A poor farmer’s son becomes a footballer and founder CEO

“Sports unite and motivate people. Today, the reason I am able to run a company successfully is because of the foundations I built as a sportsman.”

- Varun Chandran

"If it weren't for my mother, I don't think I would have gone to school at all"

He was teased for his funny 'Mallu' accent and eating habits. He fought 'racism'. As a small boy, his ambition didn't go beyond chopping logs in the forests like his father or following his uncle into the Army. He sacrificed his football career for his family. Today, Varun Chandran, from a small Kerala village, is the millionaire CEO of his own IT company. Remarkably, he has set up a part of his operations near the same small village where he was born.

Varun was born in Paadam, a small village near Kollam. Most of the 800 families were poor landless labourers working in the nearby forest. His mother ran a grocery shop. A strong willed, ambitious woman, she insisted that her children attend the English medium primary school in the neighbouring town. “If it weren't for my mother, I don't think I would have gone to school at all. She made sure that we were educated, unlike most children of the village,” affirms Varun. He still remembers studying under the light of a kerosene lamp, as the village wasn't connected to the grid until he was 10 years old. “In fact, I can't remember ever studying under an electric bulb. Even after we got electricity, power supply was intermittent and afflicted by voltage fluctuations. During the monsoon season, we would invariably have no power as the trees in the forest near our village would have collapsed on to the electricity poles."

Money was hard to come by. His mother’s grocery store was not doing well. Their debts rose to the point that everything in their house had been taken away, and they had to sleep on the floor. “The school fee was Rs.25 a month but my parents couldn't pay the fees for six or seven months at a stretch. I was thrown out of the class many times. I had to go through this humiliating experience frequently. I also realised how the colour of your skin puts you at a disadvantage. There were teachers who called me 'the black boy'. It used to make me cry. That became my nickname in school. Some even called me a crow. It hurt and I hated it. I had more bad experiences than good ones in that school," said a nostalgic Varun. But he used football to channelise all his anger. He was tremendously inspired by the rags to riches story of I M Vijayan, the well-known Malayali football player, and wanted to be like him. "I saw myself in I M Vijayan," he says of his idol.

“I dropped outof college in 2003, and so Iwas without adegree. After my injury, I wasn't afootballer either.My mother scolded me, andtold me to get out and find myself a job"

Varun Chandran

He soon became the school football captain and brought back home an inter school trophy. He won a government sports scholarship to enter a college in Trivandrum. "That was my first step into the outside world." From then on, Varun made steady progress as a footballer. He went on to captain the Kerala University football team. Just before finishing his college degree, Varun was picked to attend a selection camp for the next Santosh Trophy – his opportunity to play for the Kerala senior side! But when at the camp, he injured his shoulder badly and had to leave. He went back to his village to nurse his injury. But the situation at home was terrible; there was no food and an air of tension permanently hung around the house.

Narrating his struggle Varun says, "I dropped out of college in 2003, and so I was without a degree. After my injury, I wasn't a footballer either. My mother scolded me, and told me to get out and find myself a job." He asked his grandmother for help. She took her gold bangle off her wrist, and gave it to him along with Rs.3000, saying, "Go and start a new life." Varun went to Bangalore where a man from his village, who was a contractor, allowed him to stay rent-free in a tiny place that housed seven of his contract workers. Bangalore was booming at the time and there were lots of call centre jobs available. He attended around 40 call centre job related-interviews but failed because he couldn’t utter a single sentence in English. “After each failed attempt, I used to sit at the Shivaji Nagar bus stop and cry my heart out,” says Varun. He went to the public library and began to read and learn new English words with the help of a dictionary. And three months later, he did land a job in a call centre!

On one of his travels, he had met one Abhoy Singh from Delhi who gave him his email id and asked him to stay in touch. "I didn't know what an email was. I found out that it had something to do with computers," He reminisces. He joined a private institute to learn about computers. "As a footballer, I had travelled all over India. But the internet took me all around the world!" he exults. Just as I M Vijayan had inspired him to become a footballer, Abhoy inspired him to learn computer science and become a programmer and an entrepreneur. "If only they knew the influence they have had on my life!" says he.

Varun began to read everything he could lay his hands on, in relation to computers. He got a job with Entity Data, a Hyderabad-based company, as a business development executive. He did so well at his job that they sent him to the US after three months. He joined SAP and later Oracle and was sent to Singapore. In time, Silicon Valley kindled his desire to start something on his own. "I read a lot about the guys who had startups and dreamt of the day I would have one of my own. I knew I had to create something that would solve problems, make people's lives easier, and be desirable,” he recalls. While still working for Oracle, he had started to develop products that would help users identify the best sales and marketing approaches by giving them data on the likes and dislikes of potential customers and to target the right customers. In 2012 he decided to set up a company from his house in Singapore. He registered the company in Singapore the best place in the world to start a company! He created a website in just 30 minutes and named it Corporate 360, with the tagline "We take care of organisations’ 360-degree marketing profile."

Varun created Tech Sales Cloud a sales and marketing tool that analyses large datasets in order to help sales and marketing teams target customers better. He met some corporate houses and showed them the product and, within three months, succeeded in getting no less than three orders. "The first order, from a customer in the UK, was worth $500, and when I got it, I was screaming and jumping up and down ecstatically in my bedroom,” said an elated Varun. The year ended with $250,000 in revenue. Then he decided to expand by hiring contractors, seven from Kerala and four from Manila. He had by then cleared the family's debts and bought a house in Pathanapuram. In 2012, the company had some 50 customers and a revenue of $600,000. In November 2013, Varun started a development centre in Pathanapuram rather than in the usual choice destinations of Bangalore or Hyderabad.

It was initially tough to get good programmers. “When I advertised for candidates, nobody seemed interested. Youngsters didn't want to come and stay and work in a small town. They feel you are not working unless you sit in some fancy techno park,” says Varun. Today, he works out of his own office building situated on the land he purchased in Pathanapuram and has 17 employees. He is in the process of building an IT park there. He wants to prove that IT jobs aren't just in big cities but can be done from anywhere in the world. Of course, Varun does plan to open sales and marketing offices in Silicon Valley and London. But product development will continue to be done in Manila and Kerala, with the head office continuing to remain in Singapore. By 2017, he plans to make it a $5 million company with operations in five countries.

His advice to young entrepreneurs is to innovate products that will be useful to millions of people “Build products that will solve problems. Create the right culture and build your team around it. Improvise every day. And don't ever stop no matter what!”