A Day in the Life: Internet Company CEO/Founder

Vault Day in the Life: Allwin Agnel
Designation: CEO/Founder
Company Name: PaGaLGuY.com
Age: 27

Education
B.com - Mumbai University
M.com - Mumbai University
MBA - The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Professional History: 
My career has progressed on two tracks since I have individually pursued two separate entrepreneurial ventures, one in the tech industry and the second in the media industry.

At 21, I took the plunge and co-founded Neutral Web, a company which provided digital storage to clients seeking to host their own websites. Today, Neutral Web has clients in over 16 nations and hosts in excess of 8,000 websites. All this started from a credit-card loan and a co-founder's apartment.

Alongside Neutral Web, in September 2002, I began this research into MBA degrees, but could not find an unbiased website for Indian business school aspirants and to therefore founded pagalguy.com (translates to "crazy guy") - a website that would allow aspirants to share information about getting into top Indian MBA programs.

The website and its community have grown to a community of 210,000+ users, becoming not only the largest forum for aspiring MBA students, but India's largest educational forum altogether. The company now has a full time team of 14 driven individuals from top schools worldwide.

Job Description:
Keep growing the company, hire the most talented people and solve problems no one has solved before.

Your day:

8.30 AM: Hit snooze on alarm

9:00 AM: Wake up, freshen up, check schedule for the day and head for work. Breakfast is optional

10:30 AM: Check mail. Have coffee. Reply to emails and get back to coffee.

11:00 AM: Meet clients or job applicants or partners or suppliers, colleagues or anyone we are working with.

1:00 PM: Lunch time - order food along with other colleagues and eat in office. Chat up with everyone, laugh, enjoy food and get back to work

2:00 - 5:00 PM: Work without much of a break, which includes working on financing, clients, future business, strategies and everything related.

5:30 PM: Snack time. Yum!

6:30 PM: Kick back and work on new products along with rest of the gang. This could last anywhere from an hour to three hours.

7:30 PM: Work with everyone to gain clarity on my own thoughts. Hash out ideas, debate them, refine them and get back to dreaming.

9:30 PM: Leave work to home

11:30 PM: Get back to reading something - could be strategy, hiring, theories, behavioral economics or anything that I need to help shape up the company & myself.

2:30 AM: Listen to music and keep reading

3:30 AM: Finally retire to sleep and think about a couple of problems that are worth solving and file them in my head for later reference.

Favorite Part of the Job: 
Hiring phenomenally talented people

Least Favorite Part of the Job: 
Doing any recurring work on a timetable

Advice: 
Hang in sufficiently long enough, magic happens.