STARTUPS
The Dining Room Start-Up: The Story of Happiest Minds Technologies
At 68, most people are retired.
Ashok Soota was not like most people. He had just walked out of the company he co-founded, and he was about to begin again.
From his dining room.
To understand why, you have to go back.
Long before that room, Soota had already lived a full career. He spent years at Wipro and rose all the way to vice-chairman. He was there when Indian IT was still small, and he helped build its technology business into something that mattered.
In 1999, at 56, an age when many people start counting down to the end of their working lives, he made a different choice. He left, with a group of colleagues, to build something of their own.
They called it Mindtree.
It grew fast. In 2007, Mindtree went public, and the IPO was oversubscribed more than 100 times. It was the kind of moment founders spend their lives chasing.
But companies, like families, are not always easy places to stay.
In 2011, after a falling-out with his co-founders, Soota left the company he had helped build.
Picture the moment.
He was 68. He had helped build one company at Wipro and co-founded and taken another public. He had nothing left to prove.
He could have stopped. Nobody would have blamed him.
Instead, he announced a new company.
He called it Happiest Minds Technologies.
The year was 2011, the city Bengaluru. The press had a name for it: a “dining room start-up.” There was no glass tower and no sprawling campus, only a room in a home and a man with decades of experience behind him.
What he had was a clear idea: an IT company built only for digital work, from day one.
The question followed him everywhere. Would he really go up against Mindtree and Wipro, his own old homes?
He would. And he did.
The years passed, and the dining room start-up kept growing.
Then, in September 2020, at 77, Ashok Soota took Happiest Minds public.
The IPO was oversubscribed 151 times.
On the first day of trading, the shares closed 123% above the issue price.
The man who had started over at 68 now stood at the biggest moment of his second act, at an age when most people have long since stopped working.
Today, Happiest Minds has about 6,500 people. In FY26, it earned ₹2,315 crore in revenue.
Two companies. Two IPOs.
And the second one began at an age when most people stop.
What Ashok Soota teaches us
Your best work doesn’t have an age limit.
Losing one company doesn’t erase what you know.
Experience is the one unfair advantage you can’t buy.
Starting small is fine, even from a dining room, at 68.
So here is the question worth sitting with:
What’s stopping you from starting at your age?
Tell us in comments below.