Vishal Thapar learned early in his career about the importance of back-up plans.
It was the early 2000s, and the future entrepreneur and co-founder of Boston Chai Party had recently graduated from Punjab Engineering College in India with a degree in computer science. Life was pretty good: he’d been offered a job by an American company based in Pittsburgh, and was planning to move to the U.S. as soon as the company sent him a plane ticket. Visa in hand and farewells said, Thapar waited…and waited. “And then, the company just disappeared,” he tells me. The dotcom bubble had burst; the company had gone under. With nowhere to turn, Thapar used one of his back-up plans: a master’s degree at the University of Connecticut.
Education was, after all, extremely important to him and his family. Thapar grew up lower-middle class in New Delhi, a city in which abject poverty lives next to affluence. His father was an engineer for the Indian railway and his mother was a professor, and both taught Thapar and his siblings the importance of education as a way to become successful. Thapar developed a fascination with the United States from watching old American movies on his family’s black-and-white television, and decided he wanted to live there one day.
He was accepted to the University of Connecticut, his father taking a reverse mortgage on their house in India to pay for one semester. Needing a way to pay for the rest of the program, it was time for back-up plan number 2. He started networking and advertising his resume, and his entrepreneurial spirit began to grow. He met someone at the UConn Division of Health and Human Services and offered to improve their website, as well as the websites for the connected schools (the websites were, Thapar tells me politely, “not at par with the times”). It worked. Thapar made a beta version of one of the websites over his first winter break and presented it to the deans of the schools, who promptly hired him to develop all of them over the next year and a half.
This was Thapar’s first of many entrepreneurial ventures. During his PhD, also at the University of Connecticut, he worked with his advisor on a blogging company. When he came to Boston, he got into the education technology industry. But his passion – and his retirement plan – is chai. And if you’re American and you think you know what chai is because you’ve had a latte at Starbucks, you are very wrong. But you’re also in for a treat when you taste the real thing.
Thapar started making chai – black tea, milk, water, and masala (which means spices in Hindi) – for his mother in India, and like coffee for Americans, it was a staple of his diet as a young man. When he came to the U.S., he noticed chai latte on the menu of a Starbucks and ordered it. Thapar describes the experience as an exciting wait, followed by the most disappointing first sip of his life. The sugary, sludgy drink was nothing like what he knew. It wasn’t chai. This dearth of good chai led to the founding of Boston Chai Party many years later.
Thapar founded the company with Rushil Desai, whom he’d met at Massachusetts General Hospital. Thapar was working and teaching in bioinformatics at MGH, and Desai was planning to apply to medical school. The two friends reminisced about chai back home and commiserated over the difficulty of finding good chai in the States, and they decided to do something about it. The business model was simple: they would source good ingredients from an Indian farm, make chai in their inimitable way, and distribute it at farmers’ markets. Thapar loved the environment of the farmers’ markets, interacting with customers. It was the same reason he loved teaching – the direct and impactful relationships he formed with other people. Looming in the background, unfortunately, was the coronavirus pandemic.
COVID made Thapar change directions. Teaching bioinformatics to medical students and biologists on Zoom was not the most enjoyable experience. Gone was the direct interaction with students, replaced by screens on mute. Gone were the farmers’ markets through which Boston Chai Party had initially grown. Thapar decided to leave academia to work in the pharmaceutical industry, and he also changed the business model. Boston Chai Party started to focus more on the chai concentrate and chai-making set that they had developed in the past and could ship directly to consumers. They now ship everywhere in the United States, using the same ethically-sourced ingredients from the farm Thapar visits on his yearly trips to India.
Recently, Thapar attended a pitch contest for the Asian Business Training and Mentorship program through the Asian American Civic Association and won audience favorite (and $500). He has plenty of ideas for the future of Boston Chai Party, with new flavors and a return to farmers’ markets and catering now that the pandemic is on the wane. And Thapar himself never seems to slow down, boiling over with passion. He’s an inspiring figure: a husband and father, scientist, teacher, and serial entrepreneur who counsels people to start businesses that are personal to them. And to have a back-up plan, always.
This philosophy forms his advice for new entrepreneurs. “Don’t quit your day job, man,” he says, because you never know what might happen when you start a company. But you should start one anyway (preferably before you have children). “What are you waiting for?” he asks me. “It’s the easiest thing to start a business…it’s so satisfying to have the confidence that I have a back-up plan. That was one of the reasons I started all of this, because I failed so early in my life.” We chai lovers are lucky Thapar had a back-up plan. As for me, I find myself wondering why I haven’t started a business yet. But it’s teatime now, and I’ll have to think about it over a good cup of chai.
You can order from Boston Chai Party at https://bostonchaiparty.com/.
