Question: Tell us a little bit about your background. What's your hometown. What do your parents do? Where did you go to school/ college in India? Your route to Stanford?
Akshay: I'm originally from Churu, Rajasthan, but my family moved to Ahmedabad before I was born. So I grew up in Ahmedabad and studied at St. Xavier's up until 12th grade. I did my Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering at Purdue University, followed by a Master's degree at Stanford University. In between the two degrees, I worked as an Analyst at a venture capital firm for a year. I have two brothers, one elder and one younger, which meant I got a good balance of guidance and love. I admire my parents and grandparents (who still live in Ahmedabad) for their selflessness and constant support, allowing me to chase my dreams - small and big.
Ankit: Like Akshay, I was born in Rajasthan in a small town called Ajmer. I grew up in Bombay and did my Bachelor’s at IIT Bombay in study Computer Science. Even though I got admitted into the Masters program at Stanford, I was initially very hesitant to join. I was set on becoming a management consultant instead! Fortunately, my enthusiasm for technology combined with a significant push from my parents made me come to Stanford. I shudder to think how my life would have been had i chose not to. My dad has been an entrepreneur ever since I remember - which meant dinner table conversations were pretty much training to become one myself. My mom is a nuclear scientist and has always been more ambitious and confident in me than myself - constantly pushing me to be positive and think big!
I gather Pulse started as a student project. What were your first thoughts when you and Ankit worked on this? Did you have any other App ideas that you considered? Just how much or how little did you initially invest to get started?
Ankit and I are both news junkies. When we were entering out final quarter at Stanford, we noticed two interesting trends.
First, we noticed that in today's world, people get their news from a lot of different sources. 10 years ago, I would watch the evening news on TV or read Hindu in the morning, and that was it. Today, I get my news from big publishers like New York Times, blogs like TechCrunch, links shared by my friends on Facebook or Twitter, and so on.
The other thing we noticed was that most of the people around us were reading this news on their mobile devices (phones and tablets). People were moving away from their laptops and computers, and reading all this news on the go.
Now, the whole experience of reading this news on the mobile device was broken. Either you open multiple windows in your browser, or you set up an aggregator like Google Reader. The former was just a very poor experience since it made you jump from web pages to web pages. And the latter gives you another inbox to deal with. The whole aspect of news reading felt like a chore. And so, Ankit and I came up with a simple vision - let's make news reading fun and engaging. Let's make the whole experience visual, so that you are delighted by all images associated with news stories.
With that simple goal, we took a course at Stanford called Launchpad. The whole point of the class was to launch your product. No business plan, no pitch, nothing. Build a product, launch it. Learn from it. So, we bought an iPad the first week of class, and went about building the product. Because of the constraints of the class, we were almost forced to build the whole thing in 4-5 weeks. Having this bias towards action has helped us throughout the company life. The iPad was the only investment we made - we had our laptops to code, and that was it. We released the product in a compressed time frame of 6 weeks. Much to our surprise (and delight), it really took off.
A few reports mention that your initial aim was to make just enough money to cover the cost of the two iPads you bought. Is that exaggerated or very true?
It is actually the truth. Our expectations were pretty low - you should note that this was a class project. We would have been happy if we got an A in the class. The only investment we had made was buying the iPads, and I clearly remember talking to Ankit one night, telling him, " You know it'd be cool if we sold a couple hundred of this app, that way our iPads would be free." We didn't know that 3 weeks later, our idol, Steve Jobs would be mentioning it on stage! And it still drives me nuts to realize that today, 3 million people use the app. We're living the dream. Oh, and we got an A+ in the class.
Why did you opt for an RSS reader? Over the years RSS had lost its charm. How tough was it to work on making the design of Pulse so appealing?
The reason RSS didn't reach the masses is because of the word - RSS. It is so geeky. Ironically, it stands for "Really simple syndication". The fact is that it is not simple. You can't expect people to understand XML files and add them into a personal reader and set it up. All these things need to be abstracted away. When my 3 year old niece uses an iPhone, she just gets it. She can swipe to a new page, she can open her favorite game, and she's occupied with it for hours. So, when a user wants to aggregate a bunch of news sources, he doesn't need to know xml, atom, rss terminology.
Having said that, what RSS has done is very interesting. It has provided the plumbing for all websites. Almost all news websites have rss feeds, and so it is already available. What Pulse did was take RSS and add a layer of usability on top of it. We started with it because it was the common denominator to begin with. But, never in the app or description, will you see us use the word RSS. Over the past few months, we've added support for other streams of information. So, for example, you can now add your Facebook news feed, or top videos in Youtube, and so on.
The design came about through several iterations. We sketched out hundreds of interactions on paper, until we came up with this one, which people really liked. Starting with pencil and paper allowed us to really think about multiple designs. We didn't invest much in code until we felt good about the design. It's very important to flare up, before you decide to focus on a design. Today, the Pulse design is universally appreciated by people around the world.
How has the response been so far from the publishers? The Pulse reader I have - the free one from Android market - has a collection mostly of popular blogs and a few international news sites. How does this differ from the paid App that has become such a big hit on the iPad and iPhone?
The response has been unanimously positive. Publishers realize that we are filling an interesting need. The need to snack on news while people are on the go. They realize Pulse is an interesting distribution platform that may actually help them, whether it is more clickthroughs to their website or more sharing happening on the social network. We have signed on hundreds of publishers already, and all of them have been inbound requests. The Pulse catalog is the same for all devices and platforms. It is also free on all platforms.
With a lot of news content potentially facing a scenario of going behind pay walls, what is the future for a news aggreggator?
This is yet to be seen. So far, the only successful paywall has been that of wall street journal. We don't have a background in journalism - we're product people. we're technology people. Our passion is to create the best news reading experience on mobile devices. Our hope is that, with that passion, we can create a product that will help journalism, that will help these companies to make money. Having said that, we have spent less than a year on this, so our thoughts continue to evolve.
You have some substantial angel funding to ride on your project for now now.
We have raised close to $1M from venture firms and angels.
From being two students who worked on a simple project to moving to Palo Alto and being in the news for making one of the most exciting news apps around. How would you describe your feeling now?
Blessed.
I recently read this book "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell. It's an interesting read about successful people, and the opportunities they had along the way. When Ankit was young, his father had a business around computer training classes - so at a very young age, he got very interested in software development. Having access to these labs made him proficient in a lot of languages. On the other hand, my mother (housewife) is an extremely creative person. She paints, designs wedding cards, arranges flowers and so on. When I was young, I always helped her out with these projects. Fast forward a few years, Ankit has written thousands of lines of code that powers Pulse, whereas I've put my creative energies to work by creating a user experience that has won several awards.
Our family's support allowed us to pack our bags and travel half way around the world to study at Stanford. Spending two years there is a life changing experience. You are in the same class with one of the founders of YouTube, you bump into Mark Zuckerberg while visiting a restaurant nearby and your professor has started a few companies and is apparently a billionaire. You suddenly realize that you're not interested in "taking a job" with Microsoft or Google. You want to have a much more meaningful impact in this world. Whether we do or not is yet to be seen, but we've had a good start.
