Polar Mobile’s Kunal Gupta epitomizes Waterloo’s electric buzz

• June 03, 2011

By Linda Forrest

Earlier this week, I traveled over to Canada’s newly-crowned Silicon Valley North with our Francis Moran. To say that the energy and dynamism of that tech community is inspiring and exciting would be a profound understatement. The place is positively electric, and everyone we encountered was friendly, welcoming and eager to interact, share and connect.

The timing of our jaunt was based largely around the Communitech Techworking Breakfast with the Boss, the guest of honour for which was Kunal Gupta, CEO and founder of Polar Mobile. While still in university, this impressive young man was responsible for starting the Impact Entrepreneurship Group, whose goal is to create the next generation of entrepreneurs and help young entrepreneurs realize their true potential. This group, as well as Kunal’s knack for networking, has rendered him a well-known professional within Canada’s Technology Triangle and well beyond. In fact, he’s quite the frequent flyer, jetting between Polar’s head office in Toronto, other Polar outposts in the U.S., and customers in New York, London, Dubai and elsewhere.

His chief complaint about travel that already has earned him his frequent-flyer elite status for next year? That he doesn’t encounter enough Canadians in these other markets, suggesting that as a nation we’re not doing a good enough job of networking and distributing our wares worldwide. He’s certainly not the first to accuse Canada of that.

Kunal began by illuminating all the ways in which mobile has changed the world. In fact, he presented the bold idea that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has changed and that mobile sits somewhere towards the top of the triangle right alongside eating and sleeping.

Kunal doesn’t define mobile as a smartphone or a tablet. Instead, approaching the concept from the user perspective, he said mobile is what we are as users, and the devices that facilitate our connectivity are just supporting our mobile lifestyle. When he talked about the natural interaction that his young nieces and nephews have with touchscreens, it reflected how quickly our population is adapting to and integrating mobile devices into every facet of our lives.

Unlike many entrepreneurs that wait until they’ve completed their schooling to establish their ventures, he and his team established their first application while still students. He shared how divided his attentions were those past few years, the majority of his time focused on finding and closing that first sale. Later in his presentation, he remarked on the number of young people who ask him whether they should bother to finish their formal education. Kunal said he did not necessarily see the point of continuing with the final years of his university schooling but he stuck with it and now is happy that he did because he picked up valuable skills and information that he might not have in an autodidact approach to software development.

Last week, our Commercialization Ecosystem series touched on similar themes when it looked at the entrepreneur on campus. Kunal suggested the impetus for the creation of Impact was that “the way we’re learning how to build a company today is not in the classroom.” The university environment best serves the entrepreneur when it acts as a “sandbox” where the young entrepreneur can learn, build, fail and build again, he said.

Universities weren’t the only target of his admonishment; he had harsh words for the government funding bodies’ slow release of funds, hampering Canadian companies’ ability to hire top talent quickly, or see R&D through the development phase because of the lag between funding approval and a cheque arriving. He also blasted the media, saying they “need to do a better job of covering the younger startup companies making things happen.”

The story of him pitching his first prospect, which turned into Polar Mobile’s first customer, was particularly endearing. He told us about taking the bus from Waterloo into Toronto to meet with the brass of Canadian Business to pitch a mobile app in a time when nobody knew what such a thing was, asking bold questions, the fear of returning to his team without the client in hand and the seemingly unending nine weeks it took to close that business. That the decision-makers were entrepreneurs themselves who had sold their magazine to a major media conglomerate probably worked to his advantage as they no doubt saw shades of themselves in this eager young man pitching them.

It’s always inspiring to hear stories of entrepreneurship from entrepreneurs themselves, especially when they’re willing, as Kunal was, to tell an honest story of naivety, nervousness pitching early business, and an admission that they’re still trying to figure out their ideal business model, probably still making some mistakes, but working both on and in their business with great gusto. The projections (in loose terms) that Kunal shared see them sailing past their targets, which are always moving because of the speed at which the mobile space is expanding, into apps for cars, for television and beyond. With his strong network, technological expertise, solid user base, growing team and willingness to seek out counsel and draw on the experience and expertise of others, I’ve no doubt that Kunal and Polar Mobile will continue to flourish.

Image: BlackberryCool