Geetesh Bajaj built a PowerPoint business starting 25 years ago, when he was making slides for clients alongside web work. He learned from text-based internet newsgroups in the DOS era, then turned a side project into his full career.
Now, Giddis, you and I have known each other and collaborated for about a decade now, but I'm not sure I've ever asked you, how did you, way back in the day, first come across PowerPoint, a PowerPoint slide or a deck and think, you know what? I'm going to make a whole career out of this?
It did not happen that way. It was much more. Okay. So what happened is I started creating decks for some clients which I were doing other computer work, and I really liked doing what I was doing, and I started spending a lot of my time on PowerPoint and I ran into quite a bit of roadblocks. Whom to ask. So I used to go into the news groups in those days, news groups, where, you know, you did not have the graphical user interface that we have today. You, you actually went into like, what is a DOS screen, a black screen stuff over there. And this was.
Sorry, interrupt. This was what year and what were you doing as you were right before.
You started doing at least. At least 25 years ago. Okay. And what I was doing before at that time was working with websites. And I also was running a business of my own. And this is something which essentially started as a hobby. And so you were developing, you were.
Building websites professionally in the late 1990s.
Not. That wasn't professional. There's a. Okay. That was also a hobby and that was more of having fun. But what I was professionally, I was learning the family business, which was a food processing factory, and I was taking care of that. Okay. And. And I had some spare time. And I love doing all this stuff. I loved getting a computer, playing around with it. And so things evolved, as I told you, it was very organic. And then started asking questions about PowerPoint to understand how things work. And I found many, many people were asking questions and I thought I knew the answers to them and I would answer those questions for people on the news. Things changed. I'm based in India and the Internet opened up here and we got access to all stuff brow and, you know, going in and the world became a smaller place. Okay. And then I realized that I was answering the same questions again and again. Okay. So I decided to create the site. I could just go and put detailed answers and techniques for all the stuff I was telling them in the news groups and send them there.
