Kesavardhanan J

I n early 2005, six-month-old Katherine Emi would doze the night on a beanbag in her father’s office room. The mophaired code-writer, busy writing codes to kill viruses, would slog till 1:30 a.m., when most of the civilized world would have long taken to bed. As if participating in a relay, Emi’s mother, along with a colleague, would over the next three hours do a quality check on Dad’s programming skills, before sending out a report to Tokyo, in Japan. By the time the gang of three woke up, guys from the land of the rising sun would have sent in their feedback.

It was a punishing schedule that Kesavardhanan Jayaraman, the founder of K7 Computing, and his nutritionist-turned-techie wife, Sheba Grace, got into to meet an anti-virus product requirement for the Japanese software publisher, Sourcenext. Those were troubled times. K7 was in a deep financial mess. Unable to withstand the prospect of no pay, six of its seven top-flight programmers, scheduled to work on the project, left the company. The seventh could not leave because he happened to be the founder and CEO!

Ultimately, 2003 turned out to be an epoch-making year. Japan triggered an avalanche of fortune for Kesavardhanan. During the next five years, he made money of the I-have-never-seen-before kind! It catapulted the company to pole position. This extraordinary story tells a remarkable tale of a long hard haul, and ahead of it another tale of a flat grind. It’s a story worth telling.

In December that year, the US Army smoked out Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq from a bunker hole in the small town of Ad-Dawr.

Let’s turn the clock back to the summer of 1991.

That year, India stood within striking distance of bankruptcy. A suicide bomber assassinated a charismatic former prime minister, the Congress cobbled together a majority, and the economy looked like falling apart. In a moment of inspiration, the government of the day dusted the cobwebs of socialism to marry capitalism. Over the next 25 years, India scripted an amazing transformation that is today a global case study. Into this maelstrom, K7 Computing wandered and blossomed.

Also in 1991, the world of computing began to explode. People started to own personal computers. Unknown to them, a crisis loomed around the corner. Michelangelo, the celebrated virus, threatened to wipe away every scrap of information from computer desktops. Antivirus guru John McAfee predicted 5 million as the number. While later assessments proved him wrong, it was a momentary respite. Soon, deadly viruses swarmed, and someone needed to kill it. The Norton group played the smiling assassin and came out with their Norton Anti-Virus for PC.