Key Sentence:
- With the sale of RAW Communications in 2004, Ab Banerjee made his dream of financial independence come true.
- But that was not the end of his entrepreneurial endeavors.
“Entrepreneurs Aspire want to keep going,” he said with his newest company, ViewsHub, trying to revolutionize the way people and teams work. Banerjee came from a diplomatic family, but he and his brother were much more focused on science and engineering – mainly because they excelled at math. When he took the engineering path, it wasn’t his passion. He considered getting into the mining industry to look for gold.
But Banerjee is a producer: “Entrepreneurs Aspire am an engineer after all. That’s why I love making products. But I am a creative engineer. So I didn’t just want to make a better mousetrap; I like to build entirely new product categories, which means I have to be a bit of an evangelical salesman. “
Like many entrepreneurs, “the main thing that moves me is the desire to be financially independent. But also not obliged to work for someone else.” He completed his MBA at INSEAD, worked for Pearson. And helped set up a television station in India but quickly found TV content unattractive.
He then moved to Financial Times, a subsidiary of Pearson, to work on a highly innovative project to create video streaming for financial markets, inspired by a conversation with an analyst friend. “It’s tough to convince CEOs of public companies who are used to recording private meetings with their key audiences,” Banerjee said. “Not only did I have to convince him to be filmed, but I also had to pay for the privilege.”
There is a lot of hardware involved, and the video server has to be located in the customer communication room.
As it got more and more technically challenging, FT didn’t want to continue. So he decided to go it alone, and RAW Communications was born.
While it was relatively easy for him to get seed funding from 3i without the FT brand behind it. Who were already working on writing letters to the CEOs of the FTSE 100, FTSE 250, and S&P 500, asking them to use RAW.
He expanded the company to about 150 employees and sold it to Thomson Financial (now Thomson Reuters) in 2004. But as the company grew, the seeds were sown for his newest venture. With such a big team, he wants to know how to manage talent and the team better.
“Productivity in organizations generally increases,” says Banerjee. “As organizations get bigger, there is more friction. You get a silo mentality where one department doesn’t talk to another. “