'We Are Building Products For The World'

'We want to prove to the world that they will get the best code written from a small place like Wayanad.'

Wayanad became known to the rest of India when Rahul Gandhi chose it as his constituency in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

But to Keralites, it has been an enchanting hilly forest area that is home for a wide range of animals ranging from elephants to tigers to leopards.

As tourists to Kerala are captivated by the charm of Wayanad, two brothers who grew up in the region wanted to draw the attention of the world to Wayanad as an eco-friendly software development destination.

That's why Allwyn Kent and Allen Rintoul decided to establish their Rs 200 crore (Rs 2 billion) start-up Vonnue Innovations headquartered in Wayanad.

"We built a company because we believe wealth creation can solve a lot of problems and close the gaps that exists in society," Allwyn Kent tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier.

I wanted to be a politician

As a student at NIT Calicut, I wanted to be a politician having seen my mother (K C Rosa Kutty), a school teacher, working as a politician.

Though she was a former MLA, her political life was more in the mould of a social activist. Incidentally, my mother dissuaded me from taking an active interest in politics.

Becoming an entrepreneur was not a dream of mine while at NIT as there was no hype surrounding entrepreneurship when I passed out of college in 2006.

The dream of every student in those days was to get a good campus placement. And I did get placed by Andocs, an Israeli IT firm, and my first posting was in Cyprus.

From Cyprus, I moved to Seattle, and from there to Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore.

The huge gap in opportunities

Having worked in many cities around the world and visited many offices, I got this dream to start a company that is very local. It was just a dream then as the more I thought about it, I felt it was not workable.

It was while I was stationed in Singapore that I started thinking about the opportunity gap that exists in India. I looked at this as a problem that has to be tackled by someone.

The SOP (Statement of Purpose) I wrote on the gap in opportunities while preparing to study for an MBA came back to me.

Having worked in the field of software for many years, I realised that the opportunity gap is extreme in this field. You go to any software firm in India, you notice this divide.

For example, the urban-rural divide is huge. Those who studied in English medium schools were more confident to make conversations and express their views.

In our case also, when we were in the 5th standard, our parents sent us to the Sainik School in Trivandrum because they felt the opportunities Wayanad offered were very poor. I realised later on that if we had continued our education in Wayanad, our lives would have turned out differently.

There were students who were much better than me in school in Wayanad, and if I did better than them in my career, it is only because of the exposure and opportunities I got.

The urban-rural divide in Indian IT companies

I am not saying it is anyone's fault that the opportunity gap is very huge in a country like India, more than anywhere else in the world.

Travelling around the world made me look at companies from a different perspective.

What I saw in say, Russia or Germany, is that the language is centralised, and the culture of the company is the culture they grew up in. This is a huge advantage for the people who work there.

That kind of a situation is just not possible in India.

When a person who grew up in Wayanad goes to work in Bangalore, he is moving into a totally alien world. He may even feel he is going to a different country!

Is it possible to build a company that is local?

That's why I wanted to start a company which is highly technical, but the culture and language of the company should be what the people of that area grew up in.

For example, when you start a company in Kerala, it will have the culture of Kerala.

When we start a branch in Karnataka, we will employ people from that area, and the culture and language of the office will be of that area.

If you look at a company like Robert Bosch, its German office has German culture while its Russian branch has Russian culture. Similarly, we can have small offices in different parts of India that are very local.

The employees in the Kerala branch communicate not in English but in Malayalam, but they produce high-tech software for the world.

I feel this way, I will be able to help someone who is left behind due to lack of opportunities.

I am just trying to solve a problem that fascinates me.

Brothers discuss starting a company.

In 2018, when I was working in Singapore and my brother Allen in Bangalore, we started discussing starting our company in Wayanad.

Allen is a hardcore techie working as a software developer in Bangalore and we were doing quite well in our careers then.

We wanted to give something back to our native land.

Our grandparents had migrated from Kottayam to the hills and made their lives as farmers in Wayanad. They had travelled in a bullock cart to Wayanad and started as planters in the forest. Many people did that in those days.

We have heard stories of my mother walking 14 kilometres in the forest to reach home from her school hostel in the weekends.

We had always felt we owe a lot to the place.

And if you look at how Wayanad developed, you will see that it was not individuals who built the place; the entire community worked hard to build the town; the schools, the hospitals, roads, etc.

You can say the society we grew up was non-individualistic.

So, we decided to start a company in Wayanad that has a social structure like it will be carbon positive, where there is equal representation of both men and women, where the employees are recruited locally, where the meetings will be in the local language, etc.

Why they named the company Vonnue Innovations

We were paying respect to John von Neumann for his contribution in the field of mathematics and computer science when we took VONNEU from his name. But the guy at the registration office made a spelling mistake and made it VONNUE instead of VONNEU!

We began our journey as entrepreneurs with the savings we had.

As you know, to start a software company, you don't need much capital. You just need a place to sit and a laptop.

Luckily for us, we began with a contract from Singtel (Singapore Telecom) when they were in the process of building an OTT platform.

I continued to be in Singapore to focus on getting business while my brother got a co-working space at the Infopark in Kochi.

We were in Kochi for a year until our employee strength grew to 15 people.

Then came the pandemic....

The pandemic made one of our biggest our customers, a joint venture of Singtel, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros, file for bankruptcy.

It affected us badly as there were pending payments from them, and we had to pay salaries to our 15 employees.

Because of the pandemic, no company was spending any money on new ventures.

Even though we had very little cash left with us, my brother took the bold decision to move forward and not hang the boots. It was not that we were the only people who were suffering; the entire world was.

He decided to use the time as a period of learning and started training our employees. And he trained them every day.

Meanwhile, I took up a contract job with SES Satellite to keep the fires burning.

The momentum in growth started with us getting a contract from Grab Taxi and then came Robert Bosch. These companies trusting us was such a big deal for us.

Finally an office in Wayanad

By the end of 2020, we knew it was time to move to Wayanad.

We took up a small house in Sultan Bathery for rent and began our new journey.

Once the world came out of the pandemic, we started growing pretty fast.

One of my NIT college mates, Nijesh KU, left a lucrative job to join us. So also my brother's classmate Rajeesh CV. These are highly regarded technical guys whose main passion is writing good code and when you have such people with you, you know you are on the right path.

All of us were driven by this passion to do something highly technical but with a social angle.

When our employee strength doubled to 30, the house became too small for us.

So, we rented a 1000 square feet floor in a shopping mall.

Today, our office space is around 7,000 sq. ft.

70% of the employees are from the nearby hilly areas.

Every second Saturday we have a walk-in interview for the local people.

We look for logical ability and the capacity to focus while recruiting.

We then give them a small stipend, food and accommodation, and train them for six months.

The idea is to recruit people from the nearby hilly areas of the northern Malabar belt like Idukki, Kannur, Malabar, etc. so that they can go home on the weekends.

We make it a point to go to the colleges in this region looking for talent.

Out of the 100 people working for us, 70% are from the nearby hilly areas and 47% are women. 30 more are going to join us soon.

In our field, only very few people need to interact with customers.

For coding, you have to only read and write English. You don't have to speak English.

In a state like Kerala, all the educated people know to read and write English, but speaking is a big problem for them. Understanding a technical document or writing an e-mail is not an issue here.

India is not just a country that outsources but develops products.

In the initial days of the software boom, Indian companies were into servicing. It is not so today.

The world does not look at as an outsourcing country but as a place from where good software products are developed.

Today, we are building products and building them for the world.

Building products for the world from Wayanad

Where you are located is immaterial in today's world. What you produce has to be world class.

We want to prove to the world that they will get the best code written from a small place like Wayanad.

This is an experiment we are trying and from the list of clients we have like Singtel, Grab Taxi, Robert Bosch, SES Satellite, Eagle Eye Networks and Kearney, it seems our experiment has worked!

I feel we are at the right place at the right time.

The other day, our company was valued as a Rs 200 crore company. With a lot of focus on AI, we feel we can easily grow into a company with 1,000 employees in the next 5 years.

Need for an IT Park in Wayanad

Recently when the state government reached out to us, we said if they could build an eco-friendly IT park in Wayanad, more software developing companies would be encouraged to come to Wayanad.

That way, all of us can showcase ourselves as say, carbon-neutral software companies from Wayanad.

We don't see them as competitors as there is enough work for everybody in the world.

Wayanad is a place where agriculture is going down and tourism is in the hands of a few very rich people. So, what will the educated youth do? They have to go elsewhere to work.

Not socialists or capitalists; socio-capitalists

I would like to call ourselves as socio-capitalists.

We built a company because we believe wealth creation can solve a lot of problems and close the gaps that exists in society.

When a company employs 1,000 to 2,000 people locally, it is taking care of not just those people but 1,000 to 2,000 families as well.

We don't believe in redistribution of wealth; we believe in creation of wealth.

Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com