Founder Rajiv Shenoy took sick days from Citigroup to check out colleges in NYC.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Ever been at a college campus and seen those big TVs in the common areas, flashing news about upcoming events or showing an advertisement for the new Quiznos that’s offering a student discount? If you haven’t, then you should probably give Rajiv Shenoy a call.
Shenoy is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ORCA (Organization for Responsive Campus Advertising) TV, a school-wide network of large-screen TVs that would be placed in high-traffic areas around campus for students, faculty, and vendors to advertise their businesses, promote an event, or any number of things.
Born and brought up in the US, Shenoy is a second-generation Indian American who has spent most of his life in the Washington, DC metropolitan area after moving from Boston around the age of five.
Shenoy went to high school at The Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland. He then attended Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore for his undergraduate studies, earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. After that, he stayed at JHU for his post-graduate studies, earning his Masters degree in environmental engineering.
It was during his time at JHU that Shenoy got the idea for ORCA TV. Shenoy brought his idea to the Dean of Student Life at JHU, and it was soon implemented throughout the JHU campus, becoming a resounding success.
After spending a year on Wall Street, Shenoy decided to concentrate his efforts full-time on ORCA TV. He is now at the head of a successful start-up, with offices in Virginia, Philadelphia (where Shenoy currently resides), Baltimore, and Pune, India. The ORCA TV technology is in six campuses across the nation, and has been steadily growing in size each year.
At the young age of just 26, the recently married Shenoy has already accomplished a great deal.
In an interview with The American Bazaar, Shenoy talks about the genesis of ORCA TV (www.orcatv.net), the company’s current and possible future states, and what it’s like to be an Indian American entrepreneur, particularly at such a young age.
How did you decide that you wanted to start your own company and be an entrepreneur? Was it something you always wanted to do?
Well, my mom [Neena Shenoy] was an engineer for General Electric for several years, and then started her own company in the early 2000s. My dad [Suresh Shenoy] has started somewhere around four or five businesses, and is now the executive vice-president of Information Management Consultants, Inc., a company started by his brother [Sudhakar Shenoy] which my father joined later, in 1989.
So I’d seen my family do it [start their own businesses], I was surrounded by it from a fairly young age. I saw them do it and thought “well, this is pretty cool,” so ever since I was about four or five years old, I knew I wanted to start my own business. I loved business and knew I wanted to get into it.
Can you explain what ORCA TV is, and how it came about?
I started ORCA TV during my sophomore year at Johns Hopkins. I saw that there were a lot of really cool activities happening around campus all the time, but it was very difficult to market them.
So the idea was to network a bunch of flat-screen TVs around the campus, and we [Shenoy and a small group of friends] created software that allowed students to submit their own content. We would then vet the content [to] make sure it was appropriate, and then display it on all the screens around campus. So anything like videos, websites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and tweets, you name it – people could post their content on these screens to connect with other students.
When I graduated, the program had really taken off. It was successful, everyone loved it, but I had accepted a job on Wall Street. So I went to work in New York City for Citigroup for a year, didn’t really like what was I doing there, so I would take sick days and go around to other schools in the area to see what they were doing, and see if there was any area that I could help out with.
What I found out was that most universities already had the kind of large-screen TVs in place that we used at Johns Hopkins, but they had no content strategy, no software strategy. So they started hiring us to aggregate student content, create software around [the content], and manage the content. Essentially, we created a whole media platform that the students could use to market activities and events on campus.
In terms of your company’s growth, has it met your expectations? Where do you see ORCA TV in the next five or ten years?
In terms of growth, yes, it’s definitely met expectations. We’ve been doubling in size and revenue, year after year, for the last three years since we started [the company]. We got our first [major] investment in December of 2012, which is also very exciting. I don’t want to give out revenue numbers, but we have six people working at ORCA TV now, and we’re in six campuses between New York City and Santa Clara, California right now.
So for the next few years, I’m looking to continue growing the platform, expanding into more schools, and also innovating around the technology to make it more social. By that I mean giving users the ability to share content on iPads and iPhones, bringing the content to the individual, and creating a kind of marketplace [to] help bridge the gap between all these different technologies and showcase them on campuses.
In terms of future entrepreneurial pursuits, do you have plans to expand and start other businesses in the future? Are you actively working on anything right now?
No, I’m very focused on ORCA TV, to be honest. I think it’s easy to get distracted and I’d rather focus on building this one business. I find that there are a lot of ideas and a lot of opportunities out there for me, if you will, but if I stay focused on one thing and make that a big success, another thing will come to fruition eventually. So for me, focus is key.
Could you talk about what the experience has been like for you as an Indian American entrepreneur? Do you find that things have been more difficult for you during your career because you’re not the typical Caucasian businessman, and also because you’ve become so successful at such a young age?
Not yet; in fact, it’s been the opposite. I think as a whole, at least in my experience, the Indian community is very well-respected in America. Because I’m Indian, I’m taken as kind of a genius, which I’m definitely not. [laughs] It’s great because I’ve become kind of this technology guru even though I never really had a technology background.
We [at ORCA TV] outsource all of our business to India, so all of our people are actually Indian. Even though I was born here in the US, I’m a big advocate for being proud of being Indian, of promoting the fact that we’re Indian and embracing it, and to not only improve the culture here in the US but also [to] help people back in India.
Indian Americans have been rising to levels of prominence here in the US. Most recently, there’s an Indian Miss America [Nina Davuluri], and there also might be an Indian Surgeon General [Dr. Vivek Murthy]. Where do you see the Indian American community in the next five or ten years, in terms of the strides that we have been making?
Well, I think there are two answers to that.
The first one is that the Indian American community has always been very well-educated. They’ve always been very “aspirational”. But along with that, I think we also need to remember where we come from. So like I said, I think it’s very important to embrace the fact that we’re in India. Especially in college, for example; there, the Indians are very close to each other and, at least in my case, we had a very strong group. For some reason, Indians are also more comfortable assimilating, if that makes sense, into American culture than other ethnic groups, who really haven’t been able to as well as us.
So in terms of financials and success, if you want to measure it that way, Indians are going to continue to be on the forefront of growth in those areas. But as that’s happening, we really need to maintain our values and our culture, and let people know that as Indian Americans, we represent the best of both cultures.
[All photos courtesy of Rajiv Shenoy.]
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com