Being one of the heirs to a large business family comes with an open passport for ‘lateral’ placement in India Inc. But Kavin Bharti Mittal, one of the twin sons of Bharti group chief Sunil Bharti Mittal, had his first independent stint as a businessman with his own startup AppSpark, founded when he was in the final leg of completing Electronics and Electrical Engineering with Management degree from Imperial College, London.
The 24-year old who interned across a mix of cool places like Formula One team McLaren Racing and Google besides spending some time as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, is now head of strategy and product development at Bharti SoftBank (BSB), the group’s privately held joint venture with Japan’s SoftBank. With three projects already announced (location based check-in service Hoppr, P2P messaging app Hike and the proposed mobile portal in the works, partnering Yahoo Japan) and fourth one to be out by year-end, 10-month-old BSB is solely focussing on the mobile Internet market.
Techcircle.in caught up the younger Mittal, who lists product development and management, strategy and UI design as his specialities, to get a lowdown on the strategy and product roadmap. He informed that BSB was looking at a three-pronged strategy by which it plans to partner, build and acquire companies.
In his first free-wheeling media interview, Mittal talked about entrepreneurship vs working at a large corporate set-up, takeaways from his first startup, areas within mobile Internet which he finds interesting, entrepreneurial eco-system in India, what next is on cards from BSB and in his own words the how ‘building things from scratch is easy in India’. Watch the video excerpts.