"Childlike curiosity", "being blind to the possibility of failure", and the "josh [passion] of wanting to serve the nation" helped Atluri and his co-founders Kishore Dutt Atluri, and Ravi Kumar ride a wave of challenges
Ashok Atluri, 58, chairman and managing director of Zen Technologies Image: VIkas Chandra Pureti for Forbes India
How are battles won?”
Ashok Atluri, 58, chairman and managing director of Zen Technologies, turns the tables, and asks me this question during an hour-long interaction.
“Most of the battles are won by well-trained soldiers. We can never a win a war if there are gaps in training but, even if the equipment is older, nothing can beat a well-trained soldier,” Atluri answers.
This is the conviction that led the first-generation entrepreneur to venture into the field of defence simulators over three decades ago. “There were flight simulators, but nobody had thought about military tank simulators,” the PG diploma holder in Applied Computer Science reminisces. “That’s how we got into this in a big way.”
“Childlike curiosity”, “being blind to the possibility of failure”, and the “josh [passion] of wanting to serve the nation” helped Atluri and his co-founders Kishore Dutt Atluri and Ravi Kumar ride a wave of challenges as they tried to break into the market. “The first three years were miserable,” the pioneer explains. With no track record and much difficulty, the founders managed to raise debt from the present-day IDBI Bank to fund the R&D-focussed business in 1996.
(This story appears in the 20 September, 2024 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)