Alok Kejriwal CEO, www.contests2win.com

It’s fun to conquer heights, says Alok Kejriwal, the 37-year-old founder and CEO of www.contests2win.com. This also sums up his professional life. He is forever trying to conquer new heights.

Kejriwal was born to a family of businessmen. “Through my years at Campion school and later at Sydenham College of Commerce, Mumbai, I fell in love with entrepreneurship as a career.”

After joining his family business ? Hindustan Hosiery Industries ? in 1991, Kejriwal made his first attempt to innovate in the age-old knitwear segment. “I trained in Italy in CAD/CAM and imported these. This made my company the first in India to operate fully-computerised knitwear equipment,” says Kejriwal. When he left the company in 1998, it was doing business of more than Rs 9 crore.

But why would someone leave the cosy confines of a family business? “I never agreed with our work culture, where little independence was given to the youth. The elders of the family exercised total control. In short, there was no appetite for ambition,” says Kejriwal.

He then found refuge in the Internet. According to Kejriwal, the Internet was the antithesis of everything that an industry stood for. He believed that to succeed in this business, the real value lay in one’s mind and not in a brick-and-mortar structure. The entrepreneur in him finally blossomed and he started operations out of a small garage.

“I used to love promotions,” he says. “At that time, they were only available on TV, print and radio. So I decided to extend the use of promotions to the Internet where they could be more interactive.” For this new concept, he also managed to recruit people willing to work for peanuts but fired by the passion for technology.

The first client was Hindustan Lever’s Annapurna Salt, which agreed to an Internet promotion. More clients followed but Kejriwal changed his business model, after one client told him that they create products and not contests. “This was like a wake-up call to adapt to the changing needs of the organisations,” says Kejriwal. “I realised that clients may not always come up with contests. So we decided to customise contests for the brands.”

The dotcom bust affected him only slightly. As he puts it, the Internet was still good, it was only some businesses that went bad. “I was hopelessly waiting for a Bill Gates kind of call that would ask me to sell my company. But I did not get any,” he laughs.

His mission then was to keep the faith in the Internet alive. To minimise the bust effect, Kejriwal decided to spread his business to China. That was a tactical risk considering the economic hostility and the closed business climate. Nevertheless, the company extended its contests2win business model to the mobile platform. That’s how mobile2win.com was set up in 2001.

Kejriwal has a simple logic ?“If mobile promotion survived in China, then it could be easily applied universally.” The company has executed over 200 campaigns for 100 world-class brands and is considered one of the pioneers in mobile marketing in the Asia-Pacific region. His concept is a Stanford Business School Case Study.

The love for setting up companies did not stop here. In December 2004, he set up media2win.com that has in a year become one of the top five agencies in the Internet media space in India and has tie-ups with all major portals, key b2b and E-commerce publishers. Last year, he set up games2win, a gaming portal for the broadband market.

Four companies in three years, with Kejriwal heading just two of them. Ask him why and he says: “An entrepreneur cannot be running the business all the time, he has to get professionals to manage the company, while he thinks ahead. I prefer to work with a team of entrepreneurs who share my passions.” He calls himself a restless entrepreneur and is sure to come up with more innovations in the Internet space. Perhaps, that is why he likes meditation and is an avid Art of Living follower when he is not online.

Poetry is another one of his interests with ‘temple poems’ being his speciality. And yes, he is waiting for that elusive phone call, this time from Google, though!

As told to Aparna Harish in Mumbai