This Founder Turned Colors Into an million dollar exit - Ep 66
episode
Funds and Founders: Untold Journeys Behind Their Breakthroughs
1h 3m
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 11 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Why did Ganesh decide to start a new startup after a successful exit?
How do you first handle that growth? How long from a year like that MVP stage to your first paying customer? If there is one thing if I could have done
Differently. We spent almost like solid two years. Why go into the grind again? Why go into entrepreneurship? Uh long story short, they really loved the concept of what we had built as an application for this university. At some point you'd run out of savings and you maybe had to consider we said we are not gonna let go anybody.
I think that was the biggest mistake I we did.
Hey guys, welcome back to Funds and Founders. Today we have on Ganesh. We first met at I wanna say the Fundai event. Um that's right. And then we stayed in touch and then you're part of the Austin Indian community. Yeah. We chatted quite a bit about different ideas. Yeah. One thing I'd like to say is my understanding is you've been in tech for a while, you had a successful exit with a startup, and then you went into stealth mode again. to try to build a new AI SaaS company.
What sparked the idea to build an AI‑driven assessment platform?
Yeah. Why why go into the grind again? Why go into entrepreneurship? Again.
Good good question. Actually I didn't have any plans. I didn't have any plans to even start any venture. It was just that I saw some needs, I saw there is an ability for the people that I know can do better, not me. Uh and if we can work together maybe we can solve a problem. That's how it started. So the second time it's purely based on the aspect of the shift that we saw with the Gen AI stuff. We were fortunate enough to work from GPT one onwards, so we had seen the transition happening. But as soon as three and three point five came into play, that was like a huge transition from what I'd seen earlier. So that was like the aha moment for us saying that hey, if this can solve the problem of unstructured data to give insights which seems easy to believe in, maybe it's hallucinating, that's okay.
But how do you use this technology to change the way people communicate with each other? Right. So that kind of drove us to start thinking, hey, do we then look for ideas? Where do we look for ideas? And we didn't want to just jump into it. So we're just dabbling with multiple ideas and we kind of have honed into a place where it's an extremely crowded space. But we have seen talking to a lot of stakeholders, it's a solution they don't see a solution to the problem that has been around for more than at least a decade if not more. And what we are s trying to do here is if we can take a holistic approach with this new technology built from the ground up, can we solve that problem? So
All right. So going back to your journey, um, I think if I have my facts correct, you were at Cisco for quite a while. Yeah. And then you started your own company. Yeah. And let's talk about that journey of how do you go from seasoned tech employee to I have an idea and just briefly tell us what the company was, what were you doing there?
Actually that's a good question. So primarily at Cisco we I did multiple roles from hardware, then I moved into the software group. Uh was fortunate enough to participate in a h big transformation effort effort where we had to completely change the way we do the business and uh we were moving from waterfall to agile and in that process we had seen huge Problems with respect to just people aligning to a common vision. So there were different business units that pretty much came into a single business unit. Everyone had a different working style. Different people from San Jose, California, sorry, North Carolina. We had people from China, with from India, from Europe. Everyone had a different way of dealing with each other.
But when you put them together and say that hey this is the place we want to go, everyone ends up doing what they want. So we ended up having a lot of issues with it, the attrition, transformation, people leaving very quickly in the process, a lot of frustration. And that kind of prompted us to do a lot of employee engagement activities. So we did hackathons, we did activities which are related to basically looking at different
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why did Ganesh decide to start a new startup after a successful exit?
0:00–1:08
2
What sparked the idea to build an AI‑driven assessment platform?
1:08–5:18
3
How did the early company culture shape the product’s direction?
5:18–8:25
4
What was the biggest mistake Ganesh made by building before validating?
8:25–15:29
5
How did Ganesh land enterprise customers like TCS, Byju’s and KPMG?
15:29–32:31
6
What drove the rapid growth in the QSR (Quick‑Service Restaurant) market?
32:31–36:55
7
How did COVID‑19 wipe out 85% of revenue and what was the response?
36:55–57:51
8
What lessons did Ganesh learn after the exit and why is he building a new stealth AI sales company?
57:51–1:03:34
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Funds and Founders: Untold Journeys Behind Their Breakthroughs
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