‘We Want To Be A Cisco In Our Space’
Vijay Shekhar Sharma of One97 says the idea is to have a core business and then everything that surrounds it.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and managing director of One97 Communications, can be called an early starter. A child prodigy, he passed class XII at the age of 14 and started his first business venture while doing his third year at engineering college. His company, Xs! Corporations, was later sold to Lotus Interworks in 1999. After working for Lotus for a year, he founded One97, which provides a platform for delivering mobile value-added services, in December 2000.

From starting with astrology forecasts over the phone in 2001 to becoming one of the largest mobile value added services players today, his company has come a long way. “I think we were lucky to enter this space early, which gave us a lot of opportunities to learn,” said Sharma. It was also tough to convince operators to put up One97’s platform.

Read the full interview here.