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Ankit Agarwal

Ankit Agarwal

Enterpreneur & CTO

Company Profile

Hexaview Technologies, founded in mid 2010 is primarily into providing software solutions to Wealth Management firms, RIAs, Family offices, Financial Institutions across the globe with strong focus on next generation front end designs for web as well as mobile. We have also enabled various startups across verticals such as travel, railways to provide latest technological platforms thereby reducing their time to market and readying their product for the new generation of devices.

Addressing Risks

The greatest risk is our greatest asset, People. Since we specialize in wealth management domain, we have been providing hands on training to our employees in this domain and therefore they distinct out be to consultants rather than just software developers. But the risk of losing them is equally high. Therefore we have come up with various employee friendly policies. The idea is to position our employees as the biggest differentiators to create customer delight. The other risk which any technological company faces is the risk of “Technology getting outdated”. In today’s dynamic environment, technological improvements is happening each day  and new and better ways of doing the same  things are evolving. Therefore we need to be aware of latest technologies and keep enhancing our skills in conjunction with upcoming technologies. For example, HTML5 technology is a very hot option for development of device neutral apps but its adoption by the web browser companies is still slow. This should not stop us from experimenting with new techniques. We @ Hexaview encourage use of latest & upcoming frameworks with each new project in order to keep abreast with the technological advancements of today.

Mistakes encountered
One of the biggest lessons learnt is too much dependence on a single client. "You know you have grabbed a big client and now you start putting all your eggs in one basket." This is the biggest mistake any startup does once it grabs a big account and we were no different. We still need to understand that in today's global economy, times change quickly, company go bankrupts & shuts down so as a software provider we need to keep growing the number of clients across various regions to minimize risk. Other things that we learnt the hard way is on hiring the right talent. We don’t concentrate on hiring the best, i.e. from IITs or NITs, (it's tough to hire unless you have a strong stream of funding/backing from VCs), and we concentrate on hiring people that gels well with our organization culture. Being a startup, there is always lack of funds and infrastructure, so hire people who are not only intelligent but ready to accustom with your startup. Resource pool is the greatest asset India has but we need to tap it intelligently. Create small yet effective hiring processes to reduce wrong hiring possibilities. Lookout for people who need job and have seen a lot of hardships in life. They might be able to appreciate your work and work with you for a longer term. Another thing that we see as we grow is to create longer term associations with our customers. This has been said multiple times by multiple people, but being a startup we need to sacrifice our short term interests to make way for longer term benefits. We should not judge customer by its current size but by its potential to make it big. While venturing with other startups, we realized that we have to think beyond just providing them technology, we need to think about their products and their business model and see their long term attractiveness and invest on those parameters rather than on current deal size.
Motivation
"Fast cars and exotic food!!!!!" I think it drives every Indian crazy :-) I think “believe in self” is what drives me and my company. Believe that we can deliver under a challenging weather; believe that we can change anytime. Being an entrepreneur, we all believe in our ideas, we keep on believing we are different from others, and forget to validate our thinking, this is what I think leads to organizational decay. I believe we should keep cross validating our thinking with our environment time and again and have an optimistic outlook to change. I believe if we are always motivated to change, we keep growing. So change drives me, because if things change, it provides a window of opportunities.
My Role
From being a software developer to co-founder of Hexaview Technologies, I needed to do things which I never dreamt of. My role encompasses anything and everything from hiring to firing, building offices to building teams, finding customer to retaining them, finding the right partners and keeping all our stakeholders happy at the same time. This role made me realize importance of processes which we all keep talking while working in Infosys, IBMs, and TCS but never appreciated them. Simple yet effective processes can run a company in auto-pilot mode to certain extent.
Advice to young entrepreneurs
I think all my fellow entrepreneurs have the wisdom to deal with situations in one way or the other. What I just think that at the end of the day, even if I am not successful in this venture, I would be a much better person than I would have thought. I think we should all think of entrepreneurship as a program where we can learn every aspect of business at exponential speeds which no one can teach us at IIMs or Kellogg’s of today, that too in a very short span of time. So, it's always rewarding being an entrepreneur, "successful" or "failed" doesn't really matter.