Artist entrepreneur Raghava KK launches Flipsicle to rethink the role of creativity in technology
Raghava KK is a very different kind of entrepreneur. He does
not have a background in technology and that’s what makes him even more
interesting.
Raghava is a household name in the field of art and he is using his talent to create a new kind of startup.
Flipsicle
was born when Raghava was invited by billionaire-visionary Jeff Bezos
to share his vision at a private brain-trust/think-tank event last year.
He and his wife Netra, an educator and the brain behind his business
success in the art-world, decided to have their fourth baby – Flipsicle.
Flipsicle is a lab that creates products with one vision in mind – to
use creativity to engender empathy and to see the world through many
eyes. They just launched Flittr at
Life is Beautiful.
Now he’s in India to launch Flipsicle, backed by prominent investors
such as Vishal Gondal, former CEO, Indiagames; Gautam Godhwani, founder
of Simply Hired; John Maeda, Design Partner at KPCB; and Neeraj Arora,
who manages all things business at WhatsApp.
Raghav was named by CNN as one of the 10 most remarkable people in
the world. As an artist, he has collaborated with the greatest artistic
minds of our century, including Paul Simon. National Geographic
inducted him into the Society as an Emerging Explorer for his
contribution to bringing together art and technology. He is the Chair of
the INK Fellows Program and a mentor-advisor at NuVu Studio,
SingularityUniversity. He was one of the first Indians to speak at TED
in Long Beach, CA and is a four-time TED speaker. After bringing tech
and science into the art world, he is now taking art to the tech world
through Flipsicle
One year into the setup, Raghava has raised a seed round of funding,
acquired another startup, pivoted multiple times and gone through the
entire cycle. He has acquired an e-commerce company and will be
launching Flipsicle in India. YourStory caught up with Raghava as he was
getting ready for his trip home:
When you were growing up, what was your view of the world? How has that changed over time?
Growing up in India really exposed me to multiple perspectives. India
is an impossible democracy. There are so many worlds that co-exist in
India. I was a Hindu boy growing up in a Muslim neighborhood and
attending a ChristianJesuitSchool. My world was always made up of
multiple realities and multiple perspectives. I was used to growing up
in a world where many realities existed side-by-side.
When I started traveling and cartooning as a teenager, I realized
that there were even more realities than what I had been exposed to in
India. I learned that dads can be moms and moms can have tattoos. I’ve
always learned from the world and seen the world as my classroom.
An example of Raghava’s artwork
Coming to Flipsicle, what is the back story there?
When the iPad first came out, I was the guest of Vinod Khosla and
spoke at his conference along with Bill Gates. Ironically, I got an iPad
as a gift.
I didn’t know what to do with it, so I gifted it to my son, who was
one at the time. He loved it! So my wife Netra and I created an iPad art
book for him called Pop-it. Pop-it is about the things children do with
their parents. It shakes up the concept of the ideal family and is
meant to expose children to multiple perspectives at the earliest
stage. The book starts out with a gay couple raising a child. If you
shake the iPad, you get a lesbian couple. Shake it again, and you get a
heterosexual couple.
This is an effort to bring the concept of perspectives to children
at the earliest stage. I launched the project at TED Global in 2011. It
won several book awards, including a Kirkus Award for best children’s
book of the year and started a bit of a movement. The Shaken Media
Collective was started in Toronto around the vision of shaking
everything up using perspectives through “shaken storytelling.”
This is where the idea of Flipsicle really started – to shake up everything through perspectives.
What were your first few steps of converting your idea to a reality?
Flipsicle started in a very unique place. It was a private and
creative brain-trust/think-tank event organized by Jeff Bezos, where I
presented my vision for a new knowledge system that was visual and for
seeing the world through perspectives. With the tremendous encouragement
from some of the smartest minds in the world, I took a plane straight
from that meeting to the Valley and went on a road trip to meet anyone
who was willing to meet me. I knocked on the doors of the smartest angel
investors I could possibly think of, slept literally in my friend
Madhavi’s car, and raised my capital within 10 days.
I came back to India for the birth of my third child, my daughter
Jaya, and within 20 days, opened Flipsicle in Times Square, New York. I
put my tech team together in a very unique way. After interviewing over
40 potential candidates, I made the decision to only employ
founding–level minds and engineers. The only way to make that happen was
to make an acquisition. We bought a three-year old company, MerchiiAB,
from Sweden.
You mentioned that you moved back from US to Bangalore and then
you moved back to NY. Why is that? Doesn’t doing that with your family
make it so hard?
For the last decade, both Netra and I have spent a significant amount
of time in India and the US. It’s always been important to us that our
family is comfortable in both places. We were willing to do anything to
make our vision come true. I don’t separate work from life. This is what
we believe in and we were willing to do anything to make it happen.
Also, I knew for sure that I wanted India to be an important part of the
story, but it was difficult to find the specific talent I was looking
for. Given my connections in the US through the TED world, I chose to
kick-start it here. But I’m back to launch it in India and that’s what
matters most to me.
What is your mission and vision for Flipsicle?
We are all naturally visual beings. We respond to images. We need a social network that lets us talk in images.
Instagram is about beauty. Facebook is about events that happen in our lives. Flipsicle allows you to talk in pictures.
Our mission and vision are the guideposts by which we run our
company. We debated whether we should operate as a non-profit
organization. But we believe that businesses can and should be
sustainable, responsible and value-adding, while being able to take
innovative leaps for ambitious growth. This means we’re committed to
the environment, we safeguard the privacy of our users, and we work hard
to be transparent and honest. We also give credit where it is due.
Vision: Our vision is to connect humanity’s photos, to help us become more creative, curious and empathetic.
Mission: Flipsicle empowers us to know one another better by helping us to see the world through each other’s eyes.
What kind of culture are you building for your company?
At Flipsicle, we treat each other like family, which isn’t always
easy. Don’t expect political correctness and military protocol here. We
have brutal and intense debates on decision and strategies – every
disagreement is an opportunity to learn another perspective – but we
always try to be kind, respectful and fair to one another, and trust in
each other’s good intentions.
That’s why we’re picky about who comes in. We make sure that anyone
who joins us has gained the trust of the tribe. We have zero tolerance
for gossip and online flaming. We trust that everyone on our team will
hold himself or herself accountable and directly resolve any issues of
concerns with those involved with integrity and grace.
“Every disagreement is an opportunity to learn another perspective.”
Our health, our hobbies and our personal and family lives enrich us
as individuals and help us see the world every day with a renewed energy
and freshness. We recognize that every individual comes from a
community outside of work and we value and encourage deep roots in the
eco-systems that support us. Not only do we encourage learning from each
other, we bring in experts and friends from the culture around us.
Magic happens when we chart a course and do whatever it takes to get
to our goal – always moving forward, learning from our mistakes, working
around constraints and fighting for what we believe in. As a group, we
will never do things perfectly – we should be shameless about asking for
advice and being accountable to one another, pulling together for
decisions we make even when we might individually differ. We take risks
and leaps of faith, and are not afraid to admit mistakes or failure – we
support one another and move on, stronger.
Flipsicle team posing for a group picture
How did you choose your co-founders? Having your wife as a
co-founder, was it hard to convince your investors about the founding
team?
Everyone knew very clearly that the vision was both articulated by
Netra and me. The company is not about Netra or me but about the
vision. We both work for the vision. Our dedication and obsession with
the vision is quite apparent to all who work with us and engage with us.
Also, Netra and I have complimentary skills. She has a very good
business sense and a sense of grounding and I am more the product
visionary. We need both of these to make the company work. I have never
achieved anything in my life without Netra’s support. I am honored to
have a woman co-founder. She brings a different energy to our company.
How did you convince your team and investors for acquiring companies even before you had a product?
As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to work only with founding level
people to build this company – self-driven individuals who know how to
build things.
Also, Merchii, the company I acquired, I believe, is extremely
valuable. Its job was to rethink the future of e-commerce. In today’s
world, online commerce still mimics the real world, like a marketplace.
But the Internet is really a market-space. Why do we have to go to the
amazon.com to
shop? Things should come to you. Merchii’s vision was to build a
decentralized e-commerce engine. We thought this would be a perfect fit
for us and we also loved the team. We invited them for a hackathon in
NYC and we all felt we had to work together. It was not an easy thing to
acquire a company. We went through a lot. I am very grateful to my
investors and to the founders and investors of Merchii for believing in
what we are capable of together.
How was Flittr born?
Flittr is one of the apps from the Flipsicle family of apps. It
focuses on public quests. You get to ask people quest in a public forum
and they answer through photos.
Tell us more about your new app, Flipsicle, which you are launching in India next week.
We are launching Flipsicle at the INK Conference. It’s very important
for us to be launching at the INK Conference, because my first ever
talk about my iPad book happened at INK and it is because of that talk
that this startup has really happened. I want to show the power of India
in making my vision come true. Lakshmi Pratury, the creator of INK is
also very passionate about the vision and is thrilled to launch this at
INK for us.
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