The Exchanges

Q Three years. But what's been the, the motivation? The first company made you financially retired, right? So what's been the motivation to, again, build companies one after the other?

A I think, ah, I think you always come across a nice problem. You always come across good founders who'll bring you good ideas, and then you start falling in love with that idea. And, ah, you start, ah, if the problem is meaningful, I think it doesn't matter how much money you're in a bank. If you think it's worth solving, Uh, I think you jump onto it. And when I'm a founder, I'm not really thinking about the money that we have in the bank. I'm just thinking what I'm building. I operate like a scrap. Like, uh, I will travel economy class. If it's like, I will just bring like a first vacation, of course, I'll do whatever it takes. Uh, you know, splurge ourselves and go, go to four seasons or whatever. But if it's, uh, when I'm in a startup for company, I would just be like as crappy as I was 24 years old. I just want to feel like that I'm a hungry startup founder and So that keeps us going.

AI assessment note: “if the problem is meaningful, I think it doesn't matter how much money”

Q And go to market is, is always a question for founders. How you maybe tell about how you solving that at StatGen?

A So, ah, initially for every startup, ah, the discussion start with understanding the pain point of a customer, that are you solving a pain, and because of that you, ah, I would say founders and your head of product is always involved in the initial discussions. It's always a founder-led sales. You always have to go talk to the people and see whether they are resonating with the problem that you're solving at scale. Um, so the initial go-to-market is always that you talk to those people who have early belief in your product, and they, they trust you that you can develop, and this is where maybe some bit of benefit that we get as repeat founders, because the trust is sort of implicit, because they know that they built it, so, you know, we're not wasting their time. Um, And then you use, then you try to get a pattern out of those first 10 customers, and say, okay, this is a pattern, this is a common problem, can we, can we not scale? So the go-to-market, then you build around that common problem, and say, okay, who's your buyer? Who's, firstly, you say, go buy geography, okay, it's US. Then you say, within US, do you want to target the large enterprise, mid-enterprise, small enterprise, like, what's your go-to-market? Then within them, who's a persona, who's a buyer, who's going to buy? Sometimes, The buyer is not the user of your product, and that's the hardest sale. By the way, …

AI assessment note: “So now if you have a user, then you get a user adoption motion”

Q So, ah, in these journeys, right, the previous six journeys, how many hard pivots would you have done?

A So, ah, pivots, ah, so no, I wouldn't, I, depend on what you mean by hard pivot, so we never shifted industry, so we always had a thesis. We have always, always done, I, I don't recall any startup where we have not done a GTM pivot, and GTM pivot we, because I always feel that we have figured on day one, because we have very strong theses and everything, and every time I go to a journey, I say, wait a sec, we have not figured out a few things. So GTM pivot we have been doing, ah, and what I, I'll give you, like, good example here. We talked about this company, which you just talked about, people running Um, in the cloud, their workloads. Uh, this is a company called Equitix again. The, the started right before that. Which is a very good example because you did tell me, Sachin, but weren't people already in cloud? And I said, yeah, they were, but they were not moving as fast, and they were just doing lift and shift. And the cloud-native applications were just getting built. So yes, ah, while it looked pretty lucrative to do shift left CSPM, and that time I said, yes, we were the only ones. Um, we raised the money on that concept because VCs always want to invest in future. We realized that customers are not ready because they're already running their applications on cloud. So we had no option but to go to right. And solve that problem. If you didn't solve that problem, then they…

AI assessment note: “I don't recall any startup where we have not done a GTM pivot”

Q And can you describe some of the low moments during these previous five companies?

A I mean, all five companies have had a low moment. Even this one always will have low moment. You're always, as a founder, you're always doubting your idea. You always want to do more than what you can do. Um, and I would, if I have to pick up one low moment would always be that I sometimes feel that I go to a customer and I think there's a perfect fit for what we're building. We explain to them our use cases, and the pain points that they have, ah, we think they're a good fit, and we realize that they are not engaging with us, and I think you just start doubting whether we didn't do well, whether, um, ah, we, ah, whether our messaging is not resonating, whether it's a product. So, I think those are the biggest low moments for any founder, when you think you're building, building something meaningful, and you're not getting a response they're looking for.

AI assessment note: “if I have to pick up one low moment would always be”

Q Does humility play a role in, in your listening skills and observation?

A It does. I think it, it helps people to build trust and, ah, and, ah, friendship with me because, ah, we, Uh, when we start this journey, we are starting the journey as if this is my first startup. I mean, if I don't have that passion and that, uh, uh, drive, I think I'm failing my team. And I think the reason I've taken it very seriously because when they are trusting me, they, some people do join your mission because they believe in your mission, but I think early, uh, stage hires are really believing in the founders. And even investors, they do not know what you're going to build. They know you may pivot. Pivot market fit is not there. So they're, they're really investing in you. So I think it's important that you are grounded, ah, and feel like a first time founder, because then you're, then you are, you're not really making up anything. You are just your natural self.

AI assessment note: “It does. I think it, it helps people to build trust”

Q What do you mean by DevOps of becoming a bottleneck? If you have to explain.

A So, so, so technically speaking, the idea of, ah, StackGen is sort of stemming out from a learning from Acurex, right? So, so I'll explain the bottleneck in the context of Acurex. So again, Acurex for the community sold little, little less than two hundred million dollar to Tenable, right? Ah, it was, I think for the investors, it was the highest return because, ah, I mean, literally a CDJ investor had a short term capital gain. For, for six X or seven X of their investments, because, you know, suddenly, ah, you know, ah, every time, time they exit, because that time is COVID and the securities, you know, there was a lot of money in the market. The problem that you're solving in Accurix, again, just to remind, just as a reminder was that, ah, the cloud is basically built on the left using Terraform and IAC infrastructure as code. Programmatically to deploy your application on cloud. But when you do that, someone is building the application in Java or Python, ah, then the, ah, DevOps person will come and write the code in Terraform or whatever, and then they'll deploy the application. So there's a handoff there. And then the security comes in and says, wait a sec, you can't do that because, you know, we need to make sure you're not vulnerable, you're secure by default, you are having the policies, governance, compliance, and everything. So, We said, we decided, can this problem …

AI assessment note: “So there's a handoff there. And then the security comes in and says, wait a sec”