point
The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

December - 2008 - issue > Woman Achiever

Dream, and Believe in it

Vimali Swamy
Monday, December 1, 2008
Vimali Swamy
“Believe in your dreams because if you do not, no one else will,” says VN Saroja, Co-founder and Director, Movico Technologies. An entrepreneur for the past 18 years, Saroja is one of the few women who refused to follow the conventional career path and dared to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams in a time when entrepreneurship was not something looked upon.

Being an air force officer’s daughter, Saroja had grown up being highly independent. Upon completing her graduation in mathematical statistics from Delhi University and obtaining an MBA from the IIM Ahmedabad she turned down many lucrative job offers and chose to work as an independent consultant. It was not easy, as everyone in her family failed to understand as to why she wanted to give up regular highly paid jobs, that too after graduating from the IIM. “While at IIM I had realized my liking for smaller organizations, and was not willing to be tied down to a large organization,” she recalls. Her parents were perplexed at her choice, and it took some time for them to reluctantly agree to her wishes.

For seven years she worked as an independent consultant taking up numerous projects on the way. During this time she also got an opportunity to work for Anil Srivastava, who had started NASSCOM. Taking it as an opportunity she occupied herself researching and consolidating various reports and analytics for the industry body. She also started collaborating with Sanjeev Bikhchandani who was her senior at IIM and had started working independently. Together they developed and marketed several syndicated reports successfully. He had envisioned starting a company that helped HR managers find the right candidates and keep the job seekers updated. Finding this vision quite interesting, Saroja worked with Bikhchandani and worked on developing a large database of jobs available, along with that of HR managers and headhunters. When the Internet became accessible and popular in the mid ’90s, both recognized it as the platform on which their vision could be mounted and brought to a reality. They then co-founded naukri.com. As its Chief Operating Officer, Saroja played a crucial role in setting up the operations, inviting venture capital, expanding the company, and being involved in all aspects of running the site.

In 2003, due to severe health problems, she decided to step down from her role at Naukri. At that time, Naukri had grown from a five-member team to about 90-100 people with operations in all the four metros and other major cities in the country. For a while Saroja again started working as an independent consultant, as she was recovering from her illness. During this time she observed the boom in the mobile market in India. “Mobility was the buzz word. From accessing one’s emails to documents to conferencing while on the move, the concept of mobility was catching up,” Saroja says. She found that while the access to entertainment on the mobile and Web platforms was increasing with the far-reaching spread of technologies like 3G and Wimax, there was a serious shortage of quality videos that were legal as well as adapted for the platforms to ensure the best viewer experience. When looking at the market for the reasons behind this, Saroja and her friends found that the primary reason was the lack of a tool that allowed easy access to footage in a digital form which could then be served to consumers through the channel of their choice (mobile or Web or television).

“We realized the major phase of growth that India was going through in the media and entertainment space. We foresaw the heavy demand for video-on-demand, streaming video from the Internet, Internet television, TV on mobile, and more,” she says. Hence Saroja, with her friends Arvind Jha and Shailendra Nath Rai, decided to build a product to leverage this new wave and founded the company, Movico Technologies in September 2007. In December that year, the company came up with a product named MediaBaron, an asset and workflow management system that offers a platform for video producers and video distributors to meet their production and distribution needs by integrating every one of the various elements of content production in a single product.


Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share on facebook