From Developer to Cyber Security Entrepreneur with $10M Revenue and $18M Funding: LoginRadius CEO Deepak Gupta (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about team? You and your co-founder brought it to almost one million ARR an a bit of seed funding. How did you build the team from there on?

Deepak Gupta: Team was one big challenge for us. We had never done teambuilding exercises before. That was something new. We got some initial people who were excited for the product. We had to talk to them and explain the vision. We got a few good team members in the beginning. They are still with us.

Sramana Mitra: In San Francisco?

Deepak Gupta: Remote. We have a team in India also. We have a team in Canada. I moved to Canada to build the company in the beginning.

Sramana Mitra: Where in India?

Deepak Gupta: Jaipur and Hyderabad.

Sramana Mitra: How big?

Deepak Gupta: We have 80 to 90 people in the company.

Sramana Mitra: How is that distributed?

Deepak Gupta: In North America, we have around 25% of the people. The rest are in India.

Sramana Mitra: Is there an advantage to Jaipur?

Deepak Gupta: We were just looking for people. Jaipur is both my and my co-founder’s home town. It gave us an advantage because we already had a network of people there. In Hyderabad also, we knew people. It was easier to talk to people.

Sramana Mitra: You hired the initial team from your networks?

Deepak Gupta: Yes. We started reaching out to the network, but we also recruited outside of the network.

Sramana Mitra: After the $17 million Series A, what else did you raise?

Deepak Gupta: We didn’t raise after that.

Sramana Mitra: What is the trajectory of the business now?

Deepak Gupta: We got hit during COVID because of the verticals that we had. Some of the verticals like travel and media got hit very hard.

Sramana Mitra: But e-commerce boomed.

Deepak Gupta: We were not that much into e-commerce that time. We were more into retail. Now we have a lot of e-commerce businesses. Right now, the business is pretty healthy. We are growing. This whole authentication and single sign on is a still a big challenge in cyber security. The prospects are good for us.

Sramana Mitra: You’re at about $10 million ARR now?

Deepak Gupta: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: The $17 million was from a US VC?

Deepak Gupta: Yes, US VCs. ForgePoint and Microsoft are the two investors.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that I should have asked you?

Deepak Gupta: I think we went through a lot of things.

Sramana Mitra: We have a whole track for developers transitioning to entrepreneurs. I happen to believe that it is easier to train developers to become entrepreneurs. The other way around doesn’t really work. We have a track for non-technical founders, but it’s a whole different track. They have to either find a technical co-founder or outsource. The developer to entrepreneur track is pretty much straightforward.

Deepak Gupta: One of the key things that developers lack is marketing and sales. That’s one of the biggest challenges. Building the team is another one.

Sramana Mitra: We address all of that in the program. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : From Developer to Cyber Security Entrepreneur with $10M Revenue and $18M Funding: LoginRadius CEO Deepak Gupta
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