Atul Chitnis - Whoz He?

Atul Chitnis!! So what the hell is so unique about this guy?

The year was 1987, a time when paying for software was unheard of because people assumed that it came with the hardware. That's when he sold a software called PAM on a floppy disk for Rs 100 each and in fact sold thousands of copies. The in 1989 he sold ABB his first software which would help them exchange and transfer data automatically and how much did he charge them? Rs 25000!!! and this was after he fought with a friend who suggested him to charge them Rs 100000. Then came the list of more clients, the likes of ACC, CMIL, CSE and others.

A driven man and a person who believes that "Its not the tools that you use, but how you use them", that actually make the difference between a success and a failure. Astonishingly enough, Chitnis is against Venture Capital funding for start ups. He says, "VC funding is not a viable business model----unless you are a VC".

In an international meet in US, he was taken aback a little when he found out that the so called whoz who if Software Programming used to write the programs in C and he was still stuck with PASCAL. What came as a relief was that fact that his softwares were selling and theirs were not.

No wonder he was asked to start the 5th edition of India's Premier Startup Event - Proto.in

Live at PROTO.IN 2009

A cold start to the premier startup event but nothing could have predicted what was in store. On stage was Atul Chitnis who started with a basic but effective power point presentation. Nothing jazzy or stylish, just a black background with white crisp text on it and no logo
He started with bold statements such as:

“The world is changing”

“The PC is dying”

The world is changing!!! Yes indeed. But the PC is dying???? Like me, it shocked quite a few others in the room. So why did Chitnis think that the PC is dying?
Desktop PC sales have been flattened if not slumped and people are moving towards laptops. But aren’t laptops PC too? Chitnis disagrees. He says that the laptops are a milestone between PCs of today and the next BIG thing of tomorrow and this BIG breakthrough will have mobile communication as its platform.

Will it? My judgement and the road signs I see around me tell me that it will. The devices you carry in your pocket and the rate at which they are becoming smaller are all witnesses to this next Global MicroJump. If Thomas Friedman were here, he would probably term it as a WEB 4.0 in the making.