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February 2 – 8, 2001
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Two and a half years ago, Ajay Goel founded Silicomm, a Dayton, Ohio-based Web development and consulting company. Sixteen months ago, he also started ScoopMe.com, an online entertainment e-zine, as a side project of Silicomm. Today, the company has 13 employees and expects to do $2 million in sales in 2001.
Age: 23
Background: Both of Goel’s parents were born in India. They immigrated to the United States in the late ’60s. Goel was born and raised in the Midwest.
Education: Graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science.
AsianWeek: Why did you start ScoopMe.com?
Ajay goel: ScoopMe was started as an experiment in building an online community, using the knowledge and skills that we had learned in our Web development practices, and applying that to an online magazine to see whether we could make it into a profitable venture. The reason it’s an experiment is because the technology that we use in developing the magazine is similar to the technology we use in developing applications for our clients. A lot of that technology focuses around building highly automated systems so that it’s very easy to deploy an article to the site. And we use the same user-interface practices on that site that we do for a corporate Web site that we build for our clients.
AW: Which is a priority, Silicomm or ScoopMe?
AG: We definitely spend more time on Web development because that’s where 99 percent of the revenue comes from. ScoopMe does generate some revenue, but it’s not profitable overall because the Internet advertising market has gone to hell over the last 12 months.
AW: How many clients does Silicomm have?
AG: We have 15 ongoing clients.
AW: Why did you decide to start the company?
AG: I had been fiddling around with computers since I was in elementary school. Since my dad was in the industry, we always had computers lying around, from the very first IBM personal computer to all the successors, including Apples and Macintoshes.
In college, I started out majoring in biochemistry. My first year in college, the Internet was starting to get a lot of attention. I developed an interest in researching it and programming it, which led to a couple of freelance opportunities that I did during the summer. So I had already been doing a lot of Web design and development throughout college.
When I was in my senior year, I was considering several options. I was considering going to medical school, taking a job with an established Web development company, or starting something on my own because I already had a couple of clients. That seemed like the best opportunity. I would be in charge of my own future.
AW: How much money did it take to start the company? Did you have any investors?
AG: I had no investors. I had about $5,000 in the bank, and I had the computer that I used throughout college, which my parents had bought for me. I worked from home for the first few months.
Honestly, it didn’t take much money because when I first started I was living at home and had very few living expenses and business expenses. I didn’t even rent my own office space until I developed some solid relationships with a couple of clients, and I knew there was going to be a steady stream of revenue.
AW: Are you planning to go public?
AG: It’s a privately owned company; I’m the sole owner. There are no plans to go public right now.
AW: Where do you see the company in five years?
AG: As we’ve developed our Web consulting practice, we noticed certain areas where there’s a need for Web-based products. These ideas have surfaced in working with our clients and understanding the needs of different industries, especially in the e-commerce world.
What I see us getting more and more into is Web-based product development, so that we’re not developing customized applications for our clients, but rather packaged Web-based products that we can sell to clients within certain industries. I see us moving away from the consulting practice and becoming more of a product development company.
One of the products which we developed early on, was a Web-based payroll software for medical practices, and that’s something that we are now trying to sell to other medical practices.
AW: What advice do you have for young people interested in starting a business?
AG: First, be willing to make sacrifices. Long hours go along with starting any business, especially when you’re trying to get it off the ground. I sleep in spurts, and probably put in 100 to 120 hours working a week.
Secondly, surround yourself with the greatest, smartest and most creative people you can find. If you don’t have good people to work with you, then it will be difficult to succeed. When you’re looking for people, especially when you’re first starting a company, you should look for people who are interested in the overall growth and prosperity of the company and aren’t just looking for an hourly-wage job. You should be looking for those qualities in everyone, from the receptionist to everyone on your board.
Also, forge alliances with other people in your industry, other companies. Don’t think of other companies as your competitors when you first start out, but rather as people who can help you and establish contacts for you. Especially in the services-based industries, word of mouth is the best advertising. If you deliver great products and great solutions for your clients, not only will your existing clients come back for more, but also potential clients will seek you out.
AW: Have you been able to attract top-notch talent?
AG: Actually, we have a good crop of people like that. When I interview people, I put them through a rigorous interview process, consisting of mathematical questions, general problem-solving questions, programming questions and some conceptual-thinking questions, so we get an overall feel for the person’s skills and intelligence, as well as some personality and behavioral-type questions. When we interview people, we are also looking for experience, drive and motivation, and overall character.
AW: Do you hire a lot of people from India?
AG: Yes, we have a good number of people whom we recruited from India, and brought here on work visas. There is a greater sample set of people to choose from in India because there is a greater proportion of engineers. It’s easier to find people with the right skills and talents abroad, especially since the job market has been so tight here for the last few years. And in India, the mentality of the “cream of the crop” is that they want to come to the United States, so they interview with companies that will bring them over to the United States.
AW: Have there been any cultural barriers faced by them or you?
AG: There is an obvious cultural difference in the way they were raised and the way I was raised. So there have been difficulties in communicating and in managing sometimes. Another obstacle is that we don’t have a formal program to acclimate people from overseas to American culture and the American workplace. It’s been a learning experience to see how some of these people make the transition.
I remember the third or fourth person we brought from India. After he had been working for about a month and got his first paycheck, he was extremely shocked and a little bit disappointed at how much taxes had been removed from his check, including his state and federal withholdings and this weird concept known as social security and Medicare. Basically, the only resolution was to sit down with him and go over the cost of living and what he should expect to get every month in his paycheck, as well as how much he should try to save. Actually, my father sat down with him, since he has more experience in dealing with finances.
AW: Does your father work with you, or for you?
AG: He works with me, but he’s actually an employee of the company. He runs a branch of the company doing his own consulting in Dayton. He joined me about three months ago. He had a software company of his own when I first started my company. He eventually sold that company and did independent consulting, before joining Silicomm.
AW: How’s that working out?
AG: Very well. We have a very good relationship. We’re very close personally and professionally. And it’s nice because we operate out of two separate facilities out of Dayton, so we’re actually out of each other’s hair throughout most of the business day. We work on separate projects but have resources we can pull in case we need each other.
AW: What is the key to your success?
AG: I would say it is our excruciating attention to detail in the products we develop. All of the Web sites or applications we’ve done go through this audit process, in which every paragraph of text, every image, every line of code we write in any Web site, is up-to-date with the latest standards and is consistent within the application.
We had a project that we deployed about a month ago, which we decided, a week from the deadline, to rewrite from scratch, because we found a way to make it run only 5 percent faster. It’s attention to detail like that, which I think our clients see in the work we develop for them.
AW: What is your philosophy of life? What do you see as the big picture?
AG: That’s one I have to think about. I think the big picture is that I will ultimately have a balance in my life between work and family. Right now, work dominates my life. As I proceed into my mid- and late-20s, I would like to step away a little bit from office life and pursue other areas of interest, reading, watching the news a little more — just making more time for myself and spirituality and religion, family and friends.
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