TechTree: The Next Chapter

In the early-2000s, I was very into working out with weights, hence the posters you see on the walls in my apartment in Raval Tower, CBD Belapur

In an earlier post, I wrote about joining ITNation, where George and I started TechTree, an all-new tech website that featured hardware and software reviews, along with technology news and features. The story continues here.

While TechTree was essentially a small startup, there wasn’t a great deal of pressure on the editorial team to produce more and more content every minute of the day. The team did a reasonable number of articles every week and we prioritized quality over sheer quantity. In the evening, George and I were often among the last 5-6 people to leave office. Sometimes, we left together and walked down to Marine Drive, which was barely five minutes away from our office. We’d stroll down Marine Drive, talking about work and our lives, often stopping to buy sookha bhel from one of the streetside vendors there. George had an interesting perspective on most things – not just technology or tech journalism – and I enjoyed spending time with him. Sometimes, we’d stop for a cup of coffee at one of the fancy cafes nearby and watched the world go by. George, who lived in Mahim, would then catch a local train to go back home, while I carried on to VT and got on a train to Belapur.

Outside of work, I had met a girl – Archana – who I quite liked. We had met via a matrimonial website – perhaps not the coolest way to meet, but that’s anyway how it was. While her family was from Rajasthan, Archana herself had been born and brought up in Bombay and was quite familiar with the ways of the city. While she also had a full-time job, we managed to squeeze out time from our respective work schedules and met whenever we could, sometimes going to watch a movie or have dinner together. I introduced her to a favourite place of mine – an obscure rooftop restaurant in Colaba – which she also liked very much, and we used to sit there in the evening and talk for hours. Archana had an impish charm, spoke in a manner that I found quite alluring and was always ready with a laugh. One day, I asked her if she would marry me, and she said yes. We both laughed, but the conversation moved on to something else. We did not discuss our plans further, and for the next few days, Archana neither called, nor met with me. As it turned out, fate had other plans for both of us. Archana’s parents wanted her to get married to someone else – a boy whom they had chosen for her. For reasons best known to her, she decided to go along with whatever her parent had decided for her. She informed me of her decision on the phone and as one might expect, I felt betrayed. I was quite upset and angry for a few weeks but eventually made peace with the situation. Archana – or Archie, as I used to call her sometimes – even invited me for her wedding. Maybe that was the right new-age-y thing to do? However, I did not go. We did meet three or four times after that, over the next 7-8 years. I also met her husband once, and he seemed to be a nice guy, soft-spoken and polite. Archie and I kept in touch until a few years ago, but lost track of each other after that.

Back at ITNation, the pressure was on for TechTree to start earning some money – a few random banner ads alone would not suffice. These days, ‘advertorials’ have become very common. An advertorial is content produced by the editorial team and paid for by a client, where the objective is to provide a glowing review of the client’s product(s) and shower praise upon them, yet keeping alive the illusion of editorial integrity. Smart marketers have figured out that advertorials are often better than advertisements since they the former have an editorial stamp of approval and provide way better value for money. Back then in 2002, advertorials weren’t a big thing just yet, but the ad sales team at TechTree, desperate to try whatever they could in order to boost the bottomline, had started experimenting with some forms of paid content. For this, I sometimes went along with Deepa to meet some clients in an effort to work out a deal or two, but don’t remember getting any useful results to speak of.

The editorial team kept doing its routine stuff – plenty of hardware and software reviews and a few features – but we did not seem to be making much headway in the context of earning revenue. The idea of having paid links next to hardware reviews, which readers could click and order stuff online, had been a non-starter, which was a big dampener. While he never said anything about this to me, George must have some felt pressure from Pavan and Rizwan, and once mentioned that I might soon have to start reporting to Deepa, who was the de facto business head for TechTree. It came as quite a shock and I remember thinking to myself that I’d never, ever, agree to that. I firmly believed back then, and still do now, that the editorial head should always report to the publisher and never to the business head.

I liked working at TechTree – I was the founding editor after all and had built the site up from scratch – but every once in a while, I also thought about my days at Indian Auto. My time at Indian Auto had been, as far as I was concerned, unfinished business. While I liked working with computers and technology, I still had this deep love for fast cars and superbikes and occasionally thought about what it might be like if I found work with some other automotive magazine and went back to automotive journalism. It was a tantalizing idea and once George mentioned that I may have to start reporting to Deepa, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about the possibility of getting back to automotive media. The trouble was my track record – I had crashed two cars (a Fiat Siena Weekend and a Honda Accord) when I was with Indian Auto and in the process, I’d earned a bit of a bad reputation in automotive media circles. I did get in touch with one or two editors of certain Delhi- and Bombay-based car magazines, but was politely shown the door. ‘Sure, we’ll get back to you as soon as we have a vacancy,’ I was told, which was perhaps only fair. Nobody wants a crasher – I probably wouldn’t have hired me if I were in their position. 

I was in no great hurry to leave TechTree and was more than willing to bide my time. I had met some very interesting people there and made some good friends, one of whom was Shreos, the co-CTO. Shreos was a total technology geek, a hardcore tech-nerd. When he spoke, he sounded like he was reading out random sentences from an engineering textbook. An IIT Kanpur graduate, he had a sharp mind and he used to enjoy playing tricks on people – during routine conversations, he would intentionally use nonsensical, out-of-context, hard-to-understand tech jargon, which he knew the other person would not understand. And then he’d wait for the other person to silently nod in agreement, refusing to acknowledge the fact that they had not understood any of what Shreos had said. Later, he’d recount these stories and laugh his head off. But he was a good sort, really, and we got along well. He’d sometimes take me to Status, a Gujarati restaurant in Nariman Point that was a five-minute walk from our office, and we’d polish off a full thali each, after which it was a challenge to stay awake once we got back to office. Shreos left ITN just a few months after I joined, and though we spoke on the phone once or twice after that, we’ve never actually met since then.

In the meanwhile, a good opportunity came along for me - something I'd been waiting for. I was told by some friends in the media that Motoring, an automotive magazine published by the Business Standard newspaper group, was looking to add one person to their editorial team. I had met Bijoy, Motoring’s founding editor, once or twice during the time when I was with Indian Auto. We had also been on a drive organized by Volvo, at their plant near Bangalore, where we got to drive the Volvo B7R bus on a closed circuit. The drive had gone off without incident and on the way back, Bijoy was speaking to the Motoring team on his mobile phone, and jokingly remarked that the drive had been incident-free and that ‘Sam Kumar hasn’t crashed!’ It was a remark made in jest – Bijoy was a few years senior to me in automotive journalism and was always quite kind to me. He had supported me when many others had spoken against me, saying that crashes could happen to anybody and that many senior auto journalists had also had multiple crashes when they were younger.

When I was told that Motoring might be looking to add a new team member, I decided to go and meet Bijoy. I spoke to Bijoy and he agreed to meet me, and asked me to come to his office. The Business Standard office was situated in Worli, on PB Marg, opposite Century Mills. When I reached there, in the evening, the Motoring team was stepping out of office – they were all going to watch The Fast and The Furious, which had Vin Diesel and Paul Walker in leading roles. Without missing a beat, Bijoy quickly introduced me to the team and asked me to come along to watch the movie with them. I agreed and was hurriedly ushered into one of their two cars. From their team, I only knew Bijoy, Murali and Sachin. Murali and I had shared a room on the Fiat Siena Weekend drive, when I had crashed. And Sachin and I had been together on a trip to Japan that had been organized by Toyota for a few Indian journalists. I had been on that trip on behalf of Indian Auto while Sachin was there from Motoring, and that’s how we knew each other. However, the entire Motoring team seemed to accept me as one of them – we were all car and motorcycle guys after all – and I felt right at home with them. After the movie, Bijoy asked me to come and see him in office again, and said he would also get me to meet the team as well, in a more formal setting.

After about a week, I made another trip to the Motoring office and met Bijoy, who discussed things with me and asked me a few questions, as he tried to figure out if I’d be a useful addition to the Motoring team. Srinivas, Bijoy’s right-hand man and second-in-command at Motoring, met me next and spoke to me briefly about how Motoring worked, the unique stories that were featured in the magazine and the high standards of writing that were expected from the editorial team. The final meeting on that day was with Mr AK Bhattacharya, one of the most senior editors at Business Standard. He did a formal interview with me, but in his kind, gentle manner. He and Bijoy never made me feel as if I were being ‘grilled’ – the interview was more like a friendly conversation. I was wearing a half-sleeved shirt on that day and Mr Bhattacharya noticed the many scars on my arms – the result of multiple car and motorcycle crashes I’d had over the last many years. He said he hoped there would be no more crashes and I nodded in agreement. He also noticed that I had moved around a fair bit – from working in an industrial glass equipment manufacturing company in Baroda to setting up a computer institute in Lucknow, and then getting into tech journalism in Bombay, and moving to automotive journalism. He said I was the classic definition of a ‘drifter’ and both he and Bijoy laughed at that. At the end of the meeting, I was told I was hired.    

Soon, I got a formal offer letter from Business Standard and even though the salary they were offering was about Rs 4,000 less than what I was getting at TechTree (which, in turn, was a few thousands less than what I’d been getting at Indian Auto!), I still accepted the offer. While I quite liked working at TechTree, professionally it felt like a bit of a dead end – the website wasn’t really going anywhere much, and on top of that there was the possibility of me having to report to the business head, which I was not okay with. I was keen on returning to automotive journalism and that was more important to me than the money.

I’d be joining Motoring on 1^st November 2002, but first there was the challenge of letting George know about my decision to move on. George had helped me twice – the first time was when I was leaving CHIP and he had helped me get a job at CNET, and the other time was when I had moved on from Indian Auto and he had hired me for TechTree. I felt that by leaving so soon – I had only spent around 8-9 months with ITNation at that time – I was letting George down. But it had to be done, and so on a Monday morning I walked into George’s cabin and told him that I’d be leaving TechTree and would be joining the editorial team at Motoring. George wasn’t very happy with this and asked me to reconsider, but I said I’d made up my mind. Once it was clear to him that I wouldn’t be staying back, George said it was fine and allowed me to leave, and even waived off my notice period. I suggested that Varun, whom we had hired to head the test centre, should be the new editor. With his vast knowledge and deep understanding of technology – he was the best man for the job. In fact, I wrote an email to Pavan, Rizwan and George saying that I strongly recommended that Varun should be promoted to take over my position at TechTree, and they agreed. While I was leaving, Deepa said she'd miss having me around at TechTree.

I had really enjoyed working at TechTree and had made some good friends there – it was a really nice workplace and the bosses were more than fair in the way they managed their teams. But I guess it was time for me to turn the page yet again. As one of my bosses used to say, a rolling stone gathers no moss.

The story continues here