THE town where I grew up in India had limited electricity, a high crime rate and rampant corruption. I could have gone down the wrong path, but my parents inspired me to do otherwise. I had values and did well in school.
As a child, I asked my father why the police didn't do more to stop the lawlessness, and he said there were too many of us in the country for them to accomplish much. At first, I thought I'd join the government and try to change things, but I also had an entrepreneurial bent. I wanted to have an impact.
In 1992, I enrolled in the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology for a bachelor's degree in engineering. While there, I volunteered to be mess secretary of my dormitory. At home, my mother experimented and prepared tasty dishes, and that spurred my interest in food and cooking.
I managed the cafeteria and kitchen and took part in a friendly competition with other dorms to deliver the best-tasting food at the lowest cost. I hired the cooks, planned the menus and tried to add some new flavors, but it was a challenge. I found that even cooks can't always make new dishes solely by reading cookbooks.
When I graduated in 1996 and moved to New Delhi to join Tata Consultancy Services, I was frustrated trying to cook for myself. I managed with remote help from my mom and a neighbor, along with takeout from restaurants.
Feeding myself became harder when I moved to the United States for a Tata assignment at Nasdaq because calls to my mother were cost-prohibitive, at more than $1 a minute. I learned to cook over the next four years, but it was painful trying to make sense of cookbooks and cooking shows on television.
In 1999, I left Tata to work for HSN, then part of IAC. I helped to re-engineer its business processes and to Web-enable its software systems, staying until 2004. At the same time, I got a master's in management information systems from the University of South Florida.
Next, I served as a consultant to the venture capital company North Atlantic Capital while studying for an M.B.A. at Columbia Business School. In 2005, I served an internship at Microsoft and then became a senior business strategy manager there.
After college, I had thought about starting a company to teach people about cooking, predominantly by means of online videos. I got some capital to do that when I won the Outrageous Business Plan competition at Columbia. Business school provided a framework and timetable that helped me focus my ideas.
When I saw how broadband had taken off, I thought ifood.tv had a good chance of success because we could stream video content. I registered the Web site in 2006 and started the company with my co-founder, Vikrant Mathur, in 2007.
This month, we have achieved more than 7.7 million unique global visitors and now have offices in California, New York and India. Our recipe groups, or channels, include Italian, Mexican, kosher, Chinese, Indian, healthy and vegetarian food. We're available worldwide on TV through technology incorporated into certain televisions or by means of set-top boxes like Roku. We also offer mobile applications and provide our videos to other Web sites. Our advertisers include Kraft, French's and Cuisinart.
My wife, Tulika Ranjan, M.D., whom I married in 2001, is a brain-cancer specialist and also from India. Our parents introduced us. We liked each other immediately, but I think it was my love of food and cooking that clinched the deal for her. Together we have started NutritionRank.com to compare foods according to their nutritional value.
