Good Afternoon. Thank you very much for being here.

It was November 2012. Life was good. I had just turned 50 in May and Persistent was doing well. Sonali and I have had casual conversations about ideas on how we could contribute to community development and social programs for many years. My friend Sridhar Jagannathan was visiting us during one such conversation and gave the wise advice of dividing life into three parts - LEARN, EARN and RETURN. Call it the itch to do something more or you may call it mid-life crisis. It was time to move beyond coffee conversations to real action and we started to conceptualize deAsra foundation with a mission to find and solve some hard problem in India that would benefit large numbers of people. Something that would make a difference.

I have been a big fan of Bill Gates for nearly 30 years. He has always been an inspiration. Microsoft has been one of Persistent’s earliest customers and I have been a regular visitor to the Microsoft campus since 1992. I have always been very impressed by Bill Gates’ ability to define a big vision and then passionately drive the organization to make it happen. Naturally, I have been a keen follower of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation from the time they started in 2000. Like Microsoft, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has defined an ambitious vision to solve large problems in global health and education. The Gates Foundation website quotes Warren Buffett’s great advice about philanthropy: “Don’t just go for safe projects, take on the really tough problems.”

Living in India, it is not difficult to find tough problems to work on. Our population continues to grow and is nearly 1.3 Billion and it will exceed that of China by the year 2030. As of 2015, more than half of our population is under the age of 25. Think about it, we have more than 25 million people at every age from 0 to 25; that’s a lot of people! Education and healthcare are the most obvious tough problems to work on. When it comes to addressing the challenges in education and healthcare in our country we are looking at three constraints – availability, access and affordability. Affordability must be addressed in two ways by making things cheaper and by fueling the eco-system where people have more money to spend.

Having spent 25 years in the technology industry, I wanted to find a problem where I could apply what I have learnt -- technology and scale. I also wanted to focus on a problem that could keep me going for many years. I have really enjoyed my 25 years of running of an entrepreneurial venture, and I got very excited about focusing on “job-creation” as our tough problem to work on. Steady income can have a very significant impact on individual families and ultimately on the society. As they say, “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

With this background, we set ourselves a target of creating 100,000 new jobs in the next 5 years. After some quick analysis, it was clear that we could not achieve these targets if we focused only on the job seekers. We needed to focus on job-creators. In a country like ours, small businesses can be a powerful engine for growth. To quote the McKinsey Global Institute’s Study from February 2014, “urbanization is bound to happen at a rapid pace in India and we need to focus on manufacturing, construction and non-farm services jobs as a driver for growth.”

With this in mind, we changed our goal of creating 100,000 new jobs to enabling at least 25,000 new small businesses with a special focus on “services” businesses. Businesses such as catering, tiffin box service, snack counters, tuition classes, beauty salons, photography services, health care services etc. These businesses typical

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employ between 2-10 employees and 25,000 such businesses would easily help us achieve our goal of 100,000 new jobs.

We started our journey by meeting agencies that were already very active in this area. We met with Banks, Vocational institutions, MITCON, DIC, SIDBI Ventures and looked at other models such as the Deshpande Foundation, Kherwadi Social Welfare Association, BYST etc. and spoke to friends and family members who have experience in running services businesses. We realized that these fine institutions are already doing phenomenal work in this area. The Government also considers job creation a priority activity and there are many Government schemes for employment generation, for training and for supporting entrepreneurs. The National Skill Development Corporation has a very ambitious target of training more than 150 million people by 2020. The Banks are also very keen to fund small businesses and they even have schemes to provide collateral free loans to entrepreneurs for micro and small enterprises. Despite all of the above we found that there was something missing and as part of deAsra Foundation, we have attempted to address that.

From our conversation with entrepreneurs we quickly realized that our systems are not well set up for entrepreneurs to succeed. We have systems and processes that seem so complex that they appear to have been setup to trap the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs need support, training and guidance on a continuous basis. While many other programs have the concept of mentors, we have introduced the concept of the Udyog Mitra. The Udyog Mitra is a well-trained and paid employee of the Foundation who support these businesses as their friend, philosopher and guide. We propose to have one Udyog Mitra for each of these 250 businesses. Each Udyog Mitra will guide 100 similar kinds of business and has data and best practices about the business and will be able to provide precise guidance to ensure continued success of these businesses.

The target on hand of helping make 25,000 small services businesses happen was daunting and unless we streamlined our processes and made them self-service, there was no way we could get there. We decided that the best way to go about this would be to focus on automation and repeatability by building playbooks and templates for entrepreneurs to get started and to help them run their businesses very efficiently. We call these playbooks – “business in a box.” We are in the process of building 250 of these and believe that if we have about a 100 businesses set up for each of these 250 “businesses in a box” we will get to our goal of 25,000 small businesses. We hope to show you some of the templates that are ready. On our website http://www.deasra.in, any registered user can access detailed templates that guide the entrepreneur on how to start and run a business. Our templates are based on a six-by-six grid. The process is divided into six stages -- Plan, Start, Fund, Setup, Market and Run and each stage is further divided into six steps. We are focusing on providing complete and detailed templates on all aspects of starting and running a business from an individual entrepreneur’s point of view. We have about 25 such templates ready and are able to create about 6-8 every month. We observed that many of the entrepreneurs we met are not comfortable with English and we plan to convert these templates into other languages. Marathi versions are available online for many of our business in a box templates.

Beyond business in a box and the Udyog Mitra, the deAsra Foundation has established a partnership with Legalogic to provide a back office for shared services. Many entrepreneurs do not have precise knowledge about the paperwork and compliance requirements and businesses struggle to maintain the necessary documentation and compliance. We believe that our back office for shared services can provide a great service to these businesses in helping them stay compliant with regulations and processes.

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We already have an understanding with 8 Banks for funding the businesses we identify. We are keen to establish more such partnerships. We are working closely with Banks to help entrepreneurs become loan-worthy and then we are helping them succeed by tracking and helping them through various stages of their life-cycle.

Most small businesses also need to invest in technology and automation to be successful. We have built a technology solution to help small business manage their transactions. The concept is for parties to deAzzle their transactions between each other over cell phone. We have set up a few partnerships to support mobile wallets and mobile banking allowing small businesses to efficiently transact in a peer to peer network.

Finally, customers are the life and blood of any business. With the large number of businesses we will have in our network we have worked on different schemes to use our effort, credibility and the collective power of the businesses in our eco-system to help with sales and marketing.

So to summarize, the deAsra Foundation is a Section 25 Public Company and was incorporated on the 31st of July 2013. To increase our outreach and to encourage self-employment we are launching our monthly magazine यशस्वी� उद्योजक today.

I am proud to state that Sonali and our children Ria and Arul are fully on-board this mission. In fact ASRA is actually the first four initials of the family members – Anand, Sonali, Ria and Arul. We added the de from Deshpande to help in getting domain names etc. I would also like to acknowledge the support I got from the Board of Directors of Persistent Systems, their guidance and encouragement were crucial in our getting this far.

Clearly we have set ourselves up to address a tough problem. We have an ambitious plan and we don’t have all the answers but we have the resolve and the passion to make a difference. We need your help and your support. I hope we can showcase some of what we have done so far and get your guidance on how to proceed from here.

Thank you.

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