From Pillar to Post, to Infinity…
Like many other young-blooded aspirants, her incentive was to make money. But unlike many others, Mrs Priyanka Rungta monetised her passion for technology to establish herself in the Tech industry. With her interest stemming from her first laptop in her late-teenage years, Mrs Rungta devoted time to learning more about applications and websites, alongside reading magazines and more!
Mrs Rungta’s unwavering belief in herself and the future scope of technology helped her start her company early on in the game. Despite having few customers and projects initially due to Calcutta’s technologically-backwards nature, she made sure not to stop and persevered towards her goal. She shared that initiating a tech company was much like a company for wigs in a time when the entire world was going bald.
As with many startups, she too faced her fair share of difficulties, especially in the face of no customer product adoption. Receiving as few as one website order every quarter, she and her husband had to pay salaries from their personal wealth. She ran from pillar to post, attempting to convince people to establish an online presence with websites, but it was so early that a majority of people didn’t even have an email account!
An interesting perspective from Mrs Rungta was that though our society appears to be male-dominated, there isn’t a significant distinction in the business field. Countless women have risen to positions of high authority in Indian companies, the military, and politics. In the western sphere, she believes, the prejudice is more substantial. Ironically, though she didn’t experience this prejudice when she started, Mrs Rungta has faced a lot more today – 27 years later. However, she remains unfazed by this as her vision for her product is concrete and unbending.
The make-do attitude in India – popularly known as “jugaad” – makes people advance quickly, but often not in the right way. Thus, it was only in recent years that people sought the actual value of investing in IT. While India experienced its share of lags, the future scope is massive as all businesses digitalise themselves to cater to the tech-savvy younger population.
Mrs Rungta noticed the same for her new employees. In her coffee chats with recruits, she saw extreme creativity and comfort with technology in the newcomers. The younger generation is building towards the metaverse, where the growth potential only increases, alongside the ever-rising demands compared to earlier generations.
The metaverse is just a stepping stone to the future. The three-dimensional presence of goods and services will personalise one’s tech experience. Video conferences are 2-D today, but ten years down the line, communication will occur through holograms as if we’re all at the moment. Though ironic, this integration of technology will help us build stronger human connections with time and place as well. Mrs Rungta noted that this transition could be daunting and dystopian.
On the bright side, she believes that the tech industry has always been sustainable; she simultaneously stated that “the word ‘sustainable’ is loosely used, for the amount of energy required to build an electric car is far greater than what it would return in its lifespan.” Most tech companies are conscious of their consumption of electricity and space, as tech is a dreamer’s paradise – and dreamers almost always care for the environment.
Shortly, rather than a programmer penning redundant code, code itself will soon become more efficient and competent. It will enable significant space for creativity and innovation. The quest for human growth needs to be self-sustained, as Mrs Rungta expressed beautifully in her story and vision for not just her company but for the industry and the world as a whole.
