时间：2022-07-08 12:07:22
For five years, Quentin Staes-Polet, a Belgian who was the AsiaPacific head for Media and Entertainment/Digital Media at IBM, made frequent business visits to India. Then one fine day four years ago, Staes-Polet, who was based in Changi Village in Singapore, decided that starting up in India was not such a bad idea after all. The 42-yearold technology geek founded Kreeda Games India, an online gaming venture, in Mumbai, along with two like-minded entrepreneurs, Robin Alter and Ramesh Anumukonda.
“Since 2005, I have been observing the fast-growing interactive entertainment industry in India and China. I could not identify any strong player in this field. I saw the potential of the Indian market and hence thought of setting up Kreeda, which would focus not just on the development of games but also on publishing, localisation and marketing of games,” says Staes-Polet.
The venture funded itself for close to a year before SoftBank’s Bodhi Investment and IDG Ventures India, venture capital firms that focus on online gaming, invested $2.5 million in it in 2007. That helped the company launch its first “massively multiplayer online game”danceMELA, which the company claims is India’s first, and currently has some 100,000 registered users. By end-2008, Kreeda began outsourcing most of the development, preferring to focus on conceptualisation even as it went on to design online marketing campaigns and‘advergames’.
The Belgian is clearly at home in Mumbai. “I am very comfortable here, more than anywhere else,” he says. “I started my career in Hong Kong when its economy was taking off and stayed there for eight years. But I made only three friends. Today, in Mumbai and across India, I have more friends —Indian ones — than I ever had before.”
Like many expat entrepreneurs, Staes-Polet loves to take the lesstravelled path — whether it is on his thumping Enfield or hitching a ride on Mumbai’s ubiquitous autorickshaws. In his words, he has become a thorough “Mumbaiwala”. He prefers moving around in the suburbs, where he stays and works, and avoids travelling downtown. “It is like a lunar expedition,” he says with a shrug. On the cards: A biking trip to Goa, where Staes-Polet and his Malayali girlfriend of eight years have bought a house, although he does point out that “riding in Mumbai itself is a great adventure”, with his tongue firmly in his cheek.
Escapades apart, Staes-Polet loves the simple life when he is not working on complex multiplayer games. Being at home, cooking for friends (who are Indians as well as Belgians in India), listening to music and doing some gardening are great stress busters. There is scarcely any sign of anxiety on the Belgian’s face, who points out that “you don’t feel lost here even if you are by yourself… So rest assured I am not going anywhere from here”. Or perhaps only as far as his thumper takes him.