Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Sourcing elite product developers in India is difficult despite massive talent pools

Saravana Kumar · Kovai $8.5m Revenue, India Bootstrapped, 3 Core SaaS Products · Aug 21, 2020 · at 15:16

Saravana Kumar, founder and CEO of Kovai.co, advises Nathan Latka on the challenges foreign founders face when attempting to hire software engineers in India.

0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think in India, the challenge is the quantity is there. If you want, say for example, tomorrow you want 1000 developers, you can go to one of those TCS and Wipros and say, tomorrow I need a team of 1000 developers. It's not a problem. But if you wanted to get the top five in the, for you to execute and run the product, finding that particular talent will be difficult.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Saravana Kumar

Opinion
Founders cannot build a bootstrapped software company in Western Europe
“You cannot build a product company, especially a bootstrap company from London or anywhere from Europe.”
Saravana Kumar Aug 21, 2020 ▶ 13:18 Kovai $8.5m Revenue, India Bootstrapped, 3 Core SaaS Products
Insight
Kumar: Founders should avoid flat organizations and build hierarchy quickly
“And don't build a flat structure. Because what typically happens is when you're in the early stages, like, you know, 10 people, 20 people, et cetera, you try to build a flat structure, right? Everybody reports to you. And it's fine. But once you start scaling,…”
Saravana Kumar Jun 9, 2023 ▶ 10:56 12 Founders disciplines that helped to bootstrap to $10m+ ARR
Insight
Kumar: Building multiple $20M-$30M products is easier than one $100M business
“It's harder to build a single product, hundred million dollar business. Then, you know, like, it's fairly, comparatively easy to build, like, a 20, thirty million dollar businesses.”
Saravana Kumar Jun 9, 2023 ▶ 13:34 12 Founders disciplines that helped to bootstrap to $10m+ ARR
Insight
Indian software engineers value cash and bonuses over startup equity
“I think it would be very difficult to convince on a equity basis because, you know, it's a paper money for them, right? Like I think it's you will be better off paying them a good salary and maybe some kind of a bonus rather than explaining equity”
Saravana Kumar Aug 21, 2020 ▶ 17:04 Kovai $8.5m Revenue, India Bootstrapped, 3 Core SaaS Products
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2030
Kumar: Kovai.co targets $100M run rate by 2030
“And the objective for us is to build a hundred million dollar run rate business by 2030, like, sooner, sooner if possible.”
Saravana Kumar Jun 9, 2023 ▶ 2:51 12 Founders disciplines that helped to bootstrap to $10m+ ARR
Disclosure
Kumar personally approves invoice payments at Kovai.co to ensure financial visibility
“Still I approve a lot of invoices. Okay, there are, you know, like, it goes through workflow, the people put through everything, but the final approval, the money that going out of the bank is actually, you know, like, I control it. I won't control it in the s…”
Saravana Kumar Jun 9, 2023 ▶ 14:05 12 Founders disciplines that helped to bootstrap to $10m+ ARR
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 2,600 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.