| Website | sidu.in |
| Blog | blog.sidu.in |
| @ponnappa | |
| Birthplace | New Delhi, India |
| Birthdate | 4/5/84 |
| Visvesvaraya Technological University, BE | 2005 |
| CS |
Sidu is an entrepreneur and programmer. He is currently involved in building up his second venture, C42 Engineering, of which he is co-founder and CEO.
C42 Engineering aims to be a self-funded product development firm. As part of the founding team of C42 Engineering, Sidu helped bootstrap an offshore boutique Ruby consulting business from nothing to a $250k runway in just eighteen months, the revenue from which is now being used to fund product development. C42 Engineering’s first product, RubyMonk is currently in public beta.
In the past, Sidu was a minority partner in Inactiv Labs, a Bangalore based startup and was involved in building and managing two products, Activ Money and Activ Mobs. Activ Money never got very far, but Activ Mobs was a different story. Activ Mobs was a peer of Twitter, but ideated independently based on InActiv Labs’ focus on products built around SMS and focussed on India’s enormous market. Mobs was initially limited to just one state in India and launched in September ‘06. It was a tremendous success and grew to 60,000 registered users and 6,000 active users daily in just a couple of months.
Despite several meetings with VCs, the business failed raise funding and Activ Mobs was eventually shut down due to unsustainable burn rates. This experience clearly highlighted the difficulty of raising early stage funding in India and was a key factor in the decision that his next venture would have to be self-sustaining.
Sidu has also spent nearly five years consulting for Fortune 1000 clients as an employee of ThoughtWorks, learning a great deal from the extremely intelligent (and nice) people that work there.
