Tackling the hurdles of limited resources since childhood made Hari Krishnan Puravankara achieve the best outcome and inspiration to expect the unexpected with right efforts. Hardcore believer of –Walt Disney’s word, “You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality,”Hari proved to be such a person who fetched his dream into reality in the form of BlackPepperTechnologies Pvt. Ltd.
With the mission to build a hardware specific unicorn out of India, which should become first IPO in semi-conductor hardware sector, Hari laid the first stone of BlackPepper. The thing which inspired Hari was, ‘the ability for a human race to come-up with wonderful product ideas and implement the same was a constant inspiration’. He explains, “I could foresee how an idea to product realization started to move more towards a common man from a corporate world. This triggered a dream in my mind very early to create an organization that will make it possible for us, for India, which will be primarily focus in hardware space.”
“I realized the real challenge was to build a company that will accelerate ideation to product realization journey in the niche technology segment (such as semiconductor chip design and allied products). Also create an innovation marketplace that gives freedom to anyone to think freely of ideas and we transform that idea to a reality, we call this democratization of innovation”, he adds further.
HariKrishnan Puravankara, Innovator Who Spiced Up BlackPepper
HariKrishnan Puravankara, Founder and CEO of BlackPepper Technologies Pvt. Ltd. is responsible for the planning and execution at the company. It started with building the robust vision and ensemble the right team to own it. He asserts, “Of course the vision will eventually become every single Pepperite’s own, we believe in collective entrepreneurship. As a dynamic entrepreneur, my ability gets reinforced by keeping the team highly motivated and everyday drive them closer to the vision.”
With a dream to create a global company and scale it to cover various segments and technologies, Hari knew that he needed some handholding so he gained reasonable experience to manage such a large dream. It was after working for the large corporations, like Wipro, Magma Design Automation and playing different roles enriched Hari with the much needed experience. It’s the people with whom he worked, empowered him with knowledge that made a huge difference in building the right foundation and pillars. It so happened later that some of those mentors joined the management team of the company to take the BlackPepper journey forward.
Since most of his life revolved around challenging environment with limited options, it always dares Hari’s mind to explore beyond his boundaries. “It’s always important I put the humanness before any decision and absolve most of the pressure from business or failures from the team,” says Hari while giving credit of his success to the team.
BlackPepper, Creating its Footprints in the Global Market
India lags far behind in the product designing vis-a-vis global semiconductor market. While IT legends utilize VLSI edition as a mere enabler for their software business, pure play VLSI companies just supply low-value resource augmentation rather than building a complete hardware product design. He wanted to build a company that would more likely become India’s single-most end-to-end hardware design solutions provider building high-value engineering capabilities that are above the par of global design service space.
BlackPepper is today a trusted design partner for the global top 10 semiconductor companies. The company continues to aggressively expand global footprint, leveraging two core assets – Lean Tall Engineering (LTE) and EYWA. LTE or Lean Tall Engineering is a focused return to first principal engineering tenets of yesteryears where a single engineer was massively multi-skilled rather than skills and capabilities being sliced and diced across a slew of less experienced engineers. EYWA is their home grown, unique technology framework that allows optimization of human and compute resources enabling complex designs to predictably converge to closure.Black Pepper aims to democratize innovation by transforming ideas into tangible products and inculcate the spirit of innovation among all.
Hari’s Golden Advice to the Greenhorns
We have to be clearly aware of the value we bring to the table and the commitment to make it happen. We cannot have two minds on executing the idea; the dedication should be more than anything else at that time. The outcome will be value that we have created for not us, but for much larger team associated with the venture. An Entrepreneur should have a strong belief system and consistent thinking. He will need to build trust among all the stake holders, the team, investors, customer and partners.
Building a company is like an orchestra, it is always a collective work, only then we can listen to the right music. The entrepreneur will need to know when to play which instrument and time it perfect, so that the outcome is a pleasant experience for everyone.
Hari Krishnan Puravankara: Enthusiast who is Changing the Face of the Global Semiconductor Market
