"We're going to the venture point when companies are getting funded. As soon as the funding comes and these companies are born, we are going to initiate partnership there", says Malhotra. His strategy is to target Internet startups (who are associated in some way with e-commerce) rather than Fortune 500 companies. These are lesser known companies like Broadvision and Interwoven.

Working with the startups could be risky. The Internet itself is a risky proposition, he tells you. But if the risks are enormous, the gains are equally enormous.

The partners stand to gain from TechSpan's expertise: it undertakes product development as well as customisation for implementation. "Mybusiness processes handle small-sized jobs with quicker turnaround of three months or less," says Malhotra. Of course, Techspan's pay point is different but its choosy customers are willing to pay for the right kind of delivery.

TechSpan is contemplating restructuring next year so that it could focus a part of its key management talent on the resourcing end of the business. "I think half of my time will go into resourcing," says Malhotra. "By the end of 2000 we will have more worldwide resourcing engine that will cover two or three more countries."

TechSpan plans to remain focused to the US market, which is short of 350,000-400,000 people in the business. "It's not going to change. But here a city like Los Angeles or Seattle is bigger than a country in Europe," says he. Now Malhotra is targeting English-speaking countries like the UK and South Africa.

Driving its business model of Distributed Consultancy is Centre of Excellence (COE). Recently, it added a sprawling 20,000 square feet, $2 million COEat Noida near Delhi to its existing COEs at Fairfax, Virginia and Sunnywell, California in the US. Now it is contemplating to open some more COEs in countries like Ireland, Australia, the Phillipines and Singapore.

For non-English speaking countries like China and Russia it plans to have a business model different from COEs. Under the COE, a job may have three components - each done independently in Sunnyvale, Fairfax and Noida. The COE is a dynamic entity which is continuously in tune with cutting edge technology activities. And as the market shifts to a newer product, a COE has to quickly ramp up its people to be proficient in the product and help customers in training, solution implementation and customisation.

For India, TechSpan has multiple mandates -- recruitment, training and retraining for its employees worldwide. India is also critical -- with X'mas round the corner, right skills are so short. Recently in a span of two weeks, TechSpan has recruited 75 consultants in India, in addition to itsglobal employee strength of 175.

Though Techspan has kept an employee turnover target of 25 per cent a year, yet none of its employees has quit in the last nine months. Exceptional for a company that does not feel the need to have any vision statement (Pithy statements that adorn corporate receptions are something we will do without, says TechSpan Lexicon) and basks in Scot Adams' Dilbertian doctrine. All the practices at TechSpan are rooted in the premise -- One spends more time at work than one does at home. So make things easier and exciting for every body at the workplace.

"Somewhere we've been able get into the R&D inspired HR model where people work for the fun of discovering cutting edge technology, and where environment, salary etc doesn't weigh heavily on one's mind -- though that's exciting too at TechSpan,'' says Malhotra.