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eLance Chief Urges Students To Join Startups As Soon As Possible

Srinivas Anumolu is the co-founder of one of the hottest startups in the Silicon Valley.

eLance, he says, makes it quick and easy for any one to buy and sell services with people and businesses from around the world. Thousands of people from over 120 countries now use the eLance marketplaces for web and graphic design, software development, business services, research, data entry and much more.

Before founding eLance.com, he was a director and portfolio manager at the investment division of New York Life Insurance Company from 1994 to 1999.

He managed $ 10 billion in fixed income portfolios and served as the head of the MBS/ABS group. From 1990 to 1994, he was a consultant at Barra, Inc, the leading provider of analytical software to the financial industry. He interacted with Barra's clients, designed new software and managed software developers.

Anumolu holds an MBA from the University of California at Los Angeles and a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He co-founded the company with Beerud Sheth, who was at Merrill Lynch for several years.

His responsibilities included trading bonds, structuring deals and building financial models. He spent four years at Merrill Lynch and one year before that at Citicorp, building financial models. Prior to Wall Street, he was at the MIT Media Lab. He was in the Software Agents group, where he built a personalized news filtering agent -- an intelligent software program that learned the preferences of the user, and filtered the news stream to find matching stories. Sheth holds a MS in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Anumolu and Sheth started eLance in the latter's apartment in New Jersey. In just about a year, they moved to California, to Sunny Vale. eLance has been discussed in more than a dozen major publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Economist.

Anumolu recently chatted with rediff.com about his company, his passions, his home life and his hobbies.

Who are some of the people who have inspired you? In what way?

The younger generation of entrepreneurs like Venky Harinarayan, Ram Shriram and Sabeer Bhatia have served as a huge inspiration for me. They achieved tremendous success with Junglee and Hotmail. They have shown that anyone with a great idea can quickly create a worldwide company that touches millions of people. Venky is an old friend from IIT Madras onwards. He helped eLance.com right from the early days.

There are startups all around. What are the areas one has to be careful?

You are right! There are a lot of startups targeting every imaginable niche. Recently, there have been a lot of startups targeting the B2B sector.

I think it will be very hard for most of them to crack the B2B market since B2B markets are dominated by oligopolies of well-entrenched players. There are still untapped opportunities that are more concept plays and I think entrepreneurs have the highest risk but also the highest reward there.

Could you please talk about education in India, and in what way it prepared you (if at all) for your success story in America?

I cannot overemphasize the role that an IIT and IIM education have played in helping me succeed in America. The world-class training and the super competitive nature of the Indian educational system explains why there are so many successful Indian entrepreneurs.

What is the advice would you give to students who come from India for higher education?

I would advise them to start considering joining startups as soon as they can. This is a unique time in history where the Internet has created tremendous opportunities. Seize them before it is too late.

Think of yourself as a mentor to new entrepreneurs in the Valley. What would you tell them?

Don't do a startup or join a startup because everyone else is doing it. It is getting increasingly difficult to succeed on the Internet now that everyone is on the Internet bandwagon. Focus on getting funding and assistance from successful entrepreneurs since they can judge whether your idea is worth pursuing. Also target India since we have natural advantage there and the tremendous valuation that Satyam Infoway has got proves that Indian Internet companies are also going to get high valuations.

Could you talk about relocating in the Silicon Valley?

We moved the entire company from New York to Silicon Valley to tap into the tremendous talent here. Our move got lot of coverage in Wall Street Journal, local newspapers and local TV. Everywhere I go, people come up to me and say, "You are the company that moved? How is it going?" I am glad we moved since we have hired around 20 people in less than a month and doubled our workforce. We need to double again and reach 80-100 people in a month or so.

Give us some details about your personal life.

I am married to a doctor (Manju) and have a wonderful though incredibly mischievous three-year-old son (Rahul). eLance.com is growing rapidly and takes up most of my time. Not spending enough time with my family is the toughest part of doing a startup.

Any hobbies?

I love reading, watching movies and traveling. Not that I have any time to pursue any of this over the past year.

Do you get to see Indian movies at all?

Both my wife and I love movies, especially Indian movies. We have seen recent movies like Taal and Earth. I thought Earth was incredible...

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