
Flora2000.com founder and Montecristo No. 4 lover
Bombay Area, India

Flora2000.com founder and Montecristo No. 4 lover
Bombay Area, India
After several years as flower seed importer into India, I started Flora2000.com in 1999, because I saw that there were no professional full fledged services that delivered flowers overseas. Sure there were the Floral Majors, FTD, Interflora, etc but these were highly developed domestic services; and you had to pay an arm & a leg to get your flowers anywhere ($19 deliver charges I recall); they took 3 days; gave you no delivery confirmation; and if your address was wrong or the recipient wasn't home it was all over.
Flora2000 is today the world's premier overseas flower delivery specialist. We deliver flowers in 153 countries, same day, with an extensive catalogue of unique products from each respective country. We back this up with local prices and free or minimal delivery charges, giving the best value on the Internet (I daresay better than most local florists offer). We provide 24hr customer service and what I like to call a 200% guarantee of satisfaction: no quibble, full refund and replacement. Lastly we have made it a policy to go the full distance and more to deliver customer's orders no matter what.
All this from a company from India? India is not known for its service quality and customer friendly policies. Its taken an exceptional team working exceptionally hard and exceptionally smart to build and maintain what we do. We have backed this up with extensive process driven operations and tons of IT.
Flora2000.com now grows rapidly, with new distribution channels; and recently launched brand building activities in New York and Bombay.
In the course of my career and especially at Flora2000, where the tasks both of starting up from India and delivering in so many countries were extremely challenging, I have been able to hone my innovation, team building and management skills. Today I can confidently bootstrap projects on a shoestring and also manage extremely complex tasks.
Process development and deployment. Hyper speed organic growth. Strategic brand positioning. Marketing. Bootstrapping startups. Consumer Internet products.
Flora2000 was built on SEO: simply Google for any major country and the word flowers and you should find us easily.
I have developed techniques for hyper organic growth, where users refer users, bring on other users, and also make frequent repeat purchases.
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)
January 2008 — Present (1 year 11 months)
Druvaa has developed the next generation of enterprise backup: continuous heterogeneous replication and recovery. What this essentially does is keep a live and constant backup from all sources and allows recovery instantly in the event of failure. Recovery can also be made for a particular point in time if desired. This is the next generation of backup making current backup which is a point in time snapshot obsolete.
Druvaa is a startup based in Pune, India where Indian Angel Network is an investor. This investment represents a 1st in many ways for India, as it is a pre-revenue investment and is also an investment in a technology product company with global opportunity.
www.Druvaa.com
(Internet industry)
September 2007 — Present (2 years 3 months)
Remindo.com is the next generation intra office social network that provides office teams with a powerful collaboration space for communication and projects; and each user with a powerful dashboard that helps her/him stay on top of things. Additionally it's features go beyond work related activities and help connect users with the people behind the designation.
For all these reasons and more we fondly call it "the social network your boss loves" :)
(Internet industry)
June 1999 — Present (10 years 6 months)
Corporate management, marketing, strategy, execution.
Flora2000 specialises in gifting flowers in the US and in 150+ countries. It serves the $25B floral market and the $26B wine market in the US.
The main challenge in the 1st two years was bootstrapping on a very small financial base; and subsequently putting systems in place for high quality execution and to ensure minimum heartburn while scaling up. The current challenge is to grow the business rapidly in the United States, the world's most demanding market.
www.Flora2000.com
Foundation Course Accounting , Accounting , 1992 — 1993
BA , Economics , 1989 — 1992
O & A Level , Accounting & Economics , 1981 — 1989
1979 — 1981
1974 — 1979
Process development, product development, brand building, innovative marketing, startups; budget travel, trekking, track & field, cycling - especially long tours, used to play rugby. I also like interacting online on forums, blogs, etc which I find far more entertaining and productive than watching TV.
Indian Angel Network
I am interested in early stage Internet/IT consumer & enterprise products and brands located in the Bombay/Mumbai area and the New York area.
I have led the investment diligence on several projects and am on the board of 1 project.
Outside of academics, I am a regular speaker and panel participant on events covering the Internet, especially when it comes to Web 2.0 and startups.