Sharath Narayana
CEO & Co-Founder, Sanas. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorsanas.ai ↗
Sharath Keshava Narayana is the co-founder and CEO of Sanas and previously co-founded Observe.AI. He is also a venture investor backing early-stage enterprise AI companies through Carya Venture Partners.
1shows
1appearances
25statements
4resolved
2supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
Everything Sharath Narayana said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Narayana: Philippines call center talent is saturated despite double-digit industry growth
“Today, Philippines has reached its saturation point. There's not many more English speakers available in the country who can support this industry, and this industry is still growing double digits even today, right?”
Narayana: Rapid tech pace makes execution and distribution the only true moats
“Today the pace at which technology is going, it's very hard to have 12, 24, 36 month lead up in the market. Everybody has an idea, right? That whole execution of that idea will make the biggest difference. And if execution becomes your biggest moat, then your …”
Narayana: Indian founders lack storytelling and go-to-market skills compared to US founders
“US entrepreneurs are much better exposed on going to market. I think that is one thing that I see lacking the most in Indian founders. We are very strong engineers. We can be very strong product people. We are not naturally very good in storytelling. We don't …”
Narayana: Sanas raised $30M at $150M valuation while pre-product and pre-revenue
“Insight wrote a twenty million dollar check. ... So we did a thirty million round overall at a hundred and fifty million post. We were pre-product, pre-revenue”
Narayana: Enterprise $500K ACVs are easier to scale than small SMB accounts
“Getting every customer who will add half a million dollars in revenue it's much easier to scale than scaling, adding 5000 dollars, 200 dollars customers.”
Narayana: Founders win Fortune 500 deals by showing vulnerability, not scale
“I've always believed in showing yourself as a startup, show that you are vulnerable, ask for help. I think people don't understand. It's one of the most powerful ask you can do where you can go to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and say, I'm young. I'm naive. I…”
Narayana: All seven funding rounds at Observe and Sanas were preempted
“And I think across Observe and Sanus, Every single round we've raised has been a preempted round. We've never prepared a data room, prepared for a formal fundraising process, and I think this is true across almost four different rounds at Observe and three dif…”
Narayana: Contact center workforce is 10x larger than sales intelligence market
“SDR functions, people would use gong or potentially about a million to two million people, but contact center has over twenty million people, right? There's an industry, which is 10 X.”
Narayana: Observe.ai hit $20M ARR with 50 customers before SoftBank investment
“March of 2019 is when we went to market and there was this great good story when zero to almost two two to almost seven, seven to almost 18 when SoftBank came in and invested at almost a billion dollar valuation. So three years of extraordinary growth. Our ave…”
Narayana: No company had built call center speech analytics since CallMiner
“When we started Sanus and got into contact center, the last company which built a speech analytics in the call center space was CallMiner, which was two decades ago.”
Narayana: Observe.ai and Sanas hit $5M ARR purely through founder-led sales
“I don't think we had a actual go-to-market rep for the first five million at either companies, right? As founders, we went and rolled up our sleeves and sold the first five million dollars.”
Narayana: Sanas scaled from zero to $23M in revenue in 18 months
“In Sanus, we went from zero to 20 to twenty three million in 18 months.”
Narayana offered to return $30M to Insight if unsolved in 90 days
“Even with Sanus, with thirty million raised, about Eight, 10 months into that journey, we were almost questioning, can we even solve this problem? Like I've had a meeting with Insight where where we are like, hey, we'll give it another 90 days. Otherwise, I th…”
Narayana: US founders ship faster while Indian founders obsess over product sophistication
“Indian founders are a lot more obsessed about the sophistication of the product while I've seen founders in the US have the fail fast approach. They're like, hey, build a feature, see if this feature works, then build the next feature, and then finally build t…”
Narayana: Expand GTM only when customers buy the product, not the founder
“I think the first two to three years of your company journey, people are buying you, then they buy your product, right? There is a natural curve when people start buying your product, then they know that you are the founder. That's when you have to expand your…”
Narayana: Likability is the primary filter when hiring enterprise salespeople
“I have one of the biggest interviewing criteria I have to hire salespeople is I have this factor called likability. That's the first factor I look at. If the person is not likable, I won't hire them. They could be the best salespeople in the world, right?”
Narayana: Unbxd grew from under $500K to $6M+ in 18 months
“In those 18 months we went from sub half a million in revenue in India to about six plus million in revenue in the US.”
Narayana: Observe.ai raised an $8M seed out of YC before demo day
“Before demo day, we actually raised, at that time, outside Justin Khan's big round, because it was, we raised the largest seed round out of YC. An eight million seed round was the largest seed round.”
Narayana detailed his $50K angel check before assembling Sanas' $5M round
“So me and Steve who's from DN Capital wrote the first checks at Sanus. ... No, initially we just wrote a 50 K check each. But then we helped them construct a five million dollar round. And then that's when we had general catalyst, quiet capital, human capital,…”
Narayana: Observe has 300+ India staff, Sanas reaching 200
“I think Observe today has over 300 people in India. Sanus is getting up to 200 people in India.”
Narayana: Sanas has still not spent its first $30M in capital
“So we've still not spent that first thirty million even till date, right?”
Narayana: The first 50 Sanas employees were all immigrants facing bias
“Like the first 50 people in the company were all immigrants, and they all felt the challenge of bias, right?”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Sharath's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 NEON SHOWLEDGER | CEO & Co-Founder, Sanas | 1 | 25 | 50% 2/4 | full record on the Neon Show → |