4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So you had Naren on your Board for a while?

Kashyap Deorah: Yes. I said, “I’ll go with Nexus if you’re on the Board. Would you have the bandwidth for me?” He said, “I have all the time in the world.” He actually lived that. I never felt short of time with him. He would make time with me.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the business. You had early customers and validation. You had a significant financing round. What were the next major milestones?

Kashyap Deorah: There was a little bit of arrogance in me this time. It was the most humbling journey of my life. I learned more with the HyperTrack failure than I did with my 16 years of entrepreneurship before that. The market for what we had built was there right off the bat. The technology exploded. When we hit a certain scale, the tech stack didn’t hold up. It’s a good problem to have.

We realized that we were a bunch of application software people in the room. I had never built an infrastructure software company before. That was the case amongst the engineers as well. They had never built infrastructure software. We ended up building a monolith for the logistics OS that other applications were sitting on. To rearchitect that to microservices, we failed multiple times at that.

Sramana Mitra: Did you bring in expertise?

Kashyap Deorah: The first instinct was this is an architecture failure. I’m in New Delhi. All my previous companies were either in Mumbai or Silicon Valley. At that time, I was clear that the engineering leader has to be in the same room. I was unable to find the right tech leader in Delhi.

One of my friends from Bangalore spent a month with us. He was the architect SWAT that came in. He unraveled it for us. We thought that it’ll take a quarter or two. We couldn’t bring in new customers then. We were off the market for three years. Throughout these three years, we didn’t even know how far we were. It took three attempts by three different teams.

Eventually, I moved back to the Bay Area. I was expecting that the tech would be ready. I started rebuilding a tech team in the Bay Area. That’s when I met systems and infrastructure guys who have done it at scale.

Sramana Mitra: Did you need more money?

Kashyap Deorah: One thing we did right was we were financially responsible. We kept it really lean. We rebuilt the whole thing in 2019. By end of 2019, I still have half of the money left in the bank. March 2020 was the release. All the customers from the old product had migrated. We have lived to see another day.

We all know what happened next. It was all gloom and doom. It was a very stressful time, but it was one of the best things that happened for the business. From April 2020 to now, our trajectory was just phenomenal organic revenue and customer growth. We are out of the ditch enjoying that product-market fit.

Sramana Mitra: You raised some more money recently?

Kashyap Deorah: It’s unannounced. There’s something exciting happening as we speak.

Sramana Mitra: Congratulations. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : 4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack
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