Yet another IIM A student leaves the cosy cushion of corporate walls

After a few students of IIM Ahmedabad, who opted for the road less traveled earlier this year, one more student has decided to turn down his job at a high-end niche consulting firm to start a consulting division of his own as a part of ValueFirst Messaging, a 2.5 year old UK based startup in the Enterprise Mobile Messaging. .

“With all the downside of being a part of a fledging organization, the upside is characterized by limitless growth. Nimesh was in talks with ValueFirst for more than a month, even before the placements began. The role which he would be performing in ValueFirst was carved out by him based on his understanding of the business and his personal competencies. Moreover, Nimesh believed the mobile daa services space to be exciting and with a lot of action to follow. The partners have years of experience in mobile companies like Siemens and Orange, UK and the management team has a right mix of technical and managerial expertise with team members from XLRI, BITS Pilani & IIM Bangalore.

The story of Nimesh taking this unconventional step goes back to a talk by Sanjay Bhargava, the cofounder of Paypal, which was held at IIM A in 2005. Sanjay Bhargava insisted students to come out of the cosy walls of corporate rooms to take challenging roles in the start-ups. Subsequent to the inspirational talk by Sanjay Bhargava, Nimesh started the “Startup Day” at IIMA as a part of placement process in 2006. This year three startups were invited to campus as a part of placement process. Apart from ValueFirst, the other two startups were Drishtisoft and Gridstone Research. Drishtisoft is a 2 year old startup started by boys from IIT Guwahati and Perputo is a high profile few months old startup, started by Basab Pradhan, the erstwhile Sales & Marketing Head of Infosys.

Nimesh’s dream is to make IIM Ahmedabad as Wharton where students are known to ‘make’ jobs as opposed to ‘take’ jobs. It is to realize this dream the initiative of calling startups for the placements was started in 2006. This makes IIM Ahmedabad as the only B-school to take this special initiative of calling the young companies for the placements.

Nimesh’s prime role in the organization would be to evangelize the Enterprise Mobile Data Services Space and consult the corporate clients on mobility propositions which will help them address their critical business challenges. Nimesh’s analysis about the business was proven right when recently Voice & Data (Apr 06), mentioned ValueFirst Messaging as India’s leading MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) in its editorial.

ValueFirst Messaging Contact Details:
C 071 B, DLF Supermart I,
DLF City Phase IV,
Gurgaon 122 002
Tel: +91 124 4042537/8.