There are many reasons why a founder is motivated to start out on the entrepreneurial journey. For some, it’s the desire to solve a problem they’ve encountered in their professional experience, for others it’s the thrill of building something from the ground up. Read on to find out what inspired some of our fantastic portfolio company founders to start their own companies.
Living in Silicon Valley is an inspiration in itself. We're surrounded by examples of the incredible things entrepreneurs achieve by starting companies that transform every aspect of how we live and work. I've been fortunate to experience this firsthand when I was working at my previous company, Aruba.
My family owned a brick-and-mortar store in India when I was growing up, so I experienced firsthand how hard it can be for a business to adapt to changing technology and consumer behavior.
I wanted to create a way that any business, whether it is an e-commerce business, a physical store, or an omnichannel enterprise, can use the power of the internet to their advantage and level the playing field. And Bungee Tech does just that, providing businesses with a way to get the competitive intelligence needed to drive price, promotion, assortment, and content-related business decisions. This ultimately delivers a better end-customer experience.
For most of my career, I've been a customer success guy. I started as a customer success manager at a company called Omniture in 2003. I helped build a global customer success team focused on their strategic enterprise accounts. I was fortunate to be part of Omniture’s amazing journey from startup to IPO. The company was acquired by Adobe, and I continued on that journey with Adobe to grow and scale the global customer success team.
However, we never had solutions that were tailored specifically for our needs during my journey with Omniture & Adobe, so we were forced to cobble together processes, workflows, insights, analytics, and dashboards across many solutions. After 10 years at Omniture and Adobe, I decided to start ClientSuccess to build solutions in the customer success space and really chase a passion and solve the pain-points that I experienced as a customer success professional and leader.
The Privacera journey started with my earlier startup, XA Secure, where we solved a challenge of access control and governance in big data environments. Hortonworks acquired XA Secure, and the product turned it into a project called Apache Ranger. While at Hortonworks, I spent a lot of time with large enterprises to establish governance and security in their big data environments. Enterprises were constantly looking to extend the governance capabilities to all of their data, not just big data. These conversations led to the genesis of Privacera, where we leveraged the incredible work done in the Apache Ranger community to solve broader data governance challenges for all companies.
I am inspired by the desire to move the needle every single day and not waste time in analysis paralysis. I firmly believe that only startups can build nimbly and with precision, solutions to specific problems in the market. Larger companies either do not have the micro-vision to perceive or the ability or motivation to understand these problems. Startups with skilled teams can see and focus on the problem and solve the challenges with agility and openness (relative to the ecosystem), without the burden of large-company biases and bindings (mind and physical). The pride that comes from building value for customers gives you a high, felt only through the experience of creating products that customers want. Our customers' passion for using our products is evident when we talk to them and inspires our team to do more.
A huge motivator for me is the fact that I can run things to serve both employees and customers in the best way possible. When my team feels like they improved their life by coming and joining me, it's a tremendous unmatched feeling that I thrive on and makes me want to be successful for them.
After Replay Technologies (the first company I founded) was acquired, I worked for a very large corporation for a few months, but I realized that my entrepreneurial soul is stronger than my corporate soul. I decided that I needed to do what my instinct and brain were guiding me towards, which was creating another startup, that startup was Blink.