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SPIRIT OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP VIJAYA VERMA FOUNDER,
YOS TECHNOLOGIES
She
started, built 2 cos despite all odds
Vijaya Verma was diagnosed with autoimmune
arthritis in 2000. It’s an arthritis that eats away the cartilage that
lines the joints, causes severe pain, and has no cure. It became so bad
that two years later that she had to replace one of her knees, and over the
following years, the other knee and both hips. The joints in her arms and
shoulders often cause a lot of pain, but she says she can live with it.
In the midst of this, during a trip to the US once,
a friend noticed Vijaya making some awkward movements. The friend insisted
Vijaya see a doctor at Stanford. The diagnosis was Guillain-Barre Syndrome,
a nervous system disorder that can paralyze parts of the body. Fortunately,
it was in its early stages and could be cured. But Vijaya still carries the
risk of the problem reemerging.
Most would have been laid low by such struggles.
Not Vijaya. Right through all of it, she started and built two firms, and
once even held a board meeting in a hospital where she was admitted. The
first venture was sold successfully, and the second, Yos Technologies, is
in the healthcare space, an attempt to minimize some of the risks she saw
during her long stints with hospitals and doctors.
Vijaya grew up in Baroda and went on to do an MTech
from IIT-Bombay. She met her to-be husband there, got married two days
after graduating from IIT, in December 1982, and came immediately to
Bangalore because she had an offer from the space research organization
ISRO. Four years later, bored by the monotony of ISRO’s work, she moved —
against the advice of many — to the then little-known Wipro.
Vijaya was in the networking group that helped
build high-end computers for organizations like NIC and the Bombay Stock
Exchange. At one point, division head Sridhar Mitta decided to create a product
group. Vijaya was one of the first to join it, in its software team. This
team developed a product to remotely manage networks. But by then Wipro
promoter Azim Premji had started the IT services business, which was
proving to be a faster revenue earner than the products business. “Premji
once told us that the only consistent thing about our group’s revenues was
that it was inconsistent,” Vijaya recollects.
Seeing Premji’s lack of enthusiasm, Mitta looked
for investors who could partially fund the networking product. “He
introduced me to Prakash Bhalerao (USbased serial entrepreneur and
investor). Bhalerao was clear the venture couldn’t be run under a structure
where Wipro pays me a salary. He said there had to be fire under my seat.”
So in late 1999, around the time her arthritis problems surfaced, the
network product group was spun off into an independent venture called Alopa
Networks with Vijaya as co-founder and CTO.
Alopa turned the network product into one that
served as the backend software for cable networks that carried TV, data and
voice signals, and soon became one of the top three vendors of such a
product in the world. In 2004, Alopa was sold to one of its own rivals,
C-Cor, and Vijaya ran C-Cor’s India operations for two years.
By then she had developed a strong desire to do a
healthcare venture. In 2004, when her arthritis had become acute, a reputed
doctor with a noted hospital in Bangalore recommended a new drug. Vijaya
happened to read the finer details of the drug and found that it carried
risks for those with a history of Guillain-Barre Syndrome. “The doctor had
not even asked me if I had had the syndrome. That convinced me about the
need for a patient centric information system.”
Yos, which she incorporated in 2006, works to
digitize hospital and patient records and pool all that data to generate
insights for hospitals, doctors, insurance companies and patients. A number
of hospitals are customers. But Vijaya admits more needs to be done to make
it successful.
“The crux of a successful startup is to be able to
get all the Ps in place as soon as possible – Passion, People, Product,
Paying customers, and Profitability — and the quicker you get to the last
P, the better placed you are. One might add Perseverance as the final P –
this is really needed to keep you going, in case you have not yet got to
the last P,” she says. Vijaya’s life is an amazing testimony to the
strength of that final P of perseverance.
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