the mobstac story - from hacker to founder

The MobStac Story“From Hacker to Founder”

Ravi Pratap @ravipratap#PiHackathon - Nov 5, 2011

says “India’s hottest young startup!”

About Me

• Open source hacker

• GNOME, Mono, libcurl

• Startup guy

• Early employee, Hillcrest Labs, Washington, D.C.

• Co-founder & CTO, MobStac

1999-2001: Open Source Roots

Fascinated by impact of open source on the world

Learnt how to translate idea into product

GUADEC 2001, Copenhagen

2002-2003: CS Graduate School

Dove deep into Computer Science

Strove to become the best at my chosen trade

St. Louis Arch

2004-2005: Morgan Stanley

Programming, sure, but what about impact?

Learnt about what I did not want to do

Radio City Hall, New York

2005-2008: Hillcrest Labs

Learnt the ropes of everything

Product, people, project management, you name it

Seize initiative!

Hillcrest Labs office, Rockville, MD

MobStac: Early Years

Late 2008: Planning the startup

Mid 2009: Moving to Bangalore

Single-bedroom office, 2 employees

11 employees, MobStac office, US corp.

Chased enterprise publishers like Hindustan Times, Hindu, etc. - ZILCH, NADA, NOTHING

Decided that what really mattered is “adoption”

Stuck to our core vision - turned down lots of services opportunities

Experimented a ton: mobile ad server, vernacular rendering, etc.

Jan-June 2010

Oct 2010: Web Launch

Woah, what just happened!

Iterate, iterate, iterate !"

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Traction Led to Rapid Iteration

Product improved leaps and bounds

Learned about real customer needs and opportunities

Improved technology under the hood relentlessly

Moving Faster

Stopped being scared of running out of money

Continued to run experiments

“Made more mistakes”

August 2011: Touchsite Experiment

Tablets are game changers

Figured the user experience could be vastly different from a PC site

Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011

Things That Have Stayed With Me

Dream big: know where you want to go

Build networks: people are important

Always strive for perfection: don’t ever stop learning!

Come Work At MobStac!

work@mobstac.com