‘Market in plain English’ and on the go too

Venkat Rangan, 33, is not your typical tech entrepreneur. He does not have an engineering degree. His college education was a correspondence course. After finishing school, he shocked his family and relatives when he told them that he would like to take a break from studies and experiment with life.

His father, an executive with a private airline, fell in with his decision, but extracted a promise from Venkat – that he would obtain a degree later. Which Venkat did. He completed a BBA (Bachelor in Business Administration) from Madras University through the correspondence system.

“It was a big shock for the family,” recalls Venkat now, sitting in his neat corner office in a swanky glass building just off Chennai’s IT corridor. “The whole family was shocked. They called my father irresponsible for letting go of me like this. They offered condolence to my father saying ‘I am really sorry this has happened to you…”.

Venkat started off as an intern with a recruitment company. He then joined as a partner in a company that was into Web and computer-based training. This business was doing well till the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. The venture found it difficult to sustain itself as it had not raised funds from outside. That was Venkat’s first failure as an entrepreneur. He then started a company that planned to manufacture an IP-based set top box, which would take media content from different parts of the world and stream it for ethnic communities. That too failed.

The typical “I told you so’s” from relatives bothered neither Venkat nor his immediate family.

Venkat says he was in Singapore preparing for a meeting when he noticed a person he was sitting with fiddling with his mobile phone handset. This person told him he was trying to access his trading account in the US, thanks to the server he had set up and the programs he had created. He could log in and log out and would even get SMS alerts on his mobile.

Why not make a business model out of this, thought Venkat. Most retail investors are at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing information and analytical data that institutional investors have. The idea was to help retail investors by putting together all information, analytics and “charts in plain English” to help them execute a trade.

Venkat and Nagendra, who was checking trade details on his mobile that triggered the idea, then sat up through the night and put down their plan on paper.

“(It was) a single white paper business document. The following morning we presented this to a set of people who turned out to be our first angel investors. By 11.30 we sealed a deal with them and they said if you both start, we are ready to fund you,” says Venkat. Thus was born Market Simplified, a mobile trading application, in early 2006.

Market Simplified took off with about 10 people in a 1,800 sq ft office in Chennai. It now occupies 20,000 sq ft and employs 120 people. According to Venkat, Amazon had just then launched its cloud and Market Simplified was one of the first beta testing platforms on the Amazon cloud. With this, the start-up got the computing power of the cloud and lots of storage space, which would have cost a lot were they to set up one of their own. They launched the platform in 2008, just as the global economy went into a tailspin.

So, instead of targeting retail investors, Market Simplified went after brokerages and institutional investors, with TD Ameritrade being its first customer. It now has tie-ups with brokerages in the US, India and the Asia Pacific. Market Simplified has a revenue share with the users of its platform. Its investors include the National Stock Exchange, employees and friends and family.

According to Venkat, Market Simplified is looking to go back to its original plan – that of providing the service to retail investors – for which it will require funds. It is in talks with a few investors and hopes to get the funds before the year-end.

What about the relatives who felt he was committing a blunder when he opted to “experiment” after his 12th standard? “That was a phase. I got over it long back,” says Venkat. “Some of their children grew up and they came to work with Market Simplified, they aspire to work with Market Simplified,” he adds.

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