The former Microsoft director who tossed a coin to decide if he should quit his startup

One day Ram Chiniarlapalla returned home from work asking himself if it was worth it.

Ram had quit as a director of Microsoft to become an entrepreneur. Suddenly, everything was different.

The way people treated him was different. He was still chafing from his experience in Delhi. He had gone there to meet a potential customer, who had agreed to meet him on either one of two days. He had booked his Hyderabad-Delhi flight and hotel room early to get cheaper rates. Before flying out, he had tried calling several times to confirm the meeting time and got no response. He had gone anyway.

I’ve realized that what made me stronger are the hardships I went through.

From morning to evening, he waited in the potential customer’s office. Finally, around 4 pm on the second day, he lost it. “Don’t treat us like this. We are also human beings,” he told the man he had gone to meet, when he got a chance.

Now, here he was at the crossroads. He had lost his confidence. That evening he had a long chat with his wife. Questions were constantly popping into his head. Should he continue with this or return to his well-paying corporate job? Was it worth it to suffer the slings and arrows of entrepreneurship?

He had no answer. Finally, Ram decided to spin a coin. Heads he continued, tails he went back. It turned up heads.

The road to Jakarta

“Was it a trick coin, with heads on both sides, to fool your wife?” I asked him, and we both had a hearty laugh. This was a few months ago in Bangalore, nearly two years after that fateful evening when a toss of the coin decided which road he took.

Ramakrishna Chiniarlapalla was in a happier place in his entrepreneurial journey now. His startup Spoors was among 45 Indian software product startups selected by iSPIRT for the annual InTech50 event in Bangalore, where founders make pitches to global CIOs (chief information officers). That’s where we first met.

Now, seven months later, with over 120 customers under the belt, Ram is headed for new pastures. Spoors will have a booth in Tech in Asia Jakarta’s Bootstrap Alley in a couple of weeks, on November 16 and 17, along with other startups showcasing their products.

“We are exploring opportunities to find partners and customers in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Myanmar,” Ram tells me. “We think this part of Asia, with similar demographics to that of India, is a good market for us.”

See: 45 hot software product startups from India and their cool ideas

Tracking spoor

If you google ‘spoor’, you will find lots of links to pugmarks and droppings that trackers use to trail wild animals in the jungle. Spoors – which has pugmarks for the two o’s in its logo – tracks humans.

Corporate baggage

Enough of analysis paralysis