For me it’s a childhood dream that has come true. Every day we come to work and all that we do is live and breathe movies. It’s like winning a trophy in school for watching television! How cool is that?
We have converted our passion to our occupation and are on a path to build a great technology product in Muvi.com. It’s all about sharing our passion of movies with others.
The thing that is most awesome is that we are doing it from our home town, Bhubaneswar. After spending significant parts of professional life in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur, Bhubaneswar may not seem like a natural choice, but believe me it’s got a great advantage and is a smart choice.
When we designed the product and were ready to roll it out, it was apparent that muvi.com is a product for, by and of Indian movie lovers. We had to do it in India, building something in the Valley and shipping it over here just won’t work as the cultures and tastes are different. Also from the initial rushes we had a hunch that it would be big, we knew that our success or failure at putting together a team with high intellectual capital and culture will make or break the product.
Why not Other Cities ?
Bengaluru
With that understanding we started looking for possible places where what we dream is possible, obviously starting with the so-called silicon valley of India Bengaluru. And we tried to pull up every piece of industry statistics we could lay our hands upon, talked to fellow entrepreneurs and there was a big red flag at the attrition rates being very high and it is normal for people to change jobs every six months. It is impossible to build a great team while constantly churning people out, because everyone needs space and time to grow and no one gets that if the shifts happen too fast too quickly.
Mumbai
Our product muvi.com was all about movies, the heart of all the action Mumbai was the next choice for us. Mumbai has its advantages, being the commercial capital of India houses some of the greatest companies in India. But on contrary to others we are a technology company, what we do takes a lot of thinking and creativity and fatigue is our biggest enemy. And if someone is not a superhuman an hour’s journey on a local train will drain a significant amount of your morning burst of energy and then turning up to work to do hard-core technical stuff like text tokenization and sentiment analysis is not a nice experience in itself.
Other IT Hubs
Pune and Noida were two other choices but they lack a good supply of technology talent.
And then out of nowhere, I read a tweet from one of my friends who is a professor in one engineering college in Bhubaneswar. Though I would keep the exact content of the tweet confidential, he was basically ranting about the large number of new engineering colleges opening in Bhubaneswar. That was a “AHA” moment for us.
Five Reasons to Choose Bhubaneswar for your Start-Up:
- A little bit of online research gave us the fact that Bhubaneswar is one of the few places in India with a high per capita technology education and with the advancement in fiber connectivity, it’s got very good bandwidth to all important hubs.
- It is a beautiful place with all its beauty compacted into 25 kms radius so commuting from any point to another takes a max of 30 minutes, low average cost of living.
- The icing on the cake was exotic satellites like Puri, Konark, and Chilika where someone can enjoy a nice weekend out of all hustle and bustle.
(Being somewhat of a abominable sexist, I would say it’s a little bit of a down story on the Chicks front. But if you are smart and hardworking, chicks don’t like you anyways. So get over it!)
- Apart from all the advantages,the nostalgia of setting up a global product company in our supposedly own backyard, brought us over here.
- I am sure I am not the only one to have spotted these advantages. There are many companies for whom Bhubaneswar is big in their roadmaps. With all these advantages it is very much possible that Bhubaneswar could be in the cusp of exploding into a breeding ground for global scale technology companies.
It has got all the advantages.What it needs is a entrepreneurial community which people like us will build overtime because we are super supportive of new technology entrepreneurs and want them to make Bhubaneswar their home.
I believe bright people make friendships with other bright people, and who is brighter than an entrepreneur who working from his/her garage in wretched of the conditions and believes to rule the world someday.
– Sanjib Parida
The author is an Odia entrepreneur based out of Silicon Valley, CA and the founder of muvi.com, India’s first and largest movie database.
You can write to him/ drop in a line/ say a hi! on his email.
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