June 2nd week 2005. The days at SJCE, Mysore had come to an end. I had finished my greatest objective in life till then which was to become an electronics engineer. Each of my classmates went in different directions albeit within Bangalore. I lived in Bangalore just like most migrants to Bangalore do, with other friends in a small rented house. 4 of us, all electronic engineers from SJCE rented one of the many shackles in the concrete jungle of Bangalore. One of my roommates was Anil. I worked at Robert Bosch and Anil worked at Celstream. For the next 2.5 years, it was pretty much routine. Wake up early, jog, maneuver through the infamous Bangalore traffic, slog in front of the computer, ride back, sleep and repeat. It was a typical software engineer’s life.
Now, a software job has its benefits too. You get to travel to foreign lands. And my visit was to the place where Bosch originated, Stuttgart in Germany. September 15th, 2006 was the date when I flew to Germany and everything changed thereafter.
Germany is a beautiful green country with great respect and care for the environment. Almost every weekend in Germany was spent at one of the countrysides with like-minded friends. In fact, the cities also did not differ much from the countryside in the number of trees or greenery. The sustainably managed trees of Black forest, the botanical gardens within Stuttgart and old trees of Rosenstein park all had a profound impact on me.
After 3 months at Germany, when I came back to India, Anil had gone to Noida to join another software company, ST Microelectronics. A few days at Noida and he had already got the feeling that software companies did not differ much from one another. Except the pay of course.
So, we started discussing about a different path. The path less taken. To start our own company. Our only criteria was that it should not again be like the same jobs where we don’t know how we are contributing to the world. We wanted to do something which would actually give some meaning to our efforts.
After many months and after numerous business plans, we were still not sure whether we were on the correct path. One day, during a gtalk session, Anil asked me whether I was interested in the NGO model. I said that I wanted to plant trees but not in an NGO model.
Finally, after a lot of discussion, we were pretty much sure of what we had to do. We named it sapgreen (Meaning, the color of the leaf). Our plan slowly started to develop on google docs. More about our plan in the next post.