Take off with Natarajan

Entrepreneurs around the world share many common characteristics. But one who challenges the conventional way goes on to be called Jobs, Branson, Zuckerberg and so on. One such in the making is Vineet Devaiah who with his immense level of confidence refused an acquisition offer made by the search giant Google, a company which every entrepreneur today craves for being acquired by. It was at the time when his company was skating on thin ice, with a potential which Google noticed and a bank account with less than a thousand dollars.

In today’s startup ecosystem, where an entrepreneur looks to build a successful company so that he can sell it to a big player and make a billion dollar exit, there is a lot to learn from Devaiah. Let’s take an inspirational walk into Devaiah’s journey, which he told to VentureBeat.

A Teenager’s Entrepreneurial Stint

Hailing from Bangalore, Vineet Devaiah came from a middle class family.

He got access to a high-end computer from the Indian Government’s Antarctic Study Centre which had a lot of data related to weather. He spent most of his time there and built an application with which he was able to predict weather. It was a great boon to farmers of India. Soon the entire farming industry started using it and realizing its potential, Infosys bought it for a million dollars. At that time he didn’t know how much a million dollars was. For him, it was just another number.

The Dilemma and the Birth of “TeliportMe”

Soon after Devaiah’s father lost his life because of cancer. Heartbroken, he decided to devote his time curing this disease instead of developing technology. After a year he lost his patience in doing research and thought to go back to technology, become very rich and use that money to fund a cancer research instead.

Devaiah, then teamed up with his friend Abhinav Asthana and took a vision to build the next General Electric, a huge enterprise with R&D labs cooking up the next versions of technological future. The duo was fascinated with the concept of Teleporting and planned their business in that particular direction. The idea was to experience any kind of environment sitting anywhere through augmented reality. One could sit in his living room and experience Paris. This vision gave birth to the company “TeliportMe”.

They developed their first product called Phototour which was a collection of 3 billion geotagged images from the Internet. Since, it had privacy issues, the next step was an Android app called 360. This application lets users take 360-degree panoramas. It was actually a public-sourced Google Street View.

Refusing Google’s Offer

Impressed by the TeliportMe’s vision and concept, Google made an acquisition offer. It was a great milestone for Devaiah, but he decided to turn it down in pursuit of achieving more such milestones in the future. No, this was not a decision to make, considering that the company had less than a thousand dollars left in its bank account. This decision also ensured that TeliportMe would now compete with Google.

Devaiah expressed his views as, “We feel like Google is a million steps ahead of us in data, technology, money. They could crush us, but Google is paying for Street View, and we’ve crowdsourced our data.”

First Step towards Achieving the Dream

Devaiah then started looking for investment. He applied in an accelerator program called 500 Startups. His application got accepted which was the first for an Indian startup. It gave TeliportMe an excellent access to U.S. funds and influencers it wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Early this year, TeliportMe launched the 360 android app which recently hit its million-user mark. Devaiah said, “People are taking panoramas mostly when they’re out and about, exploring a new area, or on a trip — exactly the kinds of user cases our team wants.”

Devaiah now plans to grow the team in India. He has already decided who the first two or three people would be. He believes that TeliportMe is just a small step towards his dream of actualizing the amusing concept of Teleporting.

Source:::: silicon net

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