From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

Manish Jethani: It was a very comfortable role, but that comfort was making me uncomfortable. I was used to solving problems. I wanted to go back and do a startup again. Being well-positioned in a well-funded startup didn’t bring any additional challenge of sorts. I wanted to go back and do a startup again.

My daughter was three months old. I thought a lot about it and felt that there is no right or wrong. If you feel compelled to do something, you should go and do that. Personal life and professional life can go in parallel if you manage your time well.

This time around, I didn’t want to do a startup for the sake of it. It has to be a problem that I truly and deeply care about. It was not about venture money. It was not about getting coverage on Forbes.

Sramana Mitra: You wanted to do something in conviction.

Manish Jethani: Yes, I wanted to do something with a strong conviction. I told myself that whatever I do will be a financially bad outcome. I will not make any money. Still, I wanted to attempt solving that problem. What is that problem that I truly cared about in life that I spent 10 years of my life and gained nothing out of it?

I started observing my own behavior. This time around, I was not looking at the big markets. I was thinking of the one problem that I care about. That went on for months. In the process, I figured out that I truly derive great joy in helping people make good decisions. For example, someone says that he’s struggling with something. I will go and help them think through it.

I might not have the solution to their problem but I surely can help them see through their own problems. For example, I will ask the right questions. I will present the right pieces of information for them to think through. I coach my team to make the right decisions and grow. How do you go about building a startup on this concept? As an individual, I like helping people make decisions. How is that transferred into building something which can be a great business?

Sramana Mitra: It’s not easy.

Manish Jethani: You can build a lifestyle business, but you can’t build a great business doing this. The other thing that I started to notice while I was heading the product was every time someone asks, “Should we build this feature?” I’m like, “What problem does this solve?” I have a lot of critical questions about anything that we need to build. I would insist everyone come up with the facts and then have the conversation.

I figured out that these are the two things that have some connection. It took me a while to figure out. If you really have to make the right decision, you have to be good at leveraging the data to make the decisions. In today’s world, if you don’t look at the data, you’re likely to be wrong.

A few years back, your domain knowledge can help you make the right decisions. In the current context, the world around us is changing so fast. The context in which we build our intuition and wisdom changes very fast. If you really want to be good at making decisions, you should be good at analyzing the current situation and make those decisions. This looked like a good problem to solve.

Can we make everyone more data-driven? Most people were not technical enough. When I insist that people look at data and make a decision, they will say that the data is not available. They’ve gone to the engineering team and it’ll take them one week. It was almost like an orthogonal choice. Either you can make a decision in time or get an accurate decision. You have to choose one. I said, “Why can’t we have decisions where we can make decisions fast and those decisions will be accurate because I can use the data?”

The biggest bottleneck is that most people in the business context who are making the decisions are not technically savvy. Think about the sales team or someone doing digital marketing. They are good at their own art, but they are not data scientists. If you can build technology for them so it’s easier for them to leverage the data, that could be a really impactful thing.

That was the genesis of how we ended up picking this as a problem. We happened to be a very incidental SaaS entrepreneur. At the core, that’s not how we thought what we are building. Even today in our head, what we are trying to build is a technology that will make people make decisions based on data and get them right. That’s the genesis of what we are trying to build.

This segment is part 5 in the series : From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani
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