This song by Meatloaf motivated me no end when I was growing up and it had a lingering effect in my ears so much so that I have been a dreamer ever since but dreaming alone wouldn’t have helped any cause that one under takes and that being a principal, which my dad had instilled at a very young age helped me believe that I could do the impossible right now and miracles would take a little longer. A lot of dreaming and a lot more of visioning things to a logical conclusion through relentless pursuit to win is what is a philosophy I developed as a person and also as a leader today of a company, which I would call, “Dreams of Straw Folks”.

Yes, it was a raw dream that took rapid shape in just 48 hours and boy, what a dream it is turning out to be. From building a team over the years to being friends to everyone who worked with me, I think that’s the grace in which this company is also being built.

We had nothing when we decided to start our venture, just a lame idea, but there was serious zest and zeal within us to achieve something that would make history in times to come, so much so that the lame idea actually turned out to be a massive idea in the making.

Septemeber 15th 2008, was my last day at Yahoo India and even that day went in a jiffy, meaning, it was a day when we dint know it would be our last day but it turned out that way, however happy or sad we were to that was irrelevant, simply because we had embarked on reaching a new high, a high that we dint know how high it would be but knew that the heights would bring us the necessary high in life and so we set into high seas on what everybody called “a boat with no engines”. Sure it was a boat with no engines but little did people know that this boat had required skill sets to build an engine in no time and that’s exactly what we did, we built the engine on the boat and set sail.

Along the way we got ourselves into massive storm, that could have sunk the boat in minutes but the commitment was resilient and slowly but steadily things fell in place, what inspires this team is the fact that everyone wants to see and nurture a baby that they have given birth to, it needed the requisite incubator since it was born in storm and ahead of time, we got that through my partner and pal Sidharth Rao, he gave the baby the necessary breathing, we lived on, one hurdle crossed, which was right after the first storm but we knew there were many more to come and many more that will continue to come but in just 48 hours we had Capital 18 back us and we signed our term sheet, that’s when Sarbvir Singh assured us that this baby will grow to become the most awaited and the most sought after. That reassurance just made us feel that we have done the right thing and we are here to stay forever.

A lot of people along the way (feels like I have been into this forever, its just 2.5months) kept asking me what is it that makes me so confident of success in something I have never done before? My answer is simple, I have said this a million times since we began and I think I will continue to say this till 2010, “If the Indian Internet industry has to be a 1000 crore industry then this will not be performance driven and has to be brand driven simply because the fuel of the eco system has to come from the traditional advertisers who will come online”.

To this effect, we have embarked on a long and tedious journey of educating, evangelising and spreading the power of audience and its behaviour on what truly is the most enchanting medium of communication – Internet. We feel that audience value on the internet is ignored purely because of lack of skills in spreading the word in the right way; we know that technology plays a very important role in making this medium most robust when it comes to internet advertising, however technology is not the word that brand managers understand the most, what they do understand is the language of marketing and how that impacts their business. That is precisely why our endeavour is first to being a consultant who cares for their business and then use technology efficiently to cater to their business.

With all of this we launched Networkplay.in, India’s first vertical ad-network, which segments audience precisely without technology being the driver, does that mean we are not a believer of technology? Absolutely not! We are building on the philosophy of nothing is blind on our ad network and the ad serving product we are building talks the language of brand marketers, it will have ingredients of what a brand manager wants in today’s world on the internet, TOM, Brand Impact, Reach and use the traditional internet powers of re-targeting, behavioural targeting, IP based targeting etc.

We played to our cards, we dint know that we have the aces, we still don’t know whether we have them but what we know that here is a team of flash players who know to play blind and bet big, we are playing blind and we feel that getting the right audiences and then to market them well will bring the aces automatically. To that effect we have amassed over 500M of PVs (a no that’s ever increasing) within India and the world, we have billed over 175K USD in 2.5months of our existence, served over 65M impressions, have over 30 advertisers, over 40 publisher partners, reached over 3M UUs and are poised for bigger heights in 09-10.

Know our federation, know our advertisers and know us, we will ensure that we partner you to reach the desired result as an advertiser or as a publisher in the days to come.

We have just begun and what a beginning it has been.

Come Networkplay now and have a fabulous 2009, wishing everyone a happy new year!