Artist entrepreneur Raghava KK launches Flipsicle to rethink the role of creativity in technology

Raghava KK is a very different kind of entrepreneur. He does not have a background in technology and that’s what makes him even more interesting.

Raghava is a household name in the field of art and he is using his talent to create a new kind of startup. Flipsicle was born when Raghava was invited by billionaire-visionary Jeff Bezos to share his vision at a private brain-trust/think-tank event last year. He and his wife Netra, an educator and the brain behind his business success in the art-world, decided to have their fourth baby – Flipsicle.

Flipsicle is a lab that creates products with one vision in mind – to use creativity to engender empathy and to see the world through many eyes. They just launched Flittr at Life is Beautiful. Now he’s in India to launch Flipsicle, backed by prominent investors such as Vishal Gondal, former CEO, Indiagames; Gautam Godhwani, founder of Simply Hired; John Maeda, Design Partner at KPCB; and Neeraj Arora, who manages all things business at WhatsApp.

Raghav was named by CNN as one of the 10 most remarkable people in the world. As an artist, he has collaborated with the greatest artistic minds of our century, including Paul Simon. National Geographic inducted him into the Society as an Emerging Explorer for his contribution to bringing together art and technology. He is the Chair of the INK Fellows Program and a mentor-advisor at NuVu Studio, SingularityUniversity. He was one of the first Indians to speak at TED in Long Beach, CA and is a four-time TED speaker. After bringing tech and science into the art world, he is now taking art to the tech world through Flipsicle

One year into the setup, Raghava has raised a seed round of funding, acquired another startup, pivoted multiple times and gone through the entire cycle. He has acquired an e-commerce company and will be launching Flipsicle in India. YourStory caught up with Raghava as he was getting ready for his trip home:

When you were growing up, what was your view of the world? How has that changed over time?

Growing up in India really exposed me to multiple perspectives. India is an impossible democracy. There are so many worlds that co-exist in India. I was a Hindu boy growing up in a Muslim neighborhood and attending a ChristianJesuitSchool. My world was always made up of multiple realities and multiple perspectives. I was used to growing up in a world where many realities existed side-by-side.

When I started traveling and cartooning as a teenager, I realized that there were even more realities than what I had been exposed to in India. I learned that dads can be moms and moms can have tattoos. I’ve always learned from the world and seen the world as my classroom.

Coming to Flipsicle, what is the back story there?

When the iPad first came out, I was the guest of Vinod Khosla and spoke at his conference along with Bill Gates. Ironically, I got an iPad as a gift.

I didn’t know what to do with it, so I gifted it to my son, who was one at the time. He loved it! So my wife Netra and I created an iPad art book for him called Pop-it. Pop-it is about the things children do with their parents. It shakes up the concept of the ideal family and is meant to expose children to multiple perspectives at the earliest stage. The book starts out with a gay couple raising a child. If you shake the iPad, you get a lesbian couple. Shake it again, and you get a heterosexual couple.

This is an effort to bring the concept of perspectives to children at the earliest stage. I launched the project at TED Global in 2011. It won several book awards, including a Kirkus Award for best children's book of the year and started a bit of a movement. The Shaken Media Collective was started in Toronto around the vision of shaking everything up using perspectives through “shaken storytelling.”

This is where the idea of Flipsicle really started – to shake up everything through perspectives.

What were your first few steps of converting your idea to a reality?

Flipsicle started in a very unique place. It was a private and creative brain-trust/think-tank event organized by Jeff Bezos, where I presented my vision for a new knowledge system that was visual and for seeing the world through perspectives. With the tremendous encouragement from some of the smartest minds in the world, I took a plane straight from that meeting to the Valley and went on a road trip to meet anyone who was willing to meet me. I knocked on the doors of the smartest angel investors I could possibly think of, slept literally in my friend Madhavi’s car, and raised my capital within 10 days.

I came back to India for the birth of my third child, my daughter Jaya, and within 20 days, opened Flipsicle in Times Square, New York. I put my tech team together in a very unique way. After interviewing over 40 potential candidates, I made the decision to only employ founding–level minds and engineers. The only way to make that happen was to make an acquisition. We bought a three-year old company, MerchiiAB, from Sweden.

You mentioned that you moved back from US to Bangalore and then you moved back to NY. Why is that? Doesn't doing that with your family make it so hard?

For the last decade, both Netra and I have spent a significant amount of time in India and the US. It’s always been important to us that our family is comfortable in both places. We were willing to do anything to make our vision come true. I don’t separate work from life. This is what we believe in and we were willing to do anything to make it happen. Also, I knew for sure that I wanted India to be an important part of the story, but it was difficult to find the specific talent I was looking for. Given my connections in the US through the TED world, I chose to kick-start it here. But I’m back to launch it in India and that’s what matters most to me.

What is your mission and vision for Flipsicle?

We are all naturally visual beings. We respond to images. We need a social network that lets us talk in images. Instagram is about beauty. Facebook is about events that happen in our lives. Flipsicle allows you to talk in pictures.

Our mission and vision are the guideposts by which we run our company. We debated whether we should operate as a non-profit organization. But we believe that businesses can and should be sustainable, responsible and value-adding, while being able to take innovative leaps for ambitious growth. This means we’re committed to the environment, we safeguard the privacy of our users, and we work hard to be transparent and honest. We also give credit where it is due.

Vision: Our vision is to connect humanity’s photos, to help us become more creative, curious and empathetic.

Mission: Flipsicle empowers us to know one another better by helping us to see the world through each other’s eyes.

What kind of culture are you building for your company?

At Flipsicle, we treat each other like family, which isn’t always easy. Don’t expect political correctness and military protocol here. We have brutal and intense debates on decision and strategies – every disagreement is an opportunity to learn another perspective – but we always try to be kind, respectful and fair to one another, and trust in each other’s good intentions.

That’s why we’re picky about who comes in. We make sure that anyone who joins us has gained the trust of the tribe. We have zero tolerance for gossip and online flaming. We trust that everyone on our team will hold himself or herself accountable and directly resolve any issues of concerns with those involved with integrity and grace.

“Every disagreement is an opportunity to learn another perspective.”

Our health, our hobbies and our personal and family lives enrich us as individuals and help us see the world every day with a renewed energy and freshness. We recognize that every individual comes from a community outside of work and we value and encourage deep roots in the eco-systems that support us. Not only do we encourage learning from each other, we bring in experts and friends from the culture around us.

Magic happens when we chart a course and do whatever it takes to get to our goal – always moving forward, learning from our mistakes, working around constraints and fighting for what we believe in. As a group, we will never do things perfectly – we should be shameless about asking for advice and being accountable to one another, pulling together for decisions we make even when we might individually differ. We take risks and leaps of faith, and are not afraid to admit mistakes or failure – we support one another and move on, stronger.

How did you choose your co-founders? Having your wife as a co-founder, was it hard to convince your investors about the founding team?

Everyone knew very clearly that the vision was both articulated by Netra and me. The company is not about Netra or me but about the vision. We both work for the vision. Our dedication and obsession with the vision is quite apparent to all who work with us and engage with us. Also, Netra and I have complimentary skills. She has a very good business sense and a sense of grounding and I am more the product visionary. We need both of these to make the company work. I have never achieved anything in my life without Netra’s support. I am honored to have a woman co-founder. She brings a different energy to our company.

How did you convince your team and investors for acquiring companies even before you had a product?

As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to work only with founding level people to build this company – self-driven individuals who know how to build things.

Also, Merchii, the company I acquired, I believe, is extremely valuable. Its job was to rethink the future of e-commerce. In today’s world, online commerce still mimics the real world, like a marketplace. But the Internet is really a market-space. Why do we have to go to the amazon.com to shop? Things should come to you. Merchii’s vision was to build a decentralized e-commerce engine. We thought this would be a perfect fit for us and we also loved the team. We invited them for a hackathon in NYC and we all felt we had to work together. It was not an easy thing to acquire a company. We went through a lot. I am very grateful to my investors and to the founders and investors of Merchii for believing in what we are capable of together.

How was Flittr born? 

Flittr is one of the apps from the Flipsicle family of apps. It focuses on public quests. You get to ask people quest in a public forum and they answer through photos.

Tell us more about your new app, Flipsicle, which you are launching in India next week.

We are launching Flipsicle at the INK Conference. It’s very important for us to be launching at the INK Conference, because my first ever talk about my iPad book happened at INK and it is because of that talk that this startup has really happened. I want to show the power of India in making my vision come true. Lakshmi Pratury, the creator of INK is also very passionate about the vision and is thrilled to launch this at INK for us.