The Graduate, Part 2: How I Ended Up in India

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So how did all this get started? Well, it basically began because I knew how to use a computer.

I was still in high school, and my father asked me to create marketing materials for his small shipping business, Doma Export (domaexport.com), which sends small packages or entire cargo containers from the Northeast part of the United States to Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe.

It's the family business, so my two sisters, one brother, and I all helped in our own way. I taught myself Photoshop and made a few ads. I then created an 80-page souvenir journal for the 60th anniversary of the New Jersey division of the Polish-American Congress (http://www.polishamericancongressnj.org/), another organization my father runs. This was a behemoth of a project for me at the time, but it helped me really learn about design tools and the printing process. It also gave me another idea. I thought, "If I can do this for these organizations, why don't I do it for other companies--and get paid for it?"

I began getting requests from people in the Polish-American community who either saw my ad in the souvenir journal or whom my father referred to me. I needed some branding of my own, so in January 2006, I filed a name certificate with my county and a business registration with the State of New Jersey and became the sole proprietor of Altum Design Studios.

I had big ideas of what to do with my business, but college took priority. I spent three years at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business. Still, I tried to apply everything I learned in clas--from operations management to business ethics, global logistics to strategic management--to my vision for Altum. Web development also started to interest me in college. Beyond the HTML I was doing in high school, I started teaching myself PHP programming and MySQL databases. I read a book that's about three inches thick on the train commute to and from NYU, where I was taking classes one summer.

Then, two years ago, I began working with a friend, Brooks Lindsay, to build Debatepedia.org, a wiki for debate and argumentation. I built the site using open source software, but when the technical challenges became too large for my abilities, we went searching for a software developer to help us. We found one at a meeting of DC Entrepreneurs and Web Designers that we learned about on Meetup.com. We introduced ourselves to the group and explained our need. One of the guys who approached me said his brother ran a software development company, Quad One (quadone.com), in India. (In fact, almost everyone I talked to that day was doing software development in India.) We chose Quad One because it offered flexible payment terms and was quick and professional with responses.

So when I was ready to start building Altum, India seemed like the logical place to begin.