From making chicken curry for Sergey Brin while studying at Stanford University to co-founding Nagarro, a software services company that currently employs over 16,000 people in 30 countries, Manas Fuloria has come a long way. In a crowded market dominated by large companies such as Accenture and TCS on the one hand, and start-ups that offer software as a service on the other, Nagarro has been able to create a niche for itself in helping clients become innovative digital-first companies. BusinessLine spoke with Fuloria, CEO and Co-founder, Nagarro, on his journey so far and the way forward. Excerpts.
How are you managing issues around attrition and war for talent?
There is a lot that we are doing, we call it the Nagarrian experience. And these things have really helped us keep attrition at reasonable levels. Our attrition has gone up by a few percentage points, but it’s not wild, we have continued to hire people and the wages have increased, but the billing rates are able to take care of that.
Majority of your existing employees are in India, do you see hiring increase in other geographies?
We do hire in the US a lot and we are ramping it up. In fact, we did a couple of acquisitions with a US presence. We feel because we were earlier part of this German group, we have neglected the US a bit, but now that is going to change. We are trying to make sure we think about the next 10 years as the company scales, and want to focus on more hiring in the US and Europe. In Europe, we have nearly 1,000 employees in Germany, 1,000 in Romania , 200 in Austria and a hundred in the Nordics. We added about 2,000 plus people in the first quarter itself globally, which includes some acquisitions as well. We expect to hire another 3,000 to 4000. We’ll end the year at about 5,000 hires net of attrition.
What is your long-term strategy
Our strategy is to be a household name that will outlive us. We have a long way to go. Our goal is twofold. One is to have business success and a reputation. The other goal is to create a company that is known for the way it’s organised, and which is more humanistic. And also more agile and entrepreneurial internally. It’s very heartening for us to have a dozen nationalities in our senior management group. Our mission statement has always been to eliminate the distance between people. We want to see if this humanistic idea that we have built our company around can do more in the next 10 years to affect this sort of thinking in the countries in which we operate. It’s an early thought, but it’s very, very important for us because we are inspired by people like Elon Musk who say mankind should be on Mars and then build a company around that. I think mankind should be a lot more about emphasising the humanistic aspect and a lot less about the labels that we have.
Will M&A be an important aspect of your growth strategy ?
We have done over a dozen acquisitions in the last seven to eight years, and we have by now built a complete machine to look at potential targets, identify good cultural fits that are reasonably priced, integrate them and then leverage the entrepreneurs we get. They become co-founders of Nagarro as well. That’s the way we operate. And so, we do expect this to be at least 25-30 per cent of our growth rate in any average year.
Do you see yourself building this company out for the next 10- 15 years or at some point you will exit?
We are in this for the long haul. We want to build a company that will outlive us.. We are not looking for an exit. There’s not much else we would like to do that would be more fun than this.
What is really exciting for you in the space that you are operating in?
The most exciting thing is the consumerisation of enterprise software. If you go to Facebook or Amazon, it understands who you are. It has data on you, shows relevant content and nudges you to look at messaging outside your core field.
In the enterprise, within the companies themselves, we are totally blind. We send a mail to everyone saying, “dear colleague”, without any sense of personalisation. How do you really connect people within an enterprise? How do you allow them to seek information, democratise the user information? How do you take away a layer of management by just substituting it with information that’s pushed to the person? How do you align the culture of the organisation through these nudges so that if another company does it, it does it a different way?
We’re doing this at Nagarro ourselves, and now we’re selling this to our clients. The system, we call ‘Ginger’ internally, and now we’re also using it in a university for enhancing student experience and learning outcomes. It’s for me, the most interesting thing, because it’s basically the touch point to the individual which social media has been using, which e-commerce has been using, but we within our companies have not been using at all. And then the next step is to use that platform to connect people with causes they believe in, NGOs that are working on the causes, to sort of interact with the world outside, which is part of the 10-year vision for Nagarro.
How are you thinking about all the regulatory challenges on data privacy and data localisation?
There is a real risk to our services industry from this. I think India should largely adopt the European Union guidelines on data. It should just join with the European Union on data because European Union is anyway a conglomeration of multiple countries. That will give us a huge leg up, in terms of our Indian IT services industry but also in terms of our geopolitical standing. Then it can’t be misinterpreted as protectionism. It is then, you know, part of a global effort to make sure basic privacy, basic security concerns etc. are taken care of.
