From computer repair to IPO: the untold story of two of India’s smartest multimillionaires

Quick Heal CEO Kailash Katkar with his CTO and brother Sanjay Katkar.

The founder behind India’s first tech IPO in three years never went to college. He didn’t have to.

Kailash Katkar has been tinkering with gadgets from as far back as he can remember. It started paying off for him in his early teens when he would pick up repair jobs. Those days, back in the late seventies when he was still going to school, television had barely arrived in India – let alone computers or smartphones. So he used to repair radios.

School never engaged Kailash in the way that odd jobs like radio repairing and screen printing did. And he was making a neat pile too for a schoolboy – with monthly earnings of US$22 to 30. So after struggling to get his Secondary School Certificate (equivalent of a US high school diploma) in 1984, he decided to go to work full-time.

He took up a job with a calculator repair firm at a salary of US$5. That was a quarter of what he was earning from repair jobs on his own, but he wanted to learn the workings of the new-fangled electronic gadgets that had started popping up around him. “It made all the difference to me because there was no computer education in schools and colleges back then,” says Kailash, who is now the founder and CEO of homegrown antivirus software maker Quick Heal, which will open its initial public offer (IPO) next week to raise US$66 million.

How did Kailash go from a US$5 a month job to a US$66 million IPO? Thereby hangs a tale guaranteed to raise goose bumps.

Striking out on his own

Photo credit: Millath Rowther.

When I met Kailash one balmy evening in Bangalore a little over a year ago, on the sidelines of a conference he had come to attend from his hometown of Pune, the roadmap to the IPO had already been laid out. But what fascinated me even more was the epic journey that had brought this simple man to the pinnacle of India’s tech startup scene.

Distributors were minting money with our product, building houses, new offices with interior designing, buying cars, but we were still moving around on bikes, and working out of a small shop.

Just to give you an idea of how rare a tech IPO is in India, the last one was by search services firm Justdial in 2013. Before that was travel portal MakeMyTrip’s IPO on the Nasdaq in 2010. Quick Heal’s IPO will be the first by a software product maker in a country better known for providing IT services to the world.

None of it was even a speck on the horizon in the early nineties when Kailash became a self-employed repairman and an entrepreneur. His salary had risen to US$35 after four years of working for the calculator repair firm. But he had learned what he could about running a business and decided to start his own radio and calculator repair shop.

He saw early enough, however, that calculator and radio repair would not take him far – a prophetic call because the firm he had worked for shut down a few years later. After his day’s work, Kailash would go to an evening class to learn about computers, which had started appearing in the banks he used to visit for ledger calculator repairs. He would make trips to the neighboring metropolis of Mumbai to pick up new books on hardware.

Then one day he got a break.

He could fix anything

It began as a college project

All sales and no pay

Scaling up the hard way