For the record, it is the biggest independent pure-play call center/BPO company in India with a reported revenue of $18 million in 2001-02 that is estimated to grow to anywhere between $30 million and $32 million by March 2003. But that’s not the only reason why we are featuring it here.

In many ways, Daksh is a little different—slightly hat ke, to borrow a popular Bollywood phrase—from the rest of the crowd. For one, unlike other successful companies, the promoters are pretty sure that they will not sell it to a big company. Also, Daksh is probably the only frontline Indian BPO company in which even the initial people who joined as CSRs do have employee stocks, their number amounting to as many as 1,000 (yes, the attrition is low). But most importantly, where Daksh really stands out from the crowd is in its approach to community building, like a big corporate. A less than four year old company, Daksh already contributes one percent of its net profit for education of the underprivileged and works with two NGOs—Prayas and TRF—to help in achieving that objective. A la Infosys, one would tend to say. The independent-minded promoters do not exactly like the comparison but agree with what it means.

Vaish, Agarwal, Arvind: Entrepreneurial days

The company is also unique in the way it started. Neither of the initial two people—Sanjeev Agarwal and Pavan Vaish—came from a MNC BPO operation or an MNC bank or McKinsey. Agarwal was with Motorola and Vaish, after passing out from Stanford, was running a company called Quardrant in Gurgaon. They met in the marriage of a common friend, where Ashish Gupta of Junglee.com, who was a batchmate of Vaish at Stanford, introduced them to each other. And right since then, they wanted to work together.

Agarwal had clearly seen using e-mail as a medium to provide customer support for global clients as an opportunity. Vaish also thought the same way. Gupta too backed the idea and did some angel investing.

Incidentally, there was a two-man Amazon team in India that time to explore the possibility of offshoring the customer support—for them the default was of course e-mail—to India. Agarwal and Vaish met the team and said they could do it. That was August 1999. But it was too early for Amazon, a company that survived the great dot-com crash, purely by providing quality customer experience. And certainly too early for the two men at Daksh... VCare actually. Because the project was called by that name then. The Daksh name came latter.

Then, they were not sure whether India’s telecom infrastructure was reliable enough to provide voice support. Meanwhile, M J Arvind, Sanjeev’s ex-colleague at Digital, had joined them as the third force.

The team was there. The idea was there. The passion was there. What they needed was funds. GE’s venture arm was the first major VC that they met. But then CDC came into the picture. Donald Peck, CDC’s India head and Subba Rao got impressed with the idea and the team. And decided to invest. The first round of $2 million was closed. That was early 2000.

The next target was a customer. Daksh got its first—BigStep, a dot-com— in March 2000. That was a ten-people project. That is also the time the fourth promoter Venkatesh joined.

The real break came with Amazon signing them up for providing support to its customers. That was a big day. It was a coup of sorts. Amazon had never outsourced before. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos was taking a real big decision. The first challenge was to outsource customer service, a critical part of the customer experience management, that is the critical success factor of Amazon. Second, to outsource it to an alien land, India (of 1999-2000). And third, to a company that was not even a year old. Daksh, as all of us know, has not let Amazon down. It was in October 2000 that Daksh went live with Amazon with 100 people. And began a great journey.

Since then, it has added 2,600 more people, nine more clients, a range of new services; closed a couple of rounds of funding; and won a few awards and accolades.