ASHOK SOOTA – MINDTREE AND HAPPIEST MINDS

At an age when everyone thinks of retiring and living a peaceful life, one personality who broke the mold
is Mr. Ashok Soota. Have been working for over 30 years including in one of the biggest IT giants, Wipro
Limited as the president of Wipro Infotech, he had made the company rise from US$2 million in 1984 to
US$500 million run-rate in 1999. “the industry I was in was designed for scale – by definition, there was
a market and India were well positioned to succeed at it”, he recalled once. He also said that, “The
question then was of who were in the best position to ride the wave. Not many people know that though
Wipro was a late entrant, we overlook Infosys to become the No. 2 software company in India at one
point of time. At that time, Wipro was still a small company, but it was designed to think big, manage
rapid growth and institutionalize its core competency. That type of backing made a lot of difference.”
After gathering the experience and expertise over the years, in 1999, Soota co-founded Mindtree, a multi-
national information and outsourcing company current value of which is around US$1.1 billion. He led
this company through an Initial Public Offer (IPO) which was oversubscribed 103 times. His vision has
been not to create an organization which is lucrative in terms of money, but was to create an enterprise
which understand the business it is in and strategizes accordingly, as stated by him in an interview. Soota
often describes himself as a late-stage entrepreneur and a late-stage serial entrepreneur and a late stage
serial entrepreneur. He may have started late - but when we think of scale in Indian IT industry, he is the
man that comes to mind. Starting a business isn’t easy, but building scale and growing larger are far
tougher. His latest venture – Happiest Minds – was born in 2011 with the vision that he creates an
enterprise which not only determines his legacy but also brings happiness to the customer it offers its
services to. Like a true entrepreneur as defined by Joseph Schumpeter, he not only saw an opportunity
which was too good to be true, but also capitalized on it and created his personal stamp by identifying the
opportunities in this market and used innovative approaches to exploit them. For him happiness was not
only from creating something new, but also from the fact that he created something different and
something he is passionate about because the basic characteristic of an entrepreneur is being passionate
about your idea and also viably strategizing so that the said idea can be achieved in an efficient manner.
The IPO of Happiest Minds, that happened two weeks ago, was oversubscribed 151 times. They got bids
for 3.51 billion shares versus 23.3 million on offer, ranking it among India’s most successful first time
share of sales of this decade.
Displaying the characteristics of a true entrepreneur as defined by Peter Drucker, he was motivated
enough to start something new but also the thought about the fact that whether his idea was viable or not
and could attract funding or not never left his mind. Strategizing the ways to achieve his idea and creating
a robust organization with a well-defined governance structure is something which he has always thought
about because in a start-up where everybody wants to be involved in all the processes may not be viable
for a business because start-ups or any entrepreneurial venture requires a team which comes from
different backgrounds, providing expertise which proves to be strength for each other. The creative
tendency is displayed by Soota in the way he has developed the core team for his business. Being a late
stage entrepreneur, he has always thought about building relationships which in return helped him in
assembling a team where expertise of one compliment the other. Believing himself that his organisation is
the best and making the team believe the same by offering them challenging career paths and the idea of
wealth creation, he has been able to develop the core of the business diligently and creatively. Be it
Mindtree or Happiest Minds all the employees on the payroll of the company, 20,000 and 2,500
respectively, holds the stocks of the company at the original price of ₹2.
Being an entrepreneur, he is expected to take calculated risks for the success of his idea, which is what
Soota has done over the years. Understanding in the ability to adapt is something very important in
today’s world because there is a high possibility that the plans laid out in the beginning can change with
ASHOK SOOTA – MINDTREE AND HAPPIEST MINDS
the changing circumstances. The internal locust of control and rational thinking is something that can be
correctly attributed to Soota because of the fact that the policies that are followed in his organisation are
made by those individuals only who had the idea behind the organization. Reason being the fact that these
individuals know the working of the company and thus, are able to comprehend better policies for the
smooth working resultantly them being the founding members of the company. For an entrepreneurial
venture to succeed according to Soota is that the organisation should be able to control its cash flows
because it is very possible that the actual expenses incurred can be more than the budgeted ones and the
time taken to realize the revenue would be more than that anticipated. Thus, receiving periodic cash flows
is of utmost importance because it forms the backbone of such enterprise and helps to weather the
different conditions that may arise like the dot com bubble, great depression, etc.
He himself has outlined certain factors for the success of an entrepreneurial venture like –
 Design for Scale – Creating an organisation that is designed according to the scale decided is very
important for the success of an enterprise. In Happiest Minds - they decided to grow to be of a
certain size, wanted to be in certain segments of the industry and wanted to focus on all disruptive
technologies and thus the working of the organization was defined in that way.
 Cash is king – take decisions based on cash versus profitability and axiom, he has used time and
again. Enterprises will be only be able to overcome situations like dot com bubble only if they
have sufficient cash.
 Timing matters – whenever an enterprise aims at raising funds, the timing of it should match with
the conditions in the physical and domestic environment.
 Right business – being in the right business is utmost important to implement the innovative idea
because when you are in the right industry it itself gives impetus to grow.
 Decision making – excessive planning should be done in terms of even micro-managing the time
of an entrepreneur because than only he will be able to simplify things and remove ambiguity to a
large extent.
An entrepreneur is expected to know the importance of self-development. Soota has clearly pointed out
the fact that if an entrepreneur is not willing to learn more and is also not comfortable with the members
of the enterprise who wants to grow cannot succeed. He holds bachelor’s degree in Engineering from
University of Roorkee and master’s degree in MBA from Asian Institute of Management, Philippines and
also is bestowed with the “Golden Peacock” Award for technology leadership, “Electronics Man of the
Year” Award from Electronics Industry Association of India, “Dataquest Man of the Year” Award for
outstanding contribution in organizing. He is contributing to make the environment a better place to live
through his non-profit organisation called ‘Ashirvadam’ and ‘Samarthanam’. Through Ashirvadam he
focuses on two major problem – environment and unemployment in slums and aims to solve these
problems through his innovative ideas, that’s why the tagline for the organization is – “For a happier
world from the ground up”.
Ashok Soota’s mantra is to keep things simple. Reduce entrepreneurship and leadership to its bare
essence has been advised by him to make things simple in the enterprise. In Happiest Minds, he says,
“We do not see our role as making people happy, but enabling happiness so that people make the choice
to be happy.”