Finding the funny in outsourcing

In December, "Doubtsourcing" was acquired for an undisclosed amount by Fuse+Media Interactive, a company based in India and owned by venture firm Velocity Interactive Group, which is based in Palo Alto. Velocity partner Keyur Patel says he plans to turn "Doubtsourcing" and another creative project Sood worked on with friends called Badmash into animated TV shows, as well as shorts aimed for mobile phones.

The audience will be primarily what Patel calls the Indian diaspora, people with roots in India but living around the world. The animation work, of course, will be done in India. Sood is the creative and technical director.

"This isn't content you can create unless you understand India and the U.S.," Patel says. "You have to be on both sides of the divide."

Straddling it has always been part of Sood's life. His father, a chemical engineer, moved to the U.S. from Uganda. His mother, a loan officer, came from north India. Although the family is Hindu, Sood attended the Christian South Hills Academy in West Covina through middle school. He recalls coming home crying that his family was going to burn in hell for eternity.

It was at UC Berkeley during the dot-com boom that Sood, an economics major, caught the entrepreneurial bug. After graduating in 1998, he worked at PeopleSoft Inc. and other technology firms before setting out on his own.

First he founded an online math education company called LearnTempo for kids from kindergarten to high school. It failed. In 2001, he started DeepSun, building websites for travel agents, massage therapists and construction companies for less than $500. He barely made the rent on his San Francisco studio apartment and nearly had to close the business when his laptop was stolen from his car while he was surfing.

In 2002, he sold the name DeepSun to Sun Microsystems Inc., which had complained that he was infringing its trademark. Sood declined to disclose the amount he got from Sun but said the money helped him keep the business afloat. The company became Monsoon Co. He has six full-time employees in the U.S. -- he hopes to double that this year -- and 90 workers in three cities in India: Pune, Mumbai and Chandigarh.

Sood, a cuff-link-wearing guy, has contracts with Wells Fargo & Co. and other big names, and with many small start-ups.

"There's no way I would have gotten this off the ground without him and the outsourced team," says Ken Kurtzig, chief executive of iReuse, a website that helps corporations find nonprofits to donate unwanted supplies.