Varun Shoor was 17 years old when he told his father he wanted to start a digital business instead of going to college. He got the go-ahead.
What he didn’t get from his father, who had a hand tools factory in Jalandhar, was the money to buy a domain name for his startup.
Shoor had blown up an earlier handout on web design projects that didn’t pay off. So he wasn’t getting any more money from his father.
The domain name came from a chat room where a generous soul from Japan said he had no use for Kayako.com anymore. So Kayako—the name of a she-ghost in Japanese folklore—became Shoor’s customer service software startup that grew into a global business, from its inception in 2001 to its acquisition by US-based ESW Capital in 2018.