Bootstrapping Using Services to a Fabulous Exit from Ohio: Gathi Analytics CEO Vamsi Kora (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay with Nationwide?

Vamsi Kora: I stayed until 2007. I became a full-time employee in an initial management position. Then in 2007, I moved across town to join JP Morgan. JP Morgan bought Bank One. I kept on growing in my career rapidly. I felt that my two interests are enterprise data and building impactful global teams. That aligned very well with the opportunities I got at Chase. That helped me hone my skills.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay there?

Vamsi Kora: Ten years.

Sramana Mitra: So that brings us up to 2017. What happens next?

Vamsi Kora: In between, we went to India for about three years to help set up their Hyderabad operations. I wanted to go back and stay with my parents. We did this expat kind of thing. I came back in 2014. In 2017, I kept on drawing a few things in my head and showed it to a couple of my close friends. This may not be the perfect way to start a company.

I felt I was sitting in the middle of three core tenets. One is, there were a number of engineers who worked with me who were more than happy to join me. There’s enough trust and loyalty there. The second one is, I have a number of friends who are resourceful where I could raise funds from. The third one is, I have access to the marketplace where we want to play, which is delivering highly-scalable and highly-dependable data assets to internal customers of large corporations.

Sramana Mitra: Let me point out one thing. What you talked about is access to marketplace, and not access to expertise.

Vamsi Kora: I became friends with a number of executives I worked for. They are more than happy if I approach them. I’ll be able to get my first few accounts through them.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a very good place to start.

Vamsi Kora: It was always in my head that if I don’t do it, who else can pull off something like this. For entrepreneurs, one or two of these are ambiguous and they still make the jump. That’s the initial thinking and strategy. Almost every one of them came through even better than I anticipated.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do? Did you start as a services company?

Vamsi Kora: We started with the idea of doing both – a product build and providing services using the platform. We found it very exciting. By the time we reached the middle of 2018, I felt very strongly that unless I get rid of the product idea from my head, we’ll not be able to scale. None of the leadership team had experience building products and commercializing them on a large scale, especially when you’re dealing with having to sell them to enterprise customers.

Very few people can do it unless you have institutional backing to open the doors. We also saw a number of ideas that we had that so many other corporations are solving. When an enterprise customer signs up for cloud and if they already have the solution built-in, it’s difficult for someone else to come in. We decided that this is not going to work.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services to a Fabulous Exit from Ohio: Gathi Analytics CEO Vamsi Kora
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