Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship to $30 Million from India: Ankit Oberoi, CEO of AdPushup (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Whom did you sell that business to?

Ankit Oberoi: This was a hosting company. It was just a customer and it wasn’t a fancy transaction by any means. I just sold off all my customers to another hosting company in the US. It was not a big transaction by any means.

Sramana Mitra: But you did get a little bit of money?

Ankit Oberoi: Yes. This was in 2007. The next thing that I wanted to do was to create an information security company, which I created with a lot of my friends. It was called Innobuzz. We just started with training people in how information security works.

We taught them the fundamentals of security and showed them the ethical hacking systems in which they can validate their security. I dropped out of college because I realized that college wasn’t really my cup of tea. Of course, there was some backlash at home. I had to go through a few discussions with my parents.

Before the end of my first semester, I dropped out of college. I got fully devoted to running this company. I did this for about seven years until 2014. This business was completely bootstrapped, but by that time, we were generating about $1 million in annual revenue. It was, predominantly, services, but we had also built software. We got a few million customers.

The government also became a customer. The home export licenses, the policies regarding it, and the slow pace at which the government bought the product were big deterrents.

We figured out that the market size was really small. The realities of the business market started emerging because that’s when we became more aware of that. Previously, we were doing everything just to understand technology.  

Sramana Mitra: For the services business, was information security work for businesses the primary business?

Ankit Oberoi: That’s right. That and also training programs. 30% of the revenue was coming from the software that we built for law enforcement agencies. It was actually used by a few central law enforcement agencies as well, but there was not a lot of business-market fit.

It was difficult but by that time, we had really invested in building good software. We had strong fundamentals. First, we had a good understanding of the data. We knew how to handle massive amounts of data. We also knew how to solve problems. Finding vulnerabilities was not easy. We’ve got a very good understanding of technology.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship to $30 Million from India: Ankit Oberoi, CEO of AdPushup
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