Raju Gulabani, Co-founder, President and CEO, TeleSym

Twenty-five years ago, Raju Gulabani decided to start his own company. But it wasn't until three years ago that he transformed that dream into reality. “When I was growing up in India, I decided that my big calling in life was to start a company,” he said. “At that point, though, I didn't feel I had the skills to be successful.”

After coming to the U.S. in the early 1980s, Gulabani worked with a number of companies as an engineer, finally ending up leading several initiatives as a self-directed worker at Microsoft. It wasn't until April 2000 that he decided it was time to take the plunge. “I was young enough to have the energy, smart enough to do it and, thanks to Microsoft, rich enough to take the risk,” he said.

The only problem was the company's product: There wasn't one. So Gulabani, along with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Karl Denninghoff, examined the opportunities and concluded that a merger of voice over IP and Wi-Fi was in the offing. A month later, TeleSym was born.

The company's SymPhone software allows users to transform PDAs into VoIP-enabled mobile phones, allowing enterprise users to rely on one device for both voice and data. While this sounds suspiciously like a job for data-enabled handsets, PDAs have a distinct user interface advantage over mobile phones, Gulabani said. “When we looked at [wireless data], we said we just couldn't get excited about a little screen and keypad to do e-mail. That's not the future.”

So far, more than 200 enterprises are testing the SymPhone in various trials. And in December, TeleSym landed an investment from Intel Capital, bringing its total funding to $5.5 million — not bad for a company that's trying to get off the ground during one of the worst droughts in the history of telecom.

But in hindsight, would Gulabani have started TeleSym if he had known where the economy was heading? “Yes,” he said, adding that more goes into deciding to start a company than the direction of the stock market.

Besides, after decades of waiting, he's not about to let a little thing like the economy get in his way.