Greetings and good luck with your startups! We recently had an unfortunate incident happen to us at Zaakpay. At startups, we are attuned to not having a heart attack and dealing with the situation at hand. So we did deal with it!

Why am I writing this publicly?

I quit PayPal, Silicon Valley and my entire professional + personal network when I moved back to India in Oct 2008. I started working with Drishtee, Noida in the rural products space. 10 months later I joined 2020social.com, 7 months later I joined MobiKwik.com in Feb 2010.  Therefore, I have been part of the startup ecosystem in India since the last 2 years. Just in these 2 years, I have seen far too many shocking *rogue employee* incidents happen to us and our friends at startups. Enough is enough; I want a cleaner startup ecosystem in India therefore I am speaking up.

See Facebook snapshot: my friend Rajat Garg founder of socialappshq.com a successful Facebook Apps startup found 2 of his employees stealing his code. There are all kinds of people in the world – some are capable of wrongdoing, theft, murder, rape, etc. without any provocation. The “Chalta Hai” attitude is what makes people think they can get away with anything. Yes we have a slow legal system and a slower cyber crime police force in India, but that does not mean we let offender after offender get away it. We definitely do not want the employee who screwed us to screw any other company. There are some who think that we are doing this for PR, some who think this is our (Zaakpay’s) shortcoming and therefore we should not talk about in public. We have not done anything wrong; why should we be scared of speaking up?

So what happened?

We hired Subhro Kar in Dec 2011 as Senior Engineer at Zaakpay.com; prior to Zaakpay he worked at Ixigo.com in Gurgaon. His key duties at Zaakpay were setting up and managing the PCIDSS secure servers, system and database administration, and creating automated processes. He worked for about a month in our Delhi office post which he had to go Kolkata to deal with some family issues. Interestingly, enough he never came back and continued to work remotely. Subhro reduced his output towards Zaakpay in the last two months. We constantly questioned him but he never improved his performance or said that he was leaving. To say the least we were not happy with him but were keeping him till we found a great person to replace him. On March 15, he put in his resignation with 30 days notice, which was accepted. I was happy I would not have to fire him and that he wanted to go on his own. The same week he went on an unscheduled 8 day long vacation and it was decided the resignation terms would be decided upon his return. He returned and continued to work and said we will discuss in person. Early April, he visited the office in Delhi for a day since he was visiting Delhi for some personal work. Subhro, myself and Bipin (my partner at Zaakpay) had a 1.5 hour meeting. We told him things were not working out; he had similar things to say. We asked him did he have any last date in mind or any new job to join – he said ‘No’. So we all agreed in the meeting that he would continue on till we found a new person or he found a new job – whichever came first. Note everyone was courteous and on good talking terms with each other.

A very interesting point to note is that Bipin asked Subhro specifically are you moving abroad or have an offer coming up since there was a tweet to that effect he had read. Very convincingly Subhro said no I am not going anywhere; I was inquiring for a friend since he was unable to get a response from Vodafone.

So this was the status quo in which Subhro Kar was working at Zaakpay. We all knew he was doing his last days here and now working at even lower levels than before. But since we are a resource strapped startup we were living with it. This was our first mistake. We should have ensured he was out of the company as soon as possible even at the cost of adding more operational burden on the Tech team. We should have also not believed him when he said he was still looking for a job.

Getting to the climax:

Since 4th May we had an email thread ongoing where Bipin, and I were questioning Subhro on why so many of his tasks were pending. After all he was being paid a salary so at least we expected 30-50% output. Last we heard from him was via an email on May 7th early morning making excuses for his incomplete tasks. At 10:30 am IST on Tuesday 8th May, Sudarshan Purohit (Architect at Zaakpay) called us to inform that he was unable to log in to the production server via SSH. Within a few minutes, we realized that Bipin the only other person who had access to the production servers was also unable to use SSH credentials to login. A point to note here is that as per the PCIDSS setup Subhro was the only superuser with root access to our 3 servers. Two other people in the company had access to the production servers that too in a limited fashion via SSH from our monitoring server.

Thus, we figured out that Subhro (the system administrator) had deliberately removed Bipin and Sudarshan’s access and thereby the Zaakpay team’s access to the Zaakpay production servers (the servers by the way were running and processing payments for our customers). This came as a RUDE SHOCK to us. We still do not know why Subhro did this. Its easy enough to write an email saying that I have found a new job and I need to leave ASAP and this is my last date. Isn’t it? Unless he really just wanted to cause us pain.

I immediately called our hosting company SingleHop and went about the business of gaining control of our servers. This was easy to do since the account is associated with my credit card. First I got them to remove Subhro’s email and phone no from the account and have only my contact information on the account. Second I got the SingleHop account password changed. Then I asked them to change the root passwords on all the servers. One of the servers was done within 10 mins. On the other two servers there was a password being requested before the servers could be rebooted. None of the passwords on file worked. SingleHop had to get a datacenter technician to do the changes at the psychical servers. After almost 6 hours of downtime and firefighting we re-gained access back to our servers and Zaakpay was back up. There were many other passwords to change for the email server, various tools and services we used – if something like this happens to you please make a list of all such things first and then go about changing them. By evening, while upset we all relaxed at a small party at the office to celebrate an employee’s birthday.

We sent a termination email to Subhro at 2:17 pm IST on May 8th 2012. On 9th May 9am IST, I found out from Linkedin that Subhro Kar had started work at Facebook in Ireland. Check his Linkedin

Subhro Kar cut off the entire company’s SSH access to the production servers and literally took off to Ireland without any communication, last date or handover. It is clearly very bad on part of an employee to start a new job without telling his current employer. To add to that, cutting off our access to our servers and holding us and our customers hostage like this – is totally uncalled for, unprofessional and illegal. Collectively, we at Zaakpay have never come across such a rogue employee in our entire lives! And yes, we are taking legal action.

Lessons Learnt:

• Be very careful of who you hire as a system administrator and give superuser /root accesses
• Fire non-performing employees as soon as possible; do not give anyone more than 3 chances to prove themselves
• Do not tolerate shit from any employee whether via email or phonecall or in person
• Spend more time in hiring and reference checks; 1 good employee is better than 5 average/rogue/poor employees
• Proactively look for and judge candidates based on their trustworthiness, personal character and credibility and not just based on their key functional skills

My first concern as a CEO is providing excellent services to our new and existing customers. My second priority is growing the business topline and creating a solid product roadmap. My third priority is building a strong and reliable team. With this incident behind me, I can assure our customers, employees, investors, partners that I am going to spend 5X more time on hiring and onboarding employees to ensure they fit the fabric of “Zaakpay” and when required fire unreliable and non-performing employees to maintain the  fabric.

Finally for those users who were trying to use our site on May 8th, sorry guys we were down due to the saga explained above.

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Oh BTW who is Subhro Kar? Please read this before you think about ever hiring him.

Subhro Kar on Linkedin
Subhro Kar on Twitter
Subhro Kar on vworker
Subhro Kar on Pinterest
Subhro Kar on Facebook
Subhro Kar on 500px

Guest post by Vaibhav Goel, summer intern at Zaakpay. Vaibhav is a final year engineering student at Delhi Technological University (formerly Delhi College of Engineering). This post was not edited by Zaakpay.

In order to Stand out, In order to create a difference you need to take an opportunity that proposes before you a new challenge at every step so as to allow you to grow and expand your vistas of knowledge. It is because of that, when Zaakpay – a start up for providing online payment solutions in this e-commerce frenzy world, announced it was coming to take interns, it took me little thinking to convince myself to sit in for the interview for the two month internship period during the months of JUNE-JULY 2011 as a part of my summer internship. The whole idea of joining a company for summer internship is to learn, to enter areas you have not been introduced to before and Zaakpay looked like a perfect opportunity.

The interview was slated to be around 10 am on the 4th of June and all interested candidates reached the TNP department on time. As was the habit with all recruiters, the recruitment staff came only after noon and started their presentations the moment everything was set up.

The recruitment staff consisted of two people , Ms. Upasana Taku (Founder of Zaakpay) and Mr.Bipin Preet Singh(Co-founder of Zaakpay). On the very first day, with their presentations, I could get the clarity of thought Upasana had and what exactly were they trying to focus upon. Their presentation was crisp and to the point, no beating about the bush of what sales target they aim to achieve, how great they were as a company and blah blah. They came to point almost instantly, what they wanted, what requirements should one have etc. was clearly spelled out.

Almost, instantly after finishing their presentation, they shortlisted candidates on the basis of our resumes. The company wanted serious business and this was clear from the  sense of urgency they proceeded everything with. Thankfully, I got through the short-listing phase and was called for the interview. Being the first candidate, it did give me slight jitters. However, the moment I stepped in, they made sure I relax and this made me much more comfortable. It wasn’t a per-se interview, rather it was a session where both the parties exchanged ideas. They asked me of my past experiences and internships.  I was asked to explain what projects I have done and then shifted towards some technical questions pertaining to my field. From the interview itself, it was clear that the Zaakpay team is looking to include people who can bring in something new to the table. The session then moved to questions related to ‘what I can do for the company’ and ‘what suggestions I have for them’. I gave suggestions related to SEO of the site, increasing security features and testing the product as a whole. From the look of both of them, it seemed that they genuinely took my suggestions and with each suggestion, I was informed of the current working of the company. The entire session, made me all the more clear about the working of the company.

I got a reply from them, the next day and I was elated to know that I was selected. They asked me to join in from the 8TH and gave me my remuneration details. To my surprise my job description consisted of the suggestions I had made during my interview and this made me all the more excited to join in. I immediately sent a confirmatory mail.

I came to know that another girl from my College was also  selected, we decided to reach Zaakpay office around 9.30 AM. We reached the office on time after a tiresome 2 hour journey and were introduced to the Zaakpay team. The Zaakpay office has a homely feel to it. Unlike cubicles that are designed to choke you out, we were free to sit in any place we feel comfortable. As it was a start up there were only a handful of employees and this was another evidence that we wouldn’t get lost in the crowd. We were to be taken in at every step and our opinion mattered, not only in the field related to our area but also in trivial decisions being made.

Ms. Upasana Taku came in and made sure we were comfortable, had a good seating arrangement and introduced everyone around. For the first day, we were asked to study the site ‘www.zaakpay.com’ and were introduced with the language and framework being used. For the first couple of weeks I was given the task of SEO improvement of the site and this was something I was looking forward too. I got to read how Google lists pages and what it takes to get your site on top of the search ladder.

Apart from the set work, new challenges were put before us, like for instance I was asked to solve a problem with the HTTPS secure shell lock and had to look up in depth of its working. The working motto was that, “We are engineers and every step has a logic behind it”. Instead of having fixed technicians, Google and developers forums were made our guide and these things really helped us vasten our knowledge.

One day, all interns were taken for lunch by Upasana and Bipin and this experience helped us open up a lot. The informal chat, made me realize the thought process behind Zaakpay. Upasana was not just our employer, but also she turned out to be our mentor. The experiences she shared with us and her thought process in building up Zaakpay, are inspirational and the informality with which she addressed our issues made me respect her all the more.

We were not treated like ‘just another intern’ of a company, we were part of even the small decisions being made such as deciding the visiting card of the company.

What surprised me the most was the amount of hard work put in by everyone around, everyone was determined to get the ball rolling and it was amazing as to how even the most minute elements were given so much thought. Even after a hard day of dealing with endless issues it was amazing to see how Upasana got the stamina to review my work, make suggestions and notice every single detail. This really pumped me up to work better and bring out the best in me. When the person across the table is so pumped up, the enthusiasm is bound to be infectious.

The next task given to me was increasing the security features to the Zaakpay site and bug fixing.

The freedom to come up with an optimal solution that we feel would enhance the products feature and the joy of seeing our ideas being actually implemented is something that Zaakpay promised and delivered.

The way, Zaakpay team worked, made me agree and believe that when we have technology we can simplify the most complex problems.

I remember, during my end of internship days, I had a talk with Upasana, regarding my future job plans. I was brazen enough to say, I wasn’t looking for a hard-core coding job, with the preconceived notion of it being mundane. The talk I had with her really helped me clear my thoughts. With her simple life experiences, she asked me to approach everything without a preconceived mind set.

The attention and concern with which every little problem of ours was addressed was encouraging and helped us work better.

After completing two months with Zaakpay ,I have my own set of points on why should or why shouldn’t one work with a start-up and particularly Zaakpay

• Work with a start-up , if you don’t want to be just ‘one’ of the employees. A start-up is the best place where you can polish your skills, learn new tricks of the trade, and compete with your own self. There is a continuous hunger to prove yourself, and devour as much as you can, within the stipulated period.
• It is a Start-Up so the amount of work is diverse and extensive research on your part is required. So, if you are ready to take up something completely new everyday and challenge yourself, there is nothing better than joining a start-up(esp. Zaakpay).
• Again, a start-up might be short of resources, and you have to realize you are here to learn as well, nobody’s perfect and it is a system of information exchange. Be free to ask questions and be ready to answer them. Be Patient and try not to get the frustration of losing/of getting the continuous errors seep into your head. Try again and try harder.
• As the number of people in a start up are few, your accountability increases, you have to meet deadlines and try to figure out work on your own. This helps you widen your knowledge by heaps and bounds and it helps you to see how the company is building up.
• There are times, when you are stuck somewhere and you need help. You know it’s a silly issue and can be fixed if someone just sat beside you. Still you find no one and you end up resolving the issue yourself with a lot more effort than you expected. I guess when you are working in a start up you need to adjust to the fact that you are pretty much on your own. Someone might just say it’s a blessing in disguise.

So, that’s pretty much it. For all the future Zaakpay employees, I can say that this place is full of excitement and buzz. Once you are with Zaakpay, you are not just an employee, you are as much part of the successes and the failures as the company heads are. Be ready to face new challenges, toil hard, party harder and don’t forget to gorge on the endless chips and cookies that you and your boss share on the same table. If you want to learn and work, if you want to have a feel of how a company builds up and work despite of new problems sprouting up everyday, then Zaakpay wouldn’t disappoint you.

The memories I have with Zaakpay are forever to cherish . We cant predict the future but what I learned here and not just the technical aspect, is going to remain with me and help me in whatever I do.

THANK YOU ZAAKPAY!