LinkedIn just published a report ranking the top companies where professionals ‘most want to work’ across India. This was a data-driven approach based on LinkedIn users’ engagement with organizations across India’s entire corporate sector. To that end, it’s a lot more meaningful since the list is not based on a person’s opinion, or on the work force’s perception of how they feel about their organization. The list has been derived by a model which scores each organization on the basis of the interest level of LinkedIn’s 500 million strong user-base (40 mil + from India) has demonstrated through their activity on LinkedIn. It considers actions like the number of jobs applied to, number of non-employees trying to connect with employees, and the overall retention of the existing employees, among other criteria. As someone who has been associated with the company since 2003, I can say that Directi’s rise to the very top of this list is neither a coincidence nor a surprise. It’s the result of our founders’ philosophy of settling for nothing less than the very best at whatever we do. It’s the result of persisting on the culture of entrepreneurship, no matter how impractical it might seem for an organization where the average employee age is 27. It’s the result of never compromising on the hiring bar while still scaling the teams exponentially. It’s the result of trusting the team’s ability to overcome the seemingly insurmountable ‘disadvantage’ of being bootstrapped. It’s the result of choosing to be a product company, despite the scale, aura and fame that came with being an IT services giant in the early 2000s. None of this has been easy, none of this happened overnight. Directi is the testament to what is truly possible with the right attitude (I can achieve anything and take-on anyone), persistence (failures are nothing but the pathways to success) and the drive to keep moving forward, all day every day. I feel truly fortunate to have had the front row experience of this spectacular journey so far. And I am as excited about the future today as I was back in 2003, as a new hire at Directi. My hope is that Directi inspires many generations of talented entrepreneurs to build multi-brand, multi-product conglomerates that will create equally remarkable success stories.