Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Very good. It’s wonderful to see that you pulled a hardcore technology product company out of India.

Varun Singh: You asked me earlier where the engineers were from. They’re from Veritas and IBM.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a good place to hire from. That’s a good thing about India right now. There are actually several generation of highly trained engineers who have worked at good companies building good products. There’s a lot of rich stuff if you can make them take risks.

Let me ask you a question, which is in the contemporary psyche. This whole notion of going to college. You didn’t go to college. You learned everything that you needed to learn in a very rich way. At the end of the day, you learned more by doing things hands-on than by studying theory. There’s no disagreement there.

US colleges costs a lot of money. If you have to pay through a high-end US education, it is a very expensive affair.

Varun Singh: I am not against college in any way. I think there are different people who are suited to different tracks. If you are a self-learner and someone who can go ahead and say, “I’m going to learn this.” and stick by it rather than having to be pushed into it, you can learn yourself. You can go ahead and self-pace it however you want.

If you’re not that and you need someone guiding you through that, it’s better to go to college. My brother went to college. It turned out to be better for him to do that. There’s a lot of people who’ve asked me about that. I always tell them, “It’s a decision you’ve got to take based on who you are.”

Sramana Mitra: It was much harder to do that before the Internet. It’s hard to navigate to that extent. I started my first company in 1994 while I was a grad student at MIT. You couldn’t learn all this stuff on your own because there was none of this large network available. Now, it’s a different story. If you’re self-motivated, you can learn tremendously on your own.

Varun Singh: That’s the thing. That’s the reason why I began with BBS.

Sramana Mitra: It’s like very early generation Internet kind of experience.

Varun Singh: It was even better than that in some ways. Imagine the kind of people who ended up doing BBSs. They were the ones who were at the forefront of a lot of this stuff. You’re getting a curated set of knowledge from someone who’s gone ahead and read all of that stuff.

Sramana Mitra: You’re also clearly an extremely self-motivated person and complete self-learner. That’s one thing I see even in 1M/1M. My assumption was if you’ve chosen to be an entrepreneur, you’re declaring already that you’re a self-learner. That’s not necessarily true. There’s a big difference between declaring you want to be an entrepreneur and doing the heavy lifting required to be a successful entrepreneur.

Varun Singh: I think what I’ve seen in a lot of cases is entrepreneurs who are doing it in a well-understood category and are doing it in a domain that they already understand based on their previous jobs can still get away at that at times because they have been guided enough to be able to do that. I have never built networking software. I have never coded in C. I still never coded in C even at ScaleArc. I had to hire people who could code in C. That was a new experience. If you can’t go ahead and adopt and you’re not a self-learner, don’t pick up problems that are unique.

Sramana Mitra: I would go even further to say, “Don’t be an entrepreneur.” If you’re not a self-learner, it’s hard to be an entrepreneur.

Varun Singh: I have seen entrepreneurs who are not great self-learners, but they have still done very well for themselves. I wouldn’t really go as hard as to say that because I’ve seen a few who have the ability to attract the right people at the right time. They can augment their life with that.

Sramana Mitra: They know their blind spots and they fill those blind spots with people.

Varun Singh: Do you have the ability to ramp up at the same speed as the ability to hire?

Sramana Mitra: You will never have that. However, bulk of entrepreneurship that happens in the world is bootstrapped entrepreneurship. You don’t have money to hire when you’re bootstrapping.

Varun Singh: For bootstrap entrepreneurs, yes.

Sramana Mitra: Over 99% of the entrepreneurship in the world, that’s why that perspective is so alive and critical right now in the community that we are working with. Freshdesk in India raised $90 million. It’s a lot of money. In some sense, it could be too much money.

I am delighted to hear your story. Very nice to meet you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc
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