People who spread positive vibes bring smiles around. It pays, too, if you are working at Happiest Minds, the new start-up kid on the block that targets to become the fastest to touch the $100-million revenue milestone.

Happiest Minds Technologies Executive Chairman, Ashok Soota, says the three-year-old firm will begin to assess its staff on how good they are as, what he calls, Happiness Evangelists, from this quarter.

The first to have a Happiness Evangelist, the Bengaluru-based firm will make the happiness quotient as an important component in the appraisal process from this financial year.

“We will measure how they are spreading happiness from the perspective of peers and leaders. We have informed all the leaders about this change,” Ashok Soota told BusinessLine here on Friday.

Opportunities If enthusiasm and agility are the hallmarks of a start-up entrepreneur, you can see all that in ample measure in Soota, who will turn 73 this November.

Sipping his coffee, he talks eloquently on the kind of opportunities thrown open by mobility, cloud, convergence and digital enterprises and how Happiest Minds Technologies formed to tap the potential in these areas.

Started three years ago, the firm employs 1,500 people across three facilities in Bengaluru. “We have just leased a big space to create an additional capacity for 800 seats. We hope to fill it up by the end of the year. We would merge one of the three centres into this,” he said.

Expansion Happiest Minds will open a facility in Pune or in Hyderabad next year.

With a revenue run rate of $50 million by March 31, 2015, the company hopes to achieve the $100-m revenue target set for itself by next year.

Soota said they will go for a Public issue after four years. It raised $52.5 million from VCs.

Soota adds that the employees can do better, when they do what they like to do most.

“They must understand the importance of being physically fit. It must be a way of life for them,” he pointes out.

A walking and yoga freak for over 40 years, Ashok pops up an IoT speedometer to show how many ‘steps’ he had scaled by 10 am. “I clocked only 3,800 steps. I would have completed 5,000 at this hour normally,” he adds.

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