Aashish Solanki

Quite a heading eh? Well yes it is! [ Long post read at your own risk ]

Dear All,

I have been associated with web, design and starting up since the last couple of years. I’am glad that GOD let me chase my dreams right from my standard 10th.  I still remember the turning point of my life. It is etched so clear in my memory. It was a weekday and I was sitting in a cyber during my class X trying to build website on www.homestead.com. It was the year 2000 and the dot com was on a high. I was completely mesmerized by Internet by then! Whatever little money I got went straight to cyber cafes. As I sat in my chair fiddling with the options a gentleman next to me peered over to see, what was I doing curiously. He was MD of a startup called Together Technologies Pvt Ltd. He promptly asked what I was doing and will I be interested to come over to his office to discuss a few things!

My joys knew no bounds. A 14 year old me was called to discuss things … the gentleman was ‘Ashish Saraf’, funny thing is that he shared my name as well! So I landed up that Saturday at a house-turned-office which had about 6-7 member team. I was greeted by a warm lady Annapurna, who later became my first teacher-mentor. I was asked to draw few things and comprehend a paragraph in English. They were reasonably happy with my enthusiasm and unpolished art.

Ashish offered a proposition: I work for them during my 10th holidays and they train me on PhotoShop, Dreamweaver and Flash. Believe me I could not have asked for anything else! Man, I was on top of the world. 2 months from morning 9 to evening 6 I cycled to this wonderful house and lived my dream. Annapurna patiently gave me both skills and live projects! I remember Archana as well who was from ChitraKala Parishad guiding me during those crucial stages.They had sowed the seeds of design!

Of course at times I felt I could have enjoyed my holidays or gone on a vacation instead.. Thoughts like why am I doing this and what will I do with all this came up.. But nevertheless the passion for web remained.

If not for Ashish Saraf and Annapoorna I would not have been the way I’am. My heart felt gratitude to wherever you are & you were the most important mentors of my life.. I’am sure we will bump into each other again!!

Class 11 ( or I PUC ) is a time which most youngsters look forward to. As any other teenager too I was excited about my first college! Chirst College was a great place to be. As though things were planned something miraculous happened. On the very first day of the college I met ‘Sunny Shah’ who later went on to become my first partner and an even bigger mentor!

Sunny was from Gujrat and had come down for studies here. He had immense passion for computers and design. When we got to know about our common interests our joy had no bounds. We found our perfect entrepreneurial partners. It was very clear for both of us that we started something together. While Sunny had named his secret company as Genius Tech, I on the other hand had visioned to call my company Dream Technologies. Now that we clicked together we wanted a name that will inspire both of us. And we came up with ‘Genius Dreams Technologies’ and it stuck!!

At age of 16, Class 11 we both set off.  Our first client was a student who wanted to learn to build sites and animations. We got ourselves cards printed and showed them off as our prized possessions! We did a couple of sites, branding, computer assembling and what not! The happiest moment was when I got a call from Deccan Herald. They wanted to interview us!!  It was raining heavily in Bangalore, Sunny & myself didn’t have a snap together then. We rushed to the MG road office in that rain, got a photo clicked near by and spoke to the reporter. We felt we had conquered the world. I know you all must be thinking how ‘teenish’ we were or how ‘glamour’ crept in!

But trust me.. at that age it was fun. It was a sense of achievement and pride. I can never forget the smile on my mothers face and the glow in her eyes when she saw her son’s photo in Deccan Herald. God has been generous, very generous indeed!!

We continued to take up projects. Learnt to handle clients. Many a times the hard way. What we thought was professionalism was our innocence and weakness! Nevertheless we sometimes got underpaid or worked out too many designs for a commitment that was not formalized … so on and so forth.  But as said the journey is always important than the destination.

Sunny was a pillar of strength and a guiding force. He re-inforced my passion for computers and impressed me every time with his logic and creativity. He gave me the space to grow and showed the right doors at right times!

By this time we had moved to our engineering. This time around Sunny being in a different college. Genius Dreams chugged along smoothly. As I say, God planned another torchlight for me. I met Sridhar G at BNMIT (my engi college.)

Sridhar was 2 years senior to me and was an exceptional programmer and an uncommon thinker. He appreciated my design skills and even introduced me to ProInt Software where he worked part time during engineering days. My work at ProInt involved designing their corporate site, product collateral and a few other things. ProInt was a startup in the enterprise integration space.

The moment I met him I saw that the world has multitude of great people like Sri. The urge to make a bigger difference grew. While he went out to do his masters in London we would often discuss ideas, toss few thought processes that could change lives..  Finally Yulop happened. I have spoken earlier in detail about our Journey to Yulop.

I’am extremely humbled to say that in this 2 years of association with Yulop, it has taken its shape and form & grown beyond expectations. Yulop is today making inroads into Mobile and Location Based Services apart from being a ‘Local player’ on the web. I have gained immensely from this team and I think the story & growth of Yulop will be different from 6 to 8 months now on.

As a co-founder at Yulop, I saw what it takes to build something from ground zero. I experienced team being built, I experienced how we faltered. I experienced how to learn quickly from the flaws. I saw Sri taking on things head – on. Personally I grew leaps and bounds as well!! The kind of mentoring from MAK and the support from the team has been exceptional! I shall cherish these for the rest of my life!

Today I set to pursue my love for web and design. I’am heading off to design for people, startups and corporates as a designer. I believe in giving brands and user interfaces to different and varied sets of people which will let me sleep to my content in the night. My interest for design and online marketing has widened and strengthened! I would also explore another area which always interested me – Experience Design.

As I take this plunge a big hug and a thank you to all you folks for getting me this far!! You all ROCK!

More to come soon!

PS: www.netbramha.com

This post is tagged Design, plunge