Bangalore: Business co-founders are like sole mates. You marry your co-founders along with your business. It is said that the best founding team for a startup is group of two or three people who have synergetic-not overlapping-skills. Even the Venture Capitalists are looking for funding those startups that have more than one founding member, as they believe that ‘jack of all trade is master of none’. Co-founders can be family members, school or college friends, or co-workers. We bring to you stories of two companies and how their co-founders met and generated their ideas to a scalabe business.

“It all happened over a dinner when I was going to Jaipur to attend the marriage of my friend Somya, and halted at Gurgaon to meet my college mate Abhishek, and decided to venture into an ecommerce company,” says Chetan Bafna, Co-Founder, Fetise. Fetise is a private online destination exclusively meant for men. The four co-founders, Abhishek Shah, Chetan Bafna, Subir Ghosh and Somya Tambi, were all college friends and after completing their masters, they went to their respective business. Chetan who was working with a CA group for past one year wanted to venture into ecommerce. When he met Abhishek who already had founded the ecommerce site dealandyou, they both decided to start their own site. But the question aroused as to what pain point of the market to address.

The next day itself, Chetan resigned from his job and started working on the project. After returning from his friend Somya’s marriage, both Abhishek and Chetan wondered for a few days where to click. They then found the gap and hit the ball. Later they called up Somya and Subir to join their business, as they knew they would not be able to scale it alone. Somya and Subir left their respective family business and job to join Fetise. This is how the four college friends became co-founders of a successful company.

Around the same time in a different part of the country, three other co-workers were struggling with their idea to scale it into a great business. The co-founders of eTechies; Rohit Chaudhary, Siddharth Bhatia and Samarth Goyal had been co-workers for over 10 years in a company in U.S. “We were eager to do something for Indian domestic market. In 2009, we came across the idea to start online PC repair and sales services that will provide an online computer repair services, computer help at home, and computer annual maintenance service for businesses,” says Rohit Chaudhary, Co-Founder and CEO, eTechies.in.

 The service market in U.S. was saturated, but they found a huge gap in the Indian service market, mostly beyond warranty period. Only less than fraction of a percentage of the products were covered under warranty or protection plan. So, all the three decided to leave their job and start addressing the pain points of the customers. And this is how the co-workers became co-founders.