Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This was what year?

Varun Singh: This was 2009.

Sramana Mitra: What is ScaleArc?

Varun Singh: ScaleArc is a database traffic management company. We provide a software that runs on top of MySQL and provide users the ability to run on a distributed data source without having to understand the application.

Sramana Mitra: You started this in India?

Varun Singh: Yes. We knew that this was going to be a global problem because all of our learning on how to go ahead and scale things were from other people who have done it globally – learn how to go ahead and do Hadoop and data aggregation from Google News. We built a multi-lingual crawling system before Google did. Google didn’t have multi-lingual at that point in time. They only had English.

Sramana Mitra: So you had a lot of flexibility and freedom to build stuff in this lab.

Varun Singh: As far as building products is concerned, yes.

Sramana Mitra: But that’s still not building products.

Varun Singh: It was building products to a certain extent. We were building things that were going to be delivered either as complete products within the company or even to external people. MTV was truly an external team to the network. MTV belonged to Network 18, but the team for Roadies was a third party production company. We had to build the website for them and deliver it to them as well as their customers. We built the entire thing end-to-end.

Sramana Mitra: Selling software is a very different ball game.

Varun Singh: Yes. Building products and selling software are, by themselves, very different things.

Sramana Mitra: Even building software to sell into a market is a very different ball game.

Varun Singh: Yes, that’s the learning I had only at ScaleArc.

Sramana Mitra: When you said you launched ScaleArc in 2009, what does that mean? Were you self-financing this? What was the parameter around ScaleArc?

Varun Singh: ScaleArc is one of those companies that couldn’t have possibly been bootstrapped. The technology problem that we were trying to solve was a fairly large problem to solve.

Sramana Mitra: Almost everything can be bootstrapped.

Varun Singh: It took about six months to go ahead and do a proof of concept with seven engineers.

Sramana Mitra: If you read my “Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Destruction”, it opens with a case study called Finisar, I think. Finisar was an optical networking system company. This company was bootstrapped until the mezzanine round, right before IPO.

Varun Singh: They had second- or third-time founders?

Sramana Mitra: No, actually. They’re first-time founders.

Varun Singh: Did the founders already have a lot of money through exit?

Sramana Mitra: No.

Varun Singh: India is generally not an evolved space from a financing standpoint.

Sramana Mitra: That’s why people bootstrap. In India, people mostly bootstrap. Anyway, you didn’t bootstrap. Tell me more about how you got financing to do this.

Varun Singh: I built enough of a reputation at Network 18 and working with a lot of vendors. NetMagic is one of the largest data center companies in India. Sharad was a good friend of mine. Sharad introduced me to Nexus. It was an entrepreneur to an entrepreneur introduction to the right VC. We had a conversation and got along. He did his background check and figured out if he should or should not work with me. We had validated all of the idea out by talking to potential customers.

Sramana Mitra: Who were the potential customers that you talked to?

Varun Singh: We had talked to Yatra.com, which is one of the travel websites in India and we talked to a few other companies that were, at that point in time, trying to get funded by Nexus. It was quite clear there was going to be a two-year roadmap to even go ahead and deliver the first version of the product. It was going to be engineering-heavy. It took us time to build our prototype. After six months of work, we had to drop the entire prototype on the floor and rebuild it completely.

Sramana Mitra: You architected the product?

Varun Singh: Yes, me and my co-founder. My co-founder was my VP Engineering at Network 18.

Sramana Mitra: What’s his background? Did he have  areal engineering background?

Varun Singh: Yes, he’s an application developer. He’s been an engineer in multiple companies. He built the first generation Money Control platform and he’s the one who did a lot of the work that I suggested. He’s someone who really wants to stick with one company for a long time.

Sramana Mitra: But he had experience of managing large-scale projects.

Varun Singh: Yes.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc
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