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Anuj Aggarwal

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Anuj Aggarwal

Co-founder & Chairman

Altruist Technologies

Anuj Aggarwal is a member of:

- Expert

Brief about company, offerings and foundation of the company

Altruist Group was formed in 2005. Altruist is involved in mobile social networking, mobile advertising, rich media content and value-added services for telecoms operator and brands.In 2009, Altruist acquired Mumbai based Mobile2Win in a share swap transaction. This was followed in 2011 with the acquisition of web and mobile technology firm RelayStrategy LLC, which builds mobile applications for Android, BlackBerry and iPhone platforms. Altruist also acquired Delhi's Mobisoft Telesolutions, which runs the website Phoneytunes.com, offering mobile wallpapers and ring tones, in 2011. It also invested seed capital in a Mumbai-based mobile gaming start-up called Vegam, for a minority stake. And recently we have picked up nearly 100% of Teligent Telecom AB a Swedish company having subsidiaries in UK, Germany, US and Morroco.

Most critical decision

In the initial months of the company there was a choice to either ride an existing technology partner or setup our own platform. Former option was easy and later was difficult but we still went with the difficult one and hence could scale up.

Some of the difficulties faced while building product/ solution

We did couple of products with whom we struggled a lot before the product which finally gave us success happened easily.

Three big lessons/ mistakes encountered while building company

Team : core team is very important. It should have complementary skills.Timing: this is very important. Same effort done late would not result same. A stitch in time would save nine.SWOT : in initial days when there was lot of decisions needed to be taken then SWOT analysis came very handy. This is one of the very practical theories of management which helps a lot.

Different actions if I rebuild my company from scratch all over again

Can’t think of either, neither of rebuilding the company nor of something different.

Motivation and Drives factor

The employment generation due to our growth of business motivates.

Unique about my way of motivating troops

Make him an entrepreneur i.e gives him clarity how his activity reflects into the revenues and profits of the company.

Way of choosing my people

The only one thing which we look while hiring is scalability of the person. What Hitler said for countries, we feel is true for all (businesses and individuals), he said that the countries which do not grow come to an end very soon. You will never find any organization which is stagnant at same numbers for long. Either the no. grows or company vanishes.

The challenges and lessons learnt to get first customer

Persistence helped us in getting our first customer signed. Lesson learnt: As we were in the same domain for long before starting our own, we had lot of references and thus we thought it would be easy for us. But none of the reference worked or helped. It was finally when we developed the right product that people started interacting and showing interest.

Experience of reaching out to potential investors

To reach out to potential investors is a full time exercise. You can either focus on business or funding. Reason is the match making is very difficult. This is more difficult than finding a life partner. Though both have the intent but cracking the deal at the right time is very fortunate.

My role at different dimensions as the company evolved

We feel we have become trouble creators from trouble shooters. Earlier we used to reach wherever there was a trouble and resolve it or fix it and now we do new acquisition and bring ton loads of work of the new company onto our old guys. Now we identify the areas where there could be trouble in future and inform the business owner to struggle with it.

As a leader how I make sure that I am connecting the right dots

No one can be sure but we take calculated risk and only do things in which probability is high. The problem of an entrepreneur is that he sees opportunity everywhere but to say yes to the right one and no to the smaller or not worth ones is most difficult.

My thoughts related to entrepreneurship/ leadership and management

In Altruist we believe in one thing: every individual has to simultaneously keep on doing three things, one is to do his or her job thoroughly, second is to train someone to do that job after them and thirdly to learn and practice the skill required for next thing/role in life.

Best company I admire globally

The most admired company is Airtel for us. They have the most motivated and dedicated employees. They make employees hard working and business oriented. I think we would be having a very high no. of ex Airtel employees with us.

Advice for fellow entrepreneurs

I would not advice as I know that neither they need it nor they want it. I would like to request them to do some CSR.

Risks involved in business and way of addressing

Most of the companies in our domain are single product and single market(i.e country). With acquisitions we have been able to diversify into different markets and different products on different technologies and mediums.