Game Changer

Bright young thing - Technology - ArabianBusiness.com
Meet Suhas Gopinath; the 23-year-old CEO of technology company Globals Inc turning over $25m a year.

The world's youngest CEO is not what you'd expect. A diffident, slight 23-year-old, who stutters lightly when he talks, Suhas Gopinath has none of the brash front you'd expect from someone who hit the pinnacle of corporate job titles when barely into his teens.

He is, in fact, about as far from a Richard Branson-style teen tycoon as you could imagine. So what, at age fourteen, spurred him to set up his own technology firm?

As it turns out, basic materialism.

"I wanted my own PC," Bangalore-born Gopinath admits in his lightly accented English. "The internet shop across the road charged $4 an hour, which was very expensive for me. I thought I could monetise my skills and buy my own computer to use at home."

Strictly speaking, then, his first deal was with the owner of the internet store, whom he persuaded to let him watch the shop in exchange for free surfing hours. Fast-forward six months, and Gopinath had taught himself how to build websites and was pitching cut-price portals to bricks-and-mortar firms in the US.

But business contacts, recoiling at the cockiness of this fourteen-year-old web whizz, didn't respond well.

"There was a lot of frustration and humiliation. Firms would say; ‘I see you're still in high school,' and ‘so, no moustache yet?'" Gopinath recalls. He later confesses he spent years trying to coax a moustache along, in the hope of cultivating an air of gravitas. "The rejections really were the spark for me to start my own company - I knew I needed to formalise my set-up."

At fourteen, however, Gopinath was four years short of being legally able to establish a firm in his native India. So he did what any other tech geek would do and turned to the net, in search of a US partner who was old enough - and willing - to put his name to an unknown dotcom start-up.

His search turned up a Silicon Valley resident who offered his home address as a base and, on August 1, 2000, Globals Inc was born, courtesy of a few hundred dollars saved from Gopinath's freelance web work.

As corporate launches go, it sounds unfeasibly simple. He really launched a firm with someone he had never met?

"Of course," he says, frowning slightly. "There are matrimonial sites that organise arranged marriages without either party even seeing the other person. Why can't I start a company with someone I haven't met?"

Now, at 23, Gopinath's gnat-sized start-up has morphed into a $25m-a-year technology firm, with a 250-strong staff and offices in India, the US and Germany - and all without a modicum of venture capital. It's enough to make even Bill Gates, legendary founder of Microsoft Inc, sit up and take notice. Gopinath met him while mingling with the top brass at a recent World Economic Forum in Davos.

"The first thing he said was, ‘I should be afraid of you. When I started Microsoft, I was already at university. I was eighteen. You started at fourteen - I should be worried,'" he grins. Gates is his self-confessed hero. "He is amazing, so modest."

We are talking on the sidelines of an entrepreneurship conference in Dubai where Gopinath, with all the confidence of nine years of CEO-dom, is about to preach the virtues of going it alone to Emirati high school students. Flanked by property moguls, biotechnology bosses and financiers he is, by some two decades, the most junior member of the panel.

In the course of the day, a trio of Emirati girls will scoop $25,000 in prize money after winning a nationwide hunt for the best student entrepreneurs. Afterwards, they talk of the need for seed money and venture capital to turn their invention into a reality. The contrast with Gopinath - who ran his business out of his family home, without borrowing any money - is sharp. His parents, I say, must have been very proud.

He looks faintly embarrassed. "Actually, I didn't tell them."

This is incredible. He started a firm in secret? He rushes to explain. "I come from a very orthodox, non-business family. My dad is a scientist. The feeling is, if you don't have a nine-to-five job and a monthly salary, you're not settled in life and you can't get married. To them, entrepreneurship is a sin.

He pauses. "So I just didn't tell them. I lied and said I was working as a freelancer for an American firm. Which I was - it was just my own company. I'd go to school during the day, and then work on the business in the evening. The time difference helped - in my evening, US firms opened for business."

Gopinath kept the deception up for four years, until he was eighteen. At which point Globals Inc was employing some 40 staff in the US and generating $1m a year in revenue.

He must be the only CEO on record who, when his firm turned over its first $500,000, was still getting pocket money from his dad: the princely sum of $0.50 a month.

Global Inc's success is testimony to the game-changing power of the internet, which allows any go-getter with a smart idea to hit the ground running.