Photo: Documentary Movie and Dramatics Club

The DeerExpress Club in collaboration with the Documentary Club organized a Deertalk session with Manish Modi, the director and co-founder at Janaki Technology as the speaker, on Friday. Mr. Modi is a passionate entrepreneur who co-founded Sparrow SMS, Picovico, and Khalti App. The Deertalk session started with a warm welcome to Mr. Manish Modi. Mr. Modi, speaking to Class of 2019 and 2020, shared his entrepreneurial journey. Throughout the entire session, he shared his experiences of developing Sparrow SMS, Picovico, and Khalti. His journey started with an internship at NTC, while studying undergrad at Pulchowk Engineering college. Even though the tasks that he and his friends had been assigned were extremely difficult, their patience and passion kept them going through the years. He shared how he had worked throughout the night at times due to load shedding In Nepal. They used to work whenever electricity was available, be it night or day. Mr. Modi further shared the difficulties that he had faced while developing an application such as Sparrow SMS in order to make it tailored to Nepali citizens and suitable for Nepal. He says that if you give up on something after one option doesn’t work out, it will be extremely difficult for you to succeed.

“You should always fight for it, you should always hustle for it, ” says Mr. Modi.

While working on another product, Picovico, Mr. Modi's journey took him to Bangalore. There he got a chance to learn more about startups and their business model, and meet investors on different Startups events, such as Startup Accelerator programs. In 2017, Khalti, a digital wallet app was launched by Janaki Technology. After about a month after its one-year anniversary, Khalti crossed 100,000 downloads on Google App store. He says a lot of work went into developing Khalti, especially into its user interface, and making it a real-time system. He emphasized on having a long-term vision for any product that one is developing. With Khalti, they have not had to make any significant change to the application even with the increasing number of users. On the subject of hiring employees, Mr. Modi said, “When he hires employees, we don’t care about marks and certificates. We only see how good you can code and debug, and look for experience, skillset and a learning attitude.” At the end of the session, the president of DeerExpress club, Irish Pokhrel gave a token of appreciation to the guest.