When Magic Software turned twenty-five, a colleague wished its founder a happy birthday too. The company and Vimalendu Verma had become so closely associated that congratulating one seemed to require congratulating the other. It was an affectionate way to describe an occupational hazard of founding: eventually, people begin to treat the business as an extension of your name.
Inside the office, the name had been shortened to V2. Software people are entitled to enjoy a version number. In this case, the nickname belonged to someone whose working life stretched back well before mobile learning became part of the education business.
Verma founded Magic in 1990. The date gives his story its scale. Consider how differently an entrepreneur might describe a learning product at the beginning of that period and at the time of Magic’s 2014 partnership with Solmark. The medium changes. So does the machinery of making a business around it.
There is a temptation to turn that span into a tidy lesson about patience. A career deserves something more interesting than a motivational calendar. Verma’s choices become clearer through the work itself: engineering, education, international partnerships, and the practical business of bringing other people into the running of a company.
An engineer before a founder
His education took him from The Doon School to Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. He studied computer science at BITS from 1982 to 1986, completing an MSc (Tech). Product engineering at Unisys followed, then product management and engineering at Statart Software, before Magic.
The sequence is useful. A founding date can make a business appear to have arrived fully formed. Here, it follows an apprenticeship in making products. Engineering and product management occupy neighboring desks, but they ask different questions. One concerns how something works; the other has to consider what is worth making and how it reaches a user.
Reading that early sequence, it is reasonable to see a preparation for the job that followed. That is an interpretation of the career, rather than a claim about a private revelation. No dramatic moment is necessary. Sometimes the next enterprise grows out of the work already on the desk.
By 1990, Verma had moved into founding. The business he started would have to live through changes in the tools, formats and expectations surrounding software. That makes the early engineering background more than a credential to place beneath a photograph. It supplies a useful starting point for understanding the kind of business he chose to build.
The work behind the screen
In 2004, Verma described Magic’s work across multimedia CD-ROMs and international development assignments. A WWF commission in 1996, the Virtual Wildlife Zone, had helped establish its Swiss connections. He also described earlier backing from the Swiss Technology Venture Capital Fund.
Those details complicate any easy picture of a company sitting alone, waiting for the internet to discover it. There were customers, commissions and capital relationships. Independence is a question of how a business is run; it cannot simply be substituted for an account of how it was financed.
Verma’s description of delivery was equally practical. He emphasized communication, cultural understanding and project management across borders. His terse formulation on standards was: “Quality is key.”
The observation has the charm of something that cannot be improved by a longer slide deck. An offshore assignment brings distance into every exchange. Work has to survive the handover, as well as the demonstration. A company’s usefulness can depend on the unglamorous details of making that handover dependable.
“Quality is key.”
Vimalendu Verma, 2004
That is one way to read this part of his story: the founder explaining the operating conditions of trust. The product on a screen is visible. The coordination that gets it there is harder to show, yet it gives a software business much of its substance.
A classroom in a pocket
A different scale of ambition appeared with Magic Pathshala. Verma co-founded the venture with Sanjay Sundaram and Rajagopalan C. Its proposal concerned literacy and numeracy for primary schoolchildren in rural India, delivered through a mobile education program.
At the 2013 ISB iDiya competition, it finished as third runner-up and received Rs.25,000. The team planned an Android application for February 2014. That was a stated plan, and it should be read as one; a planned launch and a measured learning result are different milestones.
The venture adds an important dimension to Verma’s education work. A publisher’s requirements and a rural child’s learning needs present different design problems. The latter invites questions about what a lesson asks of its user before the lesson can even begin.
There is something usefully concrete about literacy and numeracy. They resist the vagueness of a promise to transform everything. A child has something to learn. A tool proposes to help. The burden then falls on the design, the delivery and, eventually, the evidence of whether the help works.
For a founder’s profile, the prize is a marker rather than a verdict. It locates an idea in a particular year, among other ventures, with an explicitly stated purpose. That is enough to make it part of the story without assigning it accomplishments the award itself cannot establish.
Making room at the table
In August 2014, Magic appointed Anuraj Soni as chief operating officer. Verma’s welcome focused on Soni’s experience with distributed delivery and scalable business processes. Soni had previously worked at Headstrong. The appointment put the running of the organization into the foreground.
The language matters because a founder’s ambition eventually creates an organizational question. Who will manage the work as the work grows? A new product can be imagined by a small group. A reliable delivery operation requires responsibilities that remain clear when several projects are happening at once.
In October, Magic announced its strategic investment and operating partnership with Solmark, formed by former Headstrong executives. Verma spoke about increased product investment and a stronger presence in North America and Europe. MagicBox, the cloud platform, was part of that plan.
“The partnership with Solmark gives Magic the ability to significantly increase its commitment to Innovation and Product Development,” he said.
Solmark’s executives were to take operating roles. This made the agreement a decision about the work of management as well as financing. It is the distinction that gives the episode its interest: a founder bringing people into the next stage with responsibilities beyond offering advice.
Sharing that work changes the shape of founding. The original act belongs to one period; keeping an organization useful belongs to many. The partnership provides a point at which those two kinds of responsibility can be seen together.
An old school connection
There was a familiar institution in the background. The Doon School’s alumni newsletter celebrated the partnership, identifying Verma with the class of 1982 and Solmark’s Sandeep Sahai with the class of 1981.
It is a pleasing detail, though it need not be made to explain the transaction. A shared school does not tell us how an agreement was negotiated or why a particular investment was made. What it supplies is a human connection alongside the corporate names.
School newsletters have their own way of compressing time. People who have spent decades in business reappear with their leaving years attached. In a few lines, an operating partnership becomes another item of news about former pupils. There is a certain leveling courtesy in that.
Verma’s story benefits from keeping both scales in view. At one scale, there is a company choosing its next commercial arrangement. At another, there are people whose histories began well before the arrangement existed. Neither scale replaces the other.
What a founder leaves in the work
Magic’s website now describes the company as fully owned by Solmark, with education and financial services activities. That is the company’s later identity. It should be kept distinct from Verma’s documented role as founder and his executive position at the time of the 2014 announcement.
A founder’s history does not need a permanent present tense. Its significance lies partly in having begun something that can acquire new managers, owners and directions. The organization keeps accumulating chapters.
Return, then, to the birthday greeting. Wishing the founder well when the company reaches an anniversary captures a feeling that an organizational chart cannot quite hold. It recognizes the long association while leaving room for the company to have a life beyond its beginning.
Verma’s career makes that association tangible through specific work. Products had to be engineered. Educational ideas had to take a form. Delivery had to be organized. Partnerships had to allocate responsibility. Each belongs to the business of founding, even when it receives less attention than the founding moment.
The nickname V2 is an apt final detail. It is brief, practical and slightly amused by the language of software. Behind it sits a career whose interest comes from duration and changing tasks. Magic may be a memorable company name. The work, as Verma’s story shows, still has to be done.