The story of Tulleeho has been told often enough, so to repeat it would be to bore a lot of people to death, but one has to think of the newcomers to this space. So here we go again. It's a trifle long, but please read on :

It was a July afternoon in pre-millenium Delhi when a group of people (founder 1 and wife, founder 2 and brother) congregated around a table to shoot the breeze and quaff a few. After a few pegs of Bushmills Old Irish the scene kind of palled. The monotony (and Delhi afternoons can be monotonous like hell) got to us and the urge came upon us to be elsewhere and do something else.

T'ho was therefore the result of crushing boredom combined with Old Irish booze-a devastating combination as it turned out. Wife and Brother had other things to do (Placement Consulting and Java Beans for the curious), and so the task devolved on f1 and f2. And so the duo chugged on, doing day job by day and furthering the cause by night.

Once we had a reasonable number of pubs reviewed, we hired an Assamese hacker called Babul Gogoi, who most nights can be found hanging out at his headquarters, a cyber café in Delhi. Babul put his limited knowledge of html along with his massive knowledge of hacking to good use ( he can even send you a program which makes viruses - mail him at xguy2k@yahoo.com ) to come up with tulleeho.com version 1.

Down the line, as the daily exertions of handling html became too onerous combined with selling salted snacks (f2) and reengineering business processes (f1), Krishna Nagaraj came on board, along with his dog Bihu (named for the Assamese festival season). Bihu (pictured below) shall go down in the history of KCI as the oldest Pointer to win a dog show.

The site was self financed to begin with and was initially borne out of our desire like most Miss India contestants to make this world a better place, albeit in our own less charitable way. Our running out of money combined with our hyperactive community (digressing for a while, where would be today, if it wasn't for the likes of grandnunkim, benshaver, pissedrunk and dougie barrett - read about them in our wall of shame along with others) and the wish to pursue global domination all came together in a heady mix. We were ripe for an Angel to swoop down upon, which is when Passionfund (www.passionfund.com) an investment fund, ably chaired by Mahesh Murthy and Arun Pai came in.

Mahesh is the guy on the left and Arun on the right. They used to be mostly found in their global headquarters, which is Mumbai's 'Just around the corner' restaurant, where they used to sip ice tea and discuss global domination with other like minded people (us). Since we last heard they've been kicked out for non-payment of ice tea bills.

Tulleeho has been a going concern since October 2000 (yup, we are the mad buggers who jumped in after it had been proven that there was a pot of shit at the end of the dotcom rainbow and not a pot of gold).

We’ve been told that if we mention the countless academic degrees we possess between the 3 of us (Venky aka P Venkatesh, Chanty aka V Achanta and Krishna aka K Nagaraj) combined with the previous jobs we were holding, we would impress the impressionable. Hence we shall desist. To get to know more about that you will have to be someone who is willing to shower us with the coin of the realm (advertisers, sponsors, investors, acquirers and other such low life).

A happier, faster, better, brighter and more environmentally conscious Tulleeho has been sprung on an unsuspecting populace. Along the way, we've unleashed lawyers, set up companies, registered trade marks, hired peope, haggled with cable guys, fought with telephone linesmen, got customers, answered stupid questions about how we're going to make money (It's easy: we’re going to become Amway distributors) and generally had a sleepless time of it. Join us on this trip, and it can only become stranger.