Like many Princeton graduates of the 1990s, Joe Sigelman '93 and Randy Altschuler '93 found jobs in the financial industry.
One night in 1999, they chatted long distance as they were up late working on presentations for their clients.
It was 3 a.m. in London, where Sigelman worked for Goldman Sachs, and 10 p.m. in Altschuler's Blackstone office in New York.
Both were disappointed that the around-the-clock crew available to type documents and presentations was not satisfactory.
After further discussions, they decided to quit their high-paying jobs to found OfficeTiger, a company that sends office work like typing overseas.
"We both recognized that even in these institutions, we can perform operations not only more cost efficiently, but better," Sigelman said. "[We realized] that if we could somehow link the breadth and depth of talent in India with services in the west — that could form a compelling business."
The decision confirmed their entrepreneurial spirit.
"The decision for both of us to leave was the largest decision we ever made. [Blackstone and Goldman Sachs] are great institutions — and you get to leave them only once," said Sigelman, now chief executive of OfficeTiger with Altschuler. "[We were] jumping into the great unknown. There's no one paying you anymore and you can't rely on someone else's business card."
Ravi Srinivasan '93 — who left Oracle to join them — is the third co-founder.
Srinivasan, who majored in electrical engineering at the University and earned a graduate degree at Stanford University, focuses on the technical aspects of the firm as senior vice president of client and technology solutions.
All in the family
The founding of OfficeTiger shows how the Princeton community can rally around young alumni and early friendships in college can lead to lasting partnerships.
Some of the early financing for OfficeTiger came from fellow Princetonians, including the late Bill Weaver '34 and Tom Tarantino '69.
It might come as no surprise that they decided to name the firm after Princeton's mascot and have the same official colors.
The employees of the firm can be referred to as Tigers.
"We met each other before we went to Princeton. We had a mutual friend before, but I had forgotten Joe by the time [we arrived at the University]," Altschuler said. "When I was a freshman, we were both in Mathey. We became very good friends. After that we remained close."
Their friendship continued as both worked in investment banking and attended Harvard Business School.
As a student at the University, Sigelman — a Wilson School major — wanted to go to law school. However, he was drawn to some of the finance firms that visited Princeton during his senior year and decided to join Lazard Frères as an investment banker.
Altschuler majored in German literature and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Vienna, Austria. After going abroad, he went to Wall Street.
Beginnings
OfficeTiger was founded in late 1999 and was operational by 2000. Sigelman went to Chennai — formerly Madras — where he has stayed for most of the past five years, training ten employees at a time.
OfficeTiger has 2,000 employees today. Most are based in Chennai, but 150 people work in New York and roughly 50 in London.
"There was always a sense that we're doing something [to change] the way the world does business that had strong geopolitical and sociological changes in it," Sigelman said.
A recent profile of OfficeTiger in The New Yorker magazine said the Chennai office receives hundreds of applications a day for work from an increasingly economically mobile population.
OfficeTiger seems to have brought the ideas of American meritocracy into one of India's most caste-centric cities.
Most of the service jobs that are outsourced abroad, including call center work, customer support and even telemarketing, fall under a broad umbrella term called Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).
The BPO work done by OfficeTiger began with desktop publishing and computer presentations "and over time we moved into research and analytics and I-banking support," Sigelman explained. "In that area, we now support eight out of the 12 largest investment banks." OfficeTiger has expanded the support work they provide to finance and accounting capabilities. In addition, they do large scale printing jobs.
One of the early challenges for OfficeTiger was to implement the "contextual environment" of international metropoles like New York and London into their workers in distant Chennai who came from disparate backgrounds.
They also had to be taught the specifics of the jobs they needed to perform for their foreign clients.
Outsourcing controversy
In recent times the speed at which white-collar jobs are moving overseas has caused controversy in the United States as well as among trade unions in the United Kingdom. Outsourcing has been blamed for the loss of jobs.
The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to developing countries has gradually led America from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.
Now that white-collar service jobs are being sent overseas — where people work for as little as a tenth of what others earn for the same jobs in the West — many people feel this wave of outsourcing abroad will prove dangerous.
Unemployment is a crucial determinant in this year's presidential elections, and outsourcing of jobs has also become a political hot topic.
"I'm a big believer in trickle down economics," Sigelman said. He said as companies become more profitable, three things can happen: consumers get lower prices; the company pays dividends to its investors; and the company expands and employs more people in other areas.
This would be beneficial to the economy in the long run, Sigelman added.
Despite Sigelman's arguments, the loss of jobs has remained a sensitive issue.
In February, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers N. Gregory Mankiw '80 said that outsourcing of jobs was "probably a plus for the economy in the long run."
The comment proved to be controversial and angered Democrats, leading some to believe Mankiw had praised the loss of jobs.
Mankiw later wrote a letter to the speaker of the House of Representatives in which he regretted how his comments "left the wrong impression."
Outsourcing has been encouraged in other countries, including Britain where Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said offshoring gives British firms a leg up, Sigelman said.
The future
Currently, OfficeTiger has no plans to go public, Sigelman said, adding they are happy with their current capital structure.
By 2005, OfficeTiger hopes to double its number of employees to 4,000. They are also opening operations in Sri Lanka.
Sigelman laughed, "We're moving from a land of Princeton tigers to a land of Tamil tigers."
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