Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that company in the end?

Rakesh Gupta: That company became part of a large corporation. It’s still part of Reed Elsevier. They still have whole group called Reed Travel Group (RTG).

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Reed?

Rakesh Gupta: I was there for three years.

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to the end of the decade, right?

Rakesh Gupta: Yes. Then I became CIO for a small startup, again, in the travel industry. It was a company called Atlas Travel in New Jersey. They have the largest reservation system in the world called Amadeus. They were trying to enter the US market and have a reservation system for tours and cruise lines. That’s a very different reservation that what you have in airline or a hotel. There are many more parameters involved in booking a cruise or a tour.

They were trying to enter the US market and we had a small team of people trying to put that whole piece together for two years. That was from 1999 through to 2001. It wasn’t a successful venture. There were larger players involved. Travelocity and Orbitz started going into the tours and cruise business. Eventually, we had to shut that piece down.

That brought me, around 2001, into the content or data industry. I started working for InfoUSA, which was started by a fellow IIT graduate back in 1972. I came full circle. I started from Omaha and came back to Omaha in 2001.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next milestone?

Rakesh Gupta: From 2001 to 2010, I joined InfoUSA right when the Internet was really picking up steam. It had gone through the dot-com bubble but Internet was just trending and dot-com was going out of the door. Serious businesses were trying to launch themselves on the Internet. One of them was $200 million company InfoUSA.

We started things like infousa.com and made that into an e-commerce business. It has grown into a large business. We did a whole bunch of small startups within the umbrella of our parent company InfoUSA. Finally, InfoUSA got sold in 2010 to a private equity for $680 million. That’s when I left and started a competitive company called Infofree, which is what I’m running right now.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept behind the company that you started?

Rakesh Gupta: Small business owners and salespeople suffer from some very fundamental issues and nobody is creating tools for them. One of the biggest issue that a small business has is how to find a new customer by working smartly. Another issue is improving productivity. What tools can they use to get better at closing sales and moving on to the next one? The third is what is now being called as Big Data and analytics. If you have an existing small business and let’s say you have 2,000 customers, how do you analyze that in a scientific way and say, “My best customers look like this. This is a profile of a good customer.” Then you can go on and find clones of those customers.

We focus on those three areas: how do you find growth, how do you improve productivity on the sales side, and how do you use analytics to your advantage. That became the genesis of what is now called Infofree, which right now has around 5,000 active paying users.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta
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