"To be successful in a start up, the fire in the belly is more important than what's in your head," quips Sanjay Nayak, co-founder and COO, Tejas Networks.

He would know better since he co-founded Tejas along with Silicon valley entrepreneur Desh Deshpande and optical networking guru Dr Kumar N Sivarajan in 2000 - the worst possible time for a start-up and a rare one at that -an Indian telecom product company.

The time between 2000-2002 saw tech companies, start-ups and markets bottoming out in the aftermath of 9/11. Still, Nayak and his backers moved ahead even as many ambitious start-ups around them sputtered out of business.

"No one knew then where the industry was going. Raising money was tough, and it was a very competitive environment. Employee morale was also down," he says reminiscing on those uncertain days. Still the company persisted thanks to his boundless optimism.

For Nayak, it was a personal motivation that led him to think of building a successful global product company in India.

Prior to Tejas, he headed operations of EDA companies Synopsys and was founding member of Cadence Systems in India. He and his colleague Arnob Roy were smitten by the urge to start a product company since "life at an MNC company like Synopsys was too easy."

But why telecom products? "We figured that we would not be disadvantaged since are away from the US. In the telecom industry, distance is not a factor," he explains.

Nayak treaded carefully initially by starting to understand customer requirements. Tejas gained access to the market by selling Sycamore's products in India. This way, he gained market intelligence on the kind of equipment that Indian telecom market wanted.

Next, Nayak focused on assembling a full-fledged multi-disciplinary team at Tejas that included hardware, domain experts, embedded software, system software, network management software, manufacturing, supply chain, components, sales and marketing and post-sales support.

Many telecom operators then were greenfield operators then who found it daunting to make their business work. "It was an uncertain time. The operators had invested a lot in licenses and user base wasn't going up as fast as expected." Besides, they had to figure out the business and the best technology for themselves. Nayak capitalized on this and urged the operators to deploy Tejas equipment in a small way and decide for themselves.

Today, Tejas is the strategic supplier for almost all major network operators in India including VSNL, BSNL, RailTel, Dishnet DSL and Bharti. Thanks to the company's single-minded focus on next-generation optical networking equipment, Tejas is today a Rs 47 crore product company. Nayak is confident of tripling revenues this year.