Jackfruit Dreams

Of all the emails and press releases that poured into my inbox this week two really stood out. The first was the important announcement that an 18-year-old law student from Siberia had won the Miss Longest Legs contest in Russia. Young Anastasia Strashevskaya won a cash prize of $2,500 merely for possessing legs that are approximately 107 centimetres long.

The second email, an unsolicited mass greeting, had an intriguing subject: “Happy New year from JackFruit365”.

As a hot-blooded young Malayali man with impeccable taste for the finer things in life and a wife born and brought up in a gritty suburb of New Delhi, my eyes were immediately and exclusively drawn to the Jackfruit email.

Jackfruit365? What new development is this? A telephone helpline for lovers of exotic fruit? A new Subodh Gupta artwork with 365 plump jackfruits arranged to look like a pineapple, thereby causing cognitive dissonance and tremendous auction prices? Or is it an e-commerce website that sells jackfruit and nothing but jackfruit all round the year?

Exactly.

Intrigued, I investigated. Only to be surprised by the profile of the entrepreneur behind it. Before jackfruit, James Joseph was a director at Microsoft India. He has a degree in mechanical engineering from College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram, and a Masters in Engineering Business Management from the University of Warwick.

And now he sold freeze-dried jackfruit.

Here at this column we are huge fans of entrepreneurs. We may talk a lot about the workplace and office-goers, but entrepreneurs...we want to kiss them on the mouth, lay them on a divan, and feed them Ferrero Rocher.

We particularly love people who transition from excellent office jobs into start-ups—something every single one of us dreams of, but nary a fraction achieve.

So this Wednesday I called up James Joseph. I wanted to ask him: Why is quitting a job to start something so hard? How did he cope? Did he have any lessons? Joseph, it turned out, was full of little lessons. For instance, the two most important things he took away from business school was strategic marketing and discounted cash flows (DCF). “Learn DCF,” he told me. “Whatever you do, make a business plan that has a cash flow. Run out of cash and you also run out of motivation.”

Joseph’s eureka moment came when he noticed the utter absence of jackfruit at the numerous five-star soirees he organized for Microsoft. So he asked around. All the chefs said the same thing: “Too sticky, too smelly and too seasonal”. So he began to investigate, and he got obsessed. Turned out that around 80% of the produce was wasted, some ₹ 2,000 crore worth. Also it was versatile: “You can make a veg burger with the raw fruit, and give it a crispy coating by using powdered seed instead of breadcrumbs.”

By this time Joseph had already quit Microsoft to take a year’s sabbatical for family reasons. He had the free time. He had the savings. But was this a business or a concept?

“A good concept is interesting. A good business makes money,” he told me.

But wait. Joseph’s work experience at Microsoft seems to have no inputs at all to offer his business. How did he...

I’d often spoken to many people—myself included—about quitting work to start companies. There always seems to be great weight placed on the question “What work experience do you bring to this new venture?”

This is why I am always thinking of starting newspapers, magazines or websites. Talking to Joseph suggested that this was too self-constraining. Instead, he said, think of skills and not of sectors or verticals. In his case Joseph fell back on his marketing skills, professional networks, cash-flow management and outsourcing experience.

How to sell his product? Online first. “So that every packet left after the cash first came in.”

Who to sell to? “Firstly to all those chefs I knew in all the hotels.”

How to get his product processed? “Find a good contractor, evaluate, outsource.”

And how did he use his marketing experience? “The jackfruit had an image and positioning problem—sticky, smelly, seasonal—that was impacting its utility. Perhaps taking care of the first would also solve the second?” Which is when, entirely due to luck, he hit upon the idea of freeze-drying the fruit. All fruit, no smell, always available. Just add warm water.

Boom. Jackfruit365.

The company only started shipping packets in September. But Joseph has sober plans—neutral cash flows this year, draw a salary the next, profits the third. Meanwhile, he is already integrating this with a social return plan as well. One of Joseph’s key learnings was that entrepreneurship is not a black box. “So many books give you the impression that start-up stories are clean and tidy. They are not.” Serendipity plays a large role. And this is where work experience comes in. You can use all those skills and contacts to tap the good surprises and overcome the bad ones. Doesn’t matter what those work skills are, Joseph told me. You can always figure out a way to use them in your fruity business plan.

Which is why right now I am drawing up a business plan to use unnaturally tall Siberians to pluck jackfruits.

Cubiclenama takes a weekly look at pleasures and perils of corporate life. Your comments are welcome at cubiclenama@livemint.com.

To read Sidin Vadukut’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/cubiclenama