From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 1)

Manish discusses his various experiences with customer validation in great depth, as well as his journey from being a hard-core developer geek to a successful entrepreneur CEO who has raised multiple rounds of venture capital from top firms including Sequoia Capital.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Manish Jethani: I come from a very small town in India called Shahdol. Most people have never heard of it. When I was graduating, there used to be just one English-medium school. That was only until class 10. There used to be just two trains. It was a fairly small town. I was the first person to get admission into IIT from my town.

Sramana Mitra: Which IIT was this?

Manish Jethani: I went to IIT Roorkee. Before the internet, it used to be even harder to access information staying in such a small town.

Sramana Mitra: When you graduated, what did you do?

Manish Jethani: When I got inside IIT, I wanted to get the highest-paying job. That was my focus. Call it poetic justice or paradox. I was about to graduate and then I decided that I don’t want to take a job. This was in 2007 when our placements were going on. I figured out that I would not enjoy being in a very structured system.

During my four years, I figured out that I was someone who wanted to try new things. What would be the right solution for most people doesn’t, intuitively, look right to me. I figured that working for a big firm is not something that I would enjoy. I would rather go and build something on my own. This was the time when venture capital in India was not as prevalent. That’s when I got my introduction to the world of startups.

Sramana Mitra: So you decided to do a startup straight out of IIT?

Manish Jethani: I met a couple of seniors from my college who were working somewhere part-time. They were working on a startup idea, but they were still doing their job. I decided to join them full-time.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get connected to these guys?

Manish Jethani: Back in the day, the venture industry wasn’t prevalent. The only way for you to build something was you continue working with your day job.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, we call it bootstrapping with a paycheck.

Manish Jethani: You essentially try to build it in your free time. You try to find some interns from college. These people reached out to the alum base. I really liked what they were doing. I started freelancing for them.

Sramana Mitra: What were they doing?

Manish Jethani: Mozilla had this issue tracking system back in the day. It was like open source. We were trying to build similar stuff for business users where if you have some problem within the organization, you can raise a ticket. This is what we call service management these days. That’s how the idea started. I started as an engineer.

Then seven to eight months into this product building, we realized that we don’t have money to pay ourselves. I started reaching out to a lot of college alums who were working in other companies. That was my first introduction to sales. I came across a gentleman who said, “What you are saying is if there is an object and goes through multiple stages, you can track those stages.” I said that’s one way to describe it.

They construct projects and have a lot of deliverables like 50,000 drawings of a thermal power plant. Can we track all those? We were desperate to find customers. We said that we can customize things. What we ended up doing was more like a document management system for construction projects. In a construction project, you have three to four years where you construct everything in a power plant. They are fairly expensive stuff. How do you organize all the information regarding the construction of a $3 billion project?

Sramana Mitra: Did they pay you enough to build this?

Manish Jethani: We got paid peanuts for that, but it was a big brand. We did a lot of things for them. We figured out that if we productize this, there will be demand. For the first project, we did a lot of customization. We were paid $500 and it took us three months to execute. It brought a lot of learning. With that brand, we went to their competitors. The projects that I closed were close to about $250,000 in 2011.

Sramana Mitra: You got good training in sales?

Manish Jethani: Yes. Selling to these large companies was a completely different learning. I came across as a super nerd engineer who would like to code without talking to someone. Then I transitioned to a hardcore enterprise sales guy. I had not imagined myself to be doing anything other than writing code.

Sramana Mitra: This was happening in Bangalore?

Manish Jethani: At that time, I was in Hyderabad.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani
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