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How one CEO went from a teenage runaway living in an Indian slum to founding a billion-dollar company
(Ambarish Mitra)
Ambarish Mitra, CEO and cofounder of Blippar.
Ambarish Mitra was living in Munirka, a slum in the southwest corner of Delhi. He had been there for seven months when he spotted an ad in the newspaper for an "e-business" competition — what they were calling internet businesses in 1997, Mitra recalls.
The 17-year-old applied to the business-plan contest, submitting his idea to empower women by connecting them to the internet free. His return address was in the slum, near the water tank, he says.
Mitra did not know that this ad would be his exit route.
With one initial public offering under his belt, Mitra now has a billion-dollar augmented-reality advertising company, Blippar. He has been photographed with the British royal family. His newest phone was personally delivered by Xiaomi vice president Hugo Barra, who arrived in a Tesla being driven by an Uber driver.
Mitra is long past the slums, thanks to the ad he spotted that put it all in motion. But in 1997, with that application floating somewhere in the mail, Mitra's focus was on one thing: surviving.
'Just a rebel'
Mitra grew up in a middle-class Indian family, which prioritized education over wealth. His mother was a homemaker, a singer, and a painter. Mitra's older sister took after her and went to study the arts in college. She now runs a successful Indian dance school in an Atlanta suburb.
Mitra's father used to hand him copies of Businessweek and Forbes magazines. The elder Mitra was an inventor in his own right, having found a way to reuse coal slurry in one of the largest Indian coal-mining towns, and he wanted his son to follow in his footsteps to study engineering.
Mitra, though, was captivated by the internet — and not very great at school. While the drawers of his desk were filled with Backstreet Boys and heavy-metal cassette tapes, business books piled up next to his computer. His two favorite books his father ever gave him were on the collapse of IBM and a book on controlling your destiny.
(Ambarish Mitra)
Ambarish Mitra's desk at his home. It's still the same as it was when he ran away from home in 1997.
After witnessing the birth of the internet, Mitra idolized Bill Gates. He read "Business the Bill Gates Way" and Gates' "The Road Ahead." Next to his computer, he kept a framed photo pulled from Fortune magazine, showing Gates and Warren Buffet.
"I was beginning to worship people like Bill Gates, like hardcore idolized him," Mitra said. "I actually had an image of him on my study table while people had Madonna and Samantha Fox and all these people in that generation. I had a picture of Bill Gates."
The lure of the internet put Mitra at odds with his father, who wanted him to study engineering. He had a great childhood and a totally functional, fun-loving family, he says, but he was also a bit of a rebel and wanted more out of his life.
"My parents wanted me to be an engineer, and I wasn't interested in that," Mitra says. "It became so hectic that one day, I just ran away from home and started living in the slum in Delhi."
Welcome to Munirka
Living in the slums, Mitra went door-to-door in the city selling magazine subscriptions by day — a lesson in handling rejection, he says now. At night, he worked in a tea stall.
The two jobs netted him around $1.50 a day. He stayed in touch with his sister so she could tell his parents he was alive. Otherwise, he was on his own.
"I became a man as a boy very quickly," Mitra says. "One quality that I acquired, which runs directly in the DNA of Blippar, is that I became completely fearless. Nothing scares me. When you go through violence like I did, and you come out the other side, it makes you stronger."
(Getty Images)
Mitra met Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, during her tour of New York City.
Seven months into his life as a runaway, Mitra noticed the newspaper ad. He applied to the contest, submitting his plan to connect everybody with the internet to empower women.
It was a "noble topic" for a young person, Mitra said, but it had deep roots in his upbringing.
His grandmother and her four sisters had all received college degrees and rode scooters through the crowded Indian streets. They were a rare sight for 1920s India, but Mitra had grown up realizing how education empowered women. The internet was an extension of that.
Three months later, Mitra found out that his plan to connect the world won.
"Absolutely to my shock and surprise and delight," Mitra says. "It was life-changing."
He won some money and borrowed the rest from a friend's dad who was a banker. Mitra then launched his internet portal: Women Infoline.
The company gave free internet access to women with low wages, subsidizing it with ads.
It soon took off as the tendrils of the tech boom made their way to India. By 2000, a 20-year-old Mitra had grown his company from its newspaper ad start in the slums to an IPO in India.
"When this happened, I did this peace treaty with my father," Mitra says. "I said, 'I will come back, but I will do whatever I want.' They were very proud of me behind the scenes."
From boom to bust to boom again
Mitra won't reveal how much money he made in the IPO, allowing only that it was insignificant in today's world but a lot of money for the year 2000 in any country. His resignation shortly after the IPO helped him get out before the tech boom collapsed a year later.
At age 20, pockets flush from the IPO, Mitra was lured to London by the glamour of British life and its culture. Four days after arrival, Mitra started working as a retail associate at the Top Shop clothing store on Oxford Street. Then he spent some time helping the British government build out its intranet, and he tried his hands at another couple of startups.
But in 2008, as the financial crisis hit worldwide, Mitra was almost bankrupt. He found himself having to get a "proper job," as he calls it.
(Ambarish Mitra)
Mitra and Omar Tayeb outside the pub where they came up with the idea for Blippar.
He joined Axa, an insurance company, working his way up to become head of innovation, but he continued to hang out with Omar Tayeb, a friend from a previous startup.
They were at a pub when they made a joke about having the Queen come to life on a pound note, and Tayeb, who was thankfully sober, remembered it, Mitra says.
They turned it into a party trick, where a photo scan on the phone would turn the Queen on a £20 note into an animated photo of their friends. Mitra's "eureka moment" came when he realized that they shouldn't be obsessing over a bank note. Any image could become animated.
Tayeb and Mitra came up with $200,000 to launch, investing all of their money in the new startup, which they called Blippar.
It worked, and the company's latest $45 million round of funding in March 2015 has catapulted the company to a $1.5 billion valuation.
Find your warship
To say Mitra is bullish on Blippar is an understatement. He tells Business Insider he will never sell to Google or even his idol, Gates, and Microsoft, because what he is doing "is bigger than the internet itself."
It's not running away as a teenager, though, that brought him the success — it's the relationships he has formed since and the timing, he says.
"You can never fire a missile from a kayak," Mitra says. "I think I found my warship. I had the right people and the right mix to build this business."
(Ambarish Mitra)
Blippar cofounders Steve Spencer, Mitra, Tayeb, and Jess Butcher.
While the teenage runaway college dropout is a great archetype of tech entrepreneurs, Mitra doesn't recommend it — and wouldn't make the choice again.
For one, he knows the decision hurt his mom a lot.
"It's a human behavior to celebrate success coming out of tough environments because it gives us hope," Mitra says. "But at the end of the day, the majority of the time when you make decisions like this, things will go wrong. It's not important to be smart. It's about building relationships around you. It goes a long way in life if you actually truly care about your immediate environment and people who care about what you do."
While Mitra has cycled through wearable devices, there's one bracelet he has never taken off. A random priest with a long beard gave it to him on the street and told him it was for happiness and prosperity. He has worn the same copper bracelet that is carved into snake heads every day since he was 12.
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