In September, 2007, Kunal Gupta stood in front of ten senior executives from Rogers Publishing, trying to sell them on a mobile application prototype he had devised in his dorm room at the University of Waterloo. This was, of course, when most people thought an app was just something on a restaurant menu. It was also Gupta’s first-ever sales meeting. Using clumsy slides of a now-primitive BlackBerry 8700 series phone, the 22-year-old software engineering student explained the concept. His three-person company, Polar Mobile, wanted to “publish” Canadian Business via an interface that would enable people to read the magazine on their handheld devices. Using mobiles as media devices, he said, was the next big thing.
“What do you guys think?” Gupta said. “Is this something you want to work together on?”
“We’ll think about it,” said Deborah Rosser, then Canadian Business’s publisher.
Gupta’s stomach sank, but he pushed forward. “Okay, but for how long?”
Less than four years later, Gupta is at the helm of a 40-person company that’s behind mobile apps for Time, GQ, Sports Illustrated, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Food Network. Even more impressively, Polar Mobile announced at the end of March its plans to release over 100 apps in this year alone for Research In Motion’s new PlayBook tablet. In an increasingly crowded digital device market — whether you’re talking about tablets or handhelds — apps can make or break a new product. Few people rave about, say, how great the iPhone is as a mobile phone, but they do love that they can update their Facebook statuses on it. In many ways, the very success of the PlayBook itself will depend on just how good — and popular — Polar Mobile’s apps are.
This isn’t the first time Gupta has had a lot riding on his shoulders. When the Canadian Business publishers did finally call back with good news — two months after Gupta’s initial sales pitch — his team had just nine weeks to actually develop the software they had sold. “The general manager for the Roger’s Media and Publishing websites called me and said ‘Hey, we are going to do it,’” says Gupta. “I was so excited, I was jumping up and down. Then there was a big pause and she said, “And so is Maclean’s.’”
With only a prototype, Gupta and the other two co-founders (he won’t discuss their names publicly) worked around the clock preparing the new mobile platform while also wrapping up their final year of school. Their dorm served as their headquarters and they snuck into a software engineering lab to work through the night (at one point, going three weeks without sleep). While the others worked on the platform, Gupta acted as designer, tester and product manager. “Although I’m a software engineer, I’ve never actually written a line of code for the company,” he says, chuckling. Taking a page from Mark Zuckerberg’s playbook, he skipped exams and school projects for meetings and industry trade shows in New York and Las Vegas.
Gupta did finally earn his degree, barely — along with the respect of Adel Sedra, Dean of the Engineering Faculty at the University of Waterloo. “He was a very active fellow. Very interested in promoting student entrepreneurship,” Sedra says, referring to Impact, a non-profit organization Gupta started with other classmates during his first year of studies. “He came to my office a number of times to promote the group and ask me to sponsor a lot of activities.” Gupta, he says, is very persistent and polite. “It’s hard to turn him down.”
If you picked up a copy of either Maclean’s or Canadian Business on January 24, 2008, you would have seen full-page ads promoting apps “powered by Polar Mobile.” (The company’s name and its iceberg logo suggests that there is, in Gupta’s words, “more beneath the surface.”) Although there were a few initial launch hiccups — there always are — everyone at the start-up eagerly anticipated the funding from their first sale. The company grew rapidly, its three founders expanded to five, and the company began working with RIM. The team had moved to a cramped office in Toronto after graduation, but after raising a round of funding through a group of angel investors (Gupta won’t reveal how much), they moved again to their current office at Front and Simcoe. The company grew again, to 18 employees. Then, in October of that year, the world markets crashed.
“We grew a little too fast,” admits Gupta, the only time regret clouds his large brown eyes. With ever-mounting financial responsibility taking its toll — he was sleeping as little as when he was student — Gupta pulled back a bit. Despite having three phones, an iPad and a PlayBook, he now disconnects completely at the end of the (12 hour) workday and on weekends. The only people able to reach Gupta off-hours are friends and the members of the company that are in his BlackBerry Messenger contacts. (He has no phone number on his business card.) Downtime’s spent with friends and family, or working out at the gym in his Harboufront condo.
The pace hasn’t slowed completely. The company will soon open a second office in San Francisco, which will give it better access to the media market in Los Angeles. The company’s trademarked SMART content management system powers over 520 mobile apps used by about 8.5 million people in more than 10 countries. And those make-or-break PlayBook apps will launch in July.
What’s next for Gupta? While he once briefly entertained the idea of a career in politics — he does possess the poise —he’s never wanted to work for anyone else. He doesn’t even have a resum. Whatever his future plans, Gupta’s not telling. Not necessarily because it’s such a secret, but more to protect himself from his own ambition: “I’m not thinking about what’s next,” he says. “I think that if I think about that then I’ll want to do it.”
