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Elansoft was promoted by three people. My self (Raju Chiluvuri), Srivishnu Raju and Praveen Raju. However, I have resigned from Elansoft management in 2001 due to personal differences. I own about 30% of the company shares, which no one would buy. Srivishnu Raju is chairman and is not responsible for day-to-day operations, but he must approve all major decisions.
Friends asked me, why I am working in a company that engaged in rigging and unethical activities. Since, I have worked for Adavansoft, Oracle and KLA-Tencor, the ‘About Us’ web page led them to think, that I am still managing the company. One other promoter worked for few months as student-intern or trainee at Thomson-CSF’s sales branch in Hong Kong.
I have asked Elansoft many times to remove data about me from the web site and they ignored. So I am forced to post here to publicly clear my involvement in any of the alleged activities. I never led or promoted the company in the past 18 months. As a shareholder, I strongly recommend Elansoft management to respond to the charges and it is their duty.
It is illegal to keep using my name to promote the company, because I have resigned from the management and never entered the company premises or talked to the management in 18 months. Also, I didn’t approve the sale of the product, because I had developed AgileBlox-Charts just as a proof of concept, which lacked formal SQA, bug tracking or quality-matrix.
The main reasons, I joined Elansoft was to research my ideas on a next generation web presentation technologies and to create-products. I have resigned later, because, frequent changes of business directions and finally majority of the directors decided to focus on software services and stop developing AgileBlox. I felt, Elansoft was mostly focused on superficial promotions, and not let me put effort to build solid foundation for the company. Also, the dot-com boom at that time convinced inexperienced people that it was OK to greatly inflate everything, and bother about execution afterwards. Some people still living in those fantasies, may never learn that it needs hard wok, experience, good-marketing and close interaction with customers.
People thought making money is easy and expectations progressively increased with Nasdaq to unrealistic levels. Frequently came up with new business plans to emulate pseudo-success stories of dot-com era, and expected instant results. This attitude didn’t allow me to focus on real good ideas, long enough for me to figure it out how to make it successful. I was blamed for their mistakes/inexperience. Also blamed for genuine mistakes or minor setbacks, which are expected part of any learning or research. One should use commonsense to judge, based on making good progress, or loosing ground.
When you are doing first time and try to achieve some thing big and new, you need to do experimentation, face failures and rejections, before you could learn how to do it right. You must work hard to comprehend the reasons and overcome those hurdles. You may not be able to answer many questions when you meet a VC (or investor) first time, but you must work hard to not repeat the same or similar mistakes again. Same rules apply with potential customers or partners. I think, it is a success, if VC gives another chance. One would fail, if he thinks he is unlucky and would have better luck with next VC; and/or keep repeating simple mistakes. I decided to leave Elansoft, because I could not make it successful.
We, including myself, had unrealistic expectation that we could secure funding in few months, during short trips to USA. Recently, I learned that the average time for a start-up to secure funding from the day they start looking for investment is 11.5 months. This information is based on a survey of the start-ups in the USA, who successfully secured funding. If it is true, we hadn’t done so badly.
Silly mistakes spoiled many excellent opportunities. We had lost a major investor/partner, because a director said, in the final meeting, that our patent couldn’t be defended. Later, when I asked him, he defended his statement by saying that AgileBlox was not a viable technology; filed-patent was useless and invalid (because, waited longer than one year since the public discloser of ideas). Elansoft could have filed couple of patents to protect the AgileBlox technology related to SVG. Elansoft did file for one provisional-patent in the year 2000; well before we start working on SVG-technology. Elansoft neither paid balance owed to patent-lawyer, nor reimbursed me the money, I paid to the lawyer.
The directors said, they would close Elansoft, if they could not secure a big project that was promised by a UK company. They may be still waiting for it. Unfortunately, Elansoft unable to secure any software projects and started selling the product to keep engineers occupied. All the talented people, who developed AgileBlox under my guidance, left the company eventually. Elansoft could have won many projects and earn many times more revenues, if they had promoted AgileBlox as an open source product and offered services in SVG and JAVA.
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