Built to Enjoy: Aptify CEO Amith Nagarajan (Part 7)

Sramana: What is the distribution of your workforce between the US and India?

Amith Nagarajan It is almost exactly even between the two.

Sramana: What is the deal with your New Orleans operation?

Amith Nagarajan Essentially my wife and I decided we did not want to raise our kids in Washington D.C, and since she is from the south we started migrating southwards. We stopped in Nashville for a couple of years just because it seemed like a great place to raise kids. We visited New Orleans all the time which is where she is from and after a couple of years we decided to just move to New Orleans.

My initial reason for coming down here was purely personal. The company had grown to the point had a lot to do with cultural leadership, long-term product vision, and a lot of speaking engagements. I travel 60% of the time so the most important thing for me was to have a good airport.

Aside from Aptify my wife and I started a family venture fund. The purpose of the fund was to reinvest in entrepreneurship. We wanted to be a source of extremely early, extremely high risk capital in extremely small amounts. We want to be in earlier than Angles or seed investors. We started investing in businesses and we funded a few in Nashville. When we got to New Orleans I was shocked at the tech scene that was there.

Since Katrina there has been a tremendous rebirth of the city. Over the course of the first 10 months we were in town we invested in 10 different startups. We realized how much creativity and smart people there are in this town. Around this time I decided to see what I could do locally with Aptify. I went down to Tulane and met with some people at the business school. We started recruiting their MBAs to come into our consulting department. In 20012 we hired 7 people out of that program. Five of them went to our other offices and two stayed here. We have done the same thing this year and six of them stayed there this year.

This city is very good at creativity. We are using it for strategy consulting which is what the MBAs are doing when we hire them. We are also doing Innovation Labs which is a software function that I am personally leading and deals with long-range, forward looking technologies several years down the road.

Sramana: What percentage of your business is international?

Amith Nagarajan About 10% of our revenue is international. A good chunk of that is from Canada although we also do quite a bit of business in Australia and Europe. The vast majority of our revenue comes from the US. We handle the US and Canada direct. In Australia and Europe we rely on partners.

Sramana: What does the future hold? Are you looking to keep this company private?

Amith Nagarajan I am really excited about where we are at and the opportunity to get to the next level. Our revenue growth is directly related to our core purpose impact. We are not looking to sell, but we may acquire some other technologies. We are not looking to exit and an IPO is not a good fit for us. We are very fortunate to have managed the business in a conservative way which has given us no need for outside capital. We can grow the company 25% to 30% year over year. We are looking to dominate the enterprise association vertical. When we have achieved that we will have impacted the world in a positive way.

Sramana: Very good. Thank you for sharing your story and best of luck as you press forward.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Built to Enjoy: Aptify CEO Amith Nagarajan
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