Vijay trained as a mechanical engineer at KLS Gogte Institute of Technology, Karnataka, completed his MBA from Goa Institute of Management, landed a job with Satyam Computer Services in Boston and moved to Canada in 2001. He served companies across Montreal and Toronto before finally fulfilling his dream – establishing Tangentia in 2003. His life and work, no doubt, has been an exciting and fulfilling journey since.
Elizabeth and VT Thomas couldn’t stop counting their blessings on 11 October 1974 – the day Vijay was born in Goa. VT served with the Indian Forest Services and Elizabeth was a school teacher. Vijay would spend his summer breaks in Kerala, with his maternal and paternal grandparents. The backwaters of Alleppey, visiting his maternal house by boats, the natural and cultural beauty amazed him a lot.
Though no one in his family had ever been into business, Vijay was still in grade 11 when he knew that he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Highly inspired by Harshad Mehta, an Indian stockbroker, he started investing in the share market. He, in fact, persuaded his father too to invest in stocks. Vijay researched quite hard, he had an Arjuna-eyed focus on each IPO and deciphered every finance magazine like Economic Times. He borrowed money from neighbours to become their portfolio manager and started investing in the likes of ICICI and HDFC. Business was always on his mind. During his engineering days, with a group of friends, he started investing in IPOs on the Bombay Stock Exchange, booked a TATA Sumo to sell the booking at a premium, etc.
Always a diligent student, he grew all the more ambitious during engineering. He started participating in university politics and representing his college at inter-university sports and cultural events and competitions. Politics honed his leadership skills, sports made him a team player and chess sharpened his brain.
In 1996, by the end of college, he was recruited by 3M Boilers, an engineering company in Pune, where he helped build a sugar factory. However, he wanted a lot more. He joined a family friend to start Nestle and Unilever distribution business in Goa. Once the business stabilised, he realised the need for an MBA to push his career graph up. Luckily, he got a call from the Goa Institute of Management for a degree in finance and marketing.
And life changed for him!
There he met Parul Verma. They were two opposites... She had lost her mother at an early age and was raised by her father, an engineer at Hindustan Copper. She has studied at Sophia School in Khetri, Rajasthan, and was all her teachers’ favourite for her diligence. She was a topper throughout her school. Vijay spoke in quick short sentences and was a social butterfly; she preferred her time alone and in-depth conversations. Though they grew up several miles away in different cultures and religions, yet they had a lot of similarities – the biggest being respect for every culture and religion.
Long distances are tough but the two continued gracefully even when Vijay was working in Boston around 2001. When he proposed to her from seven seas across, Parul, an ambitious lady, accepted on one condition: she’d work post marriage. Since his L1 visa didn’t allow spouses to work, he decided to head back to India, but destiny brought him to Canada. “Before leaving the USA, I went to meet my friends, Sally and Deepak, in Montreal. Deepak told me about a job opening with Bombardier, the plane company in Montreal, and suggested that I apply. Canada allowed spouses to work. I tried and as luck would have it, I got the job!”
In the winters of 2001, Parul and Vijay finally tied the knot of eternal love – in church, court and also the Hindu way of seven vows. A month later they flew to Montreal. Two years just went by. In 2003, the couple shifted to Toronto since Parul didn’t have a background in French and she found it difficult to find work in Montreal. He shares, “Luckily, she got a job with NorthStar Research, a market research company, and I was absorbed as head of Toronto operations at SINC, a software development company with headquarters in Paris”.
Life’s full of twists and turns...
For Christmas and New year celebrations in 2003, the couple went to India and returned only to find that SINC had been sold off to a Montreal-based group and he was the only employee left in Toronto. He was shocked, “They wanted me to continue doing the good work that I did in the previous year. But with the company structure no longer there in Canada and having to team with the Paris unit to rebuild everything myself, the idea of starting on my own resurfaced. Wasn’t that all I had wanted from the beginning? Wasn’t this a signal from up there to live up to it? I juggled a lot of my inner thoughts before deciding to start Tangentia.”
With family comes strength
Starting from a one-bedroom condominium to start offering employment, was it difficult?
“When I started with Tangentia in 2003, we had to wait for Parul’s salary to pay off our bills. Adversities taught us a lot but giving up was never an option. Parul often brushes aside praise but she’s the supporting pillar behind all this. She calmly raised our kids, Diya and Rohan, while I was busy building up the business. She ensured that our house was a home, to say the least”, says Thomas.
His first client was a Walmart vendor in Canada. The destiny of the company changed in 2006, as Tangentia signed its first major deal with Sony Music for outsourced electronic data interchange (EDI) and then the customers kept coming in and the rest as they say is history. Tangentia today has customers in 30+ countries of which 13 are Fortune 500 customers including customers like Reliance Retail, Suncor, LCBO, Royal Bank, etc.
In 2017, Vijay started Tangentia Ventures to invest in companies globally especially in the India-Canada corridor and started Clean Planet in 2020. Within a year he became one of the largest manufacturers of level three hospital gowns in Canada and is a flagbearer of Made-in-Canada, green textile manufacturing.
In 2021, he and a partner, Roshan D’Silva, founder of Tripvillas, launched FOHO which is a unique blockchain-based fractional real-estate marketplace. With a successful IEO of FOHO Coin, Vijay says, “FOHO will bridge the gap between the real world and cryptocurrencies and allow for a safer, more decentralised way to invest in hard assets.”
Walking in the footsteps of his father who was a member of the Rotary and Lions Clubs, Parul and Vijay also spend a lot of time in philanthropic activities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they extended their support in both India and Canada and Vijay took the lead in Canada in starting up the Oxygen for India campaign.
The two love to spend time with their kids. Their elder child, Diya, is a student of science at McGill University, Montreal. The younger one, Rohan, is in grade 6 and loves mathematics. The children have learned from their parents and grandparents and have grown up with a tender heart and value Indian and Canadian culture equally. The parents ensure to visit and show them around India to help them know and value their roots. In 2017, the whole family went on a world trip and visited 15 countries in 30 days. The family loves playing with their Yorkshire terrier dog, binge-watching movies and singing one of their favourites being Bob Dylan’s, ‘Blowin’ in the wind’.
In Canada, for over 20 years now, having won several accolades, being recognised as the 500 fastest growing businesses in Canada for six years in a row, holding the position of president of the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce (ICCC), the board member of TiE Toronto, actively being involved with multiple local and global business organisations, he still misses the cutting-chai* of Mumbai. Indian cuisines still have his heart!
Concluding it all, he says, “I am a strong believer of serendipity. You let life take you to places and in most cases, it is better than where you were.” He is often heard quoting this to motivate the youngsters.
*tea served in glass tumbler, which is comparatively lesser in quantity and price, but just right for a rushing person. Much loved across India, famous in Mumbai.