Go-to-market is defined as a cohesive, interconnected machine involving sales, marketing, product, and customer needs working together like a flywheel. A successful GTM strategy centers on four key elements: understanding the customer’s pain points, delivering clear product value, ensuring ease of consumption, and aligning cross-functional teams toward common goals.
In this insightful podcast, Ramesh Prabagaran, a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur and two-time founder, shares his journey from product manager to successful founder and CEO. With over 20 years in the computer networking industry, Ramesh discusses his experiences at Juniper Networks, his co-founding of Viptela (acquired by Cisco), and his latest venture, Prosimo. He dives deep into go-to-market strategies, the iterative process of startup development, and the challenges of finding the right customer segments and value propositions.
Ramesh provides valuable lessons on fundraising, mentorship, and navigating the shifting landscape of cloud networking, with particular emphasis on product-led growth (PLG) and enterprise sales. His story highlights the importance of capital constraints, building the right team, and developing a cohesive, customer-centric strategy.
Listen to the podcast here:
Resources:
Connect with Ramesh Prabagaran on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramsba
Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijdam/
From Product Manager to 2x exited Founder: Ramesh Prabagaran’s Go-To-Market Success Playbook
So I’ll start off the conversation with the signature question, which the audience enjoys and listens to and value, which is, how do you view and define go to market?
Ooh, that’s nice. Okay, yeah, yeah. I don’t think there’s like a single solid answer that you can get that’s consistent across the board, go to market. And if I put myself in the lens of a startup person, and as you, as you pointed out, I’ve done two startups, and so that’s kind of runs in my means and my arteries right now, yeah, go to market in a startup is quite different. What I mean by that is you need to have not just a well-rounded view.
Yes, you have your sales, you have your marketing, have your product, you have your customers, all those things need to fit in and whatnot, but go to market in a startup is a very cohesive machine where you really can’t decouple these functions. One feeds off of the other. It’s almost like a flywheel where one feeds off of the other, and you just have a vicious cycle that you create.
And so to me, I try to simplify things, because it’s easier to comply to comprehend. There really two things that you care about, right? All others are just meant to serve those two things. One is the customer. So you always put yourself in the shoes of a customer, and you think about two things.
One is, what is the pain they’re going through, and what do they care about?
The other one is the product that you’re creating, what is value it provides, and whether is it really easy to consume.
And if you care and take care of these four things, what I’ve noticed is all the other things naturally fold well into this, which is my go-to-market, my outbound, my inbound, my product marketing, all of those things solve for one of these four things. And so to me, a good market in in a startup is really trying to nail these four questions that I just went through, and how do you effectively put the function together, staff them take care of the strategy appropriately to essentially solve for these four.
Right!
I’ve noticed that even if one out of these four is not solved properly, you have a broken go-to-market machine. And having gone through two startups, especially the last one, where we had about three iterations of go to market, I can tell you with absolute certainty that, and as you nail all four you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna get there.
No, I love it, and I love the way you actually broke it down into very simplistic, quote-unquote, simplistic terms, but, but I mean, to your point, I mean, that’s how I see it. Also. It’s like you’re connecting two dots on one. It always starts with your ICB, the customer, and the problem, yeah, that’s one second is, how are you delivering value, either through a product or our service exactly, right? Everything else is in between.
Yes, exactly. And then those two don’t connect. Well, then you will see that manifest in the form of inefficiency or friction in the system or broken processes and whatnot, right? So, yeah, so it’s helpful, and this is these are the four things that are very easy to understand, very simple as well, but it’s hard to keep track of, right? Because you’re always in the weeds on so many issues that you don’t get to zoom out and look at, hey, are these four things?
Yeah, yeah, no, it’s easier said than done, right? I mean, the first step is to get to that clarity that it’s these two or four or whatever you want to call it, right? These dots, connect the dots. But then doing it, executing it, is super hard, and that’s why it’s not easy from conceiving a startup idea to really seeing it grow.
Exactly! Yeah, and I can tell you, I’m sure lots of your listeners are either new to the startup world, or some are seasoned startup veterans as well, and you’ll see a remarkable difference in approach that people take to startups if you’re new versus if you’ve been there if you’re new. You feel the. Is everything. And then if you’ve done it one time, you will know that the idea is, like, 10% of the whole thing, execution is really where it is that, right?
Yes!
I remember vividly. It’s like, we used to be so secretive about the idea. We don’t want to disclose this, that, and the other. The first time around, like, even to investors and except for customers, all others, you’re very secretive about it. The second time around is, like, I don’t care. Like, you can take my PowerPoint, and go run with it. That’s fine. It’s the execution that matters. So you learn a lot of interesting things along the way.
Yeah, speaking like a true and a proven 2x founder, right? And of late, this is something that I’m seeing, maybe you’re also noticing, right? And there are that small sliver of people and the go-to-market founders and practitioners who actually buy into that,
Yeah!
it’s almost like it’s an open book, correct? Their entire go-to-market is an open book. And the way they challenge themselves is, hey, if someone can actually read these posts or blogs or whatever, and execute, which means my thinking is flawed. Yes, it’s that easy to replicate. Then there’s some serious flaw.
Exactly, exactly. So it’s the next level, double click, triple click, whatever that’s necessary that actually separates out success from things that are yet to hit success, right? I wouldn’t call them failures, and no failures in a startup.
Right.
Just success in learning.
Fantastic. So this is a good opening conversation. So let’s take a step back, go back, zoom out, and walk us through your career journey. I mean, where do you start from a professional point of view, and what led you to what you’re doing today?
Absolutely. Yeah, so for better, for first, for the last 20 years or so, I’ve been networking. Computer Networking has been the field I’ve been so focused on, and, of course, branching out from there is like security and data and whatnot, but computer networking has been the core focus. I spent about 10 years at Junpa, a flagship computer networking company, which is where I learned a lot of initial, initial things. And then, of course, being in Silicon Valley, you have the itch to start something.
Fortunately, a few of us got together and got a company called Viptela off the ground. It was in the software-defined wide area, networking space, literally, few people have never done startups before, trying to figure something out. And it was a great ride. I went from being, quote, unquote, a no-name product manager in my own head to really finding myself. I had multiple, multiple roles, from strategy to product management. We’d never had a marketing person to market, to Technology Partnerships. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing in a startup, you wear multiple hats and you just get stuff done, right and so, so that was a great ride. In five years or so since the founding, we got acquired by Cisco, so I was given the responsibility to run roughly a half-a-billion dollar portfolio at Cisco, my product that we brought in and many other things, and that was a different set of muscles I started to develop there, but my heart was always in a startup and growing from A few 100 million to a billion, while exciting, it’s a different set of muscles that I did not want to build. And so give the keys to somebody who is even better equipped than me to run that.
And then a few of us got my second startup off the ground, which is Prosimo this time, this is in cloud networking. So it was at the intersection of cloud and networking with a bunch of security and whatnot. And I thought, hey, second time around, it would be easier. Man, it wasn’t. First was all the confluence of external forces, which you naturally expect.
But this time, it was a bit more acute. We started in 2019, so we had the wave of COVID, followed by kind of remote work, followed by kind of an acute focus on fundamentals, to a radical shift in the market, on focus, focusing on financials and fundamentals, right? And so things that you took for granted, started to change quite a bit. And so it was it was an interesting evolution. From that standpoint, the good market also was very different because we were talking to different sets of buyers. But fortunately, landed a lot of dozen coupled with a dozen global, 2000 logos, and then realized that, hey, no, this is better done in a large company. So we just sold that recently, and so, so now I’m, I’m trying to get some sleep back.
Get some sleep back. Well, said, yeah.
So going back. I mean, let’s start with the first and most fundamental question, which is, why networking? What got you curious and why?
Yeah, right.
So I always look for, anytime you start a company, you look for forces of gravity. I ask myself a very simple question, if we did not start a company to address this problem, is it that the problem goes away, or does the problem compound and start to get worse?
Ramesh, even before that, sorry, I didn’t phrase my question correctly. What made you get into networking in the first place?
Oh, okay! Yeah, what made you get into networking.
So this is back in the 2000s I’m dating myself here, but back in 2000 or s,o that was the craze, blowing Internet growth and and all of the things associated with that, right? And so I wanted to be in a place that actually brought multiple things together. And so I found myself there in that space. And my master’s was in networking as well. And so now they gravitated towards towards this, right? And so I think it was just a fascinating time to be in the networking industry, back in 2000 with all of the explosive growth in different types of companies, the web coming online, and a whole bunch of things. Fast forward to today. It still continues to be exciting, even though I think AI is all the craze right now, but lots of fundamental things need to happen underneath the covers for the infrastructure to work. And I find networking a place where you can bring in solid architecture, solid reliability, solid care about and whatnot, and be as low in the stack as possible, taking care of bits and buys, or be as high in the stack taking care of application experience and so is a good place to kind of zoom in and zoom out, is what I like about it?
Yeah, no. Well said.
I mean, if I were to go back to my time and when I started my career very similar, right? Something, maybe the time was right. It had to be right, obviously, because, in Silicon Valley, you had all the big names. So I joined Fujitsu, network communications, and networking, but in the application space, doing network management software. And back then, we had all the hot, hot, and hottest of IPOs and companies. Yes, you had the .com and bust, but you also had companies like Oni, Redback, Nortel, so many, so many of them back then. And fundamentally, that was your pipeline or infrastructure for the internet boom, as simple as that,
Exactly, yeah. So yeah, after the semiconductor wave came kind of the networking wave before the cloud wave started to
Correct. So mobile, and now it’s exactly correct, yeah, and so.
So the natural progression was, kind of learn all of the fundamental things in networking. And then we saw some disruption in the first startup where, kind of the cost arbitrary, and going high capacity premium grade circuits, versus everybody being able to browse from anywhere over the internet. There was like 100 to one cost arbitrage, but all of the premium grade enterprise connectivity was happening over the premium grade. And then we felt, hey, why can’t you use the lower grade, but kind of get similar services right? And so the cost arbitrage there presented itself as a nice disruptive moment for startups to come in and dig into this space, right? And so anytime you look for that kind of wedge, right? Like, is there an industry transition that’s happening, or is there some disruption that’s happening that’s causing economics to break? And if the economics break, then that’s a good fundamental reason to jump into something. So we found the first wave in the SD Wan space with the cost arbitrage, and the second wave in terms of actual cloud, cloud networking, and so forth.
Yeah, actually, that was my follow-up question, which is like you mentioned at Juniper Networks, that’s where you probably found your set of co-founders, maybe within our outside of Juniper Network. Yes, like, what was the discussion like? I mean, what made you guys jump into it?
Yeah, it was. It was interesting. It was so we were mostly focused on enterprise customers, mostly. Enterprises were building, take any large retailer, a large bank, or a large manufacturing, they have a whole bunch of locations, and they wanted to connect all these locations together. These locations had interesting bandwidth challenges because the number of people was increasing. Case in point, talking to a pretty large retailer that said, I have locations in Panama and Saudi Arabia and one other location where the quality of internet connection determines whether people come into work or not. And so we found ourselves like, hey, it’s like these guys are paying 1000 bucks a month easily on premium grade connectivity, but nobody’s coming into the office because they’re not able to get, like, basic internet access. So what’s the point of connecting to corporate applications when people. Will need to be able to also browse and then research and do things, right? And so when that breaks, then, it manifests itself in terms of offer disruption. And so, those are kind of the initial things that led to, led to the first company
Got it. And so let’s double-click, right? So maybe the couple of you, the co-founders, had this idea, but then you didn’t have funding yet. Or, how did you go about the fundraising part?
Yeah, so maybe the first example, or the first company, was back in 2012 I’ll maybe give you a more recent one, which is the one from about five, six years ago, right? So, here the problem statement was slightly different, so I’ll just set the context up. And so it was, hey, there’s a seven-layer sandwich that was getting built in the public cloud. So if you contrast what happened in the data center. So you had kind of foundational networking, router switches, whatnot. Then you had like, load balances, and then you had like an identity, and then you had, like, security, and then you had application services. So there’s like, a seven-layer sandwich that was getting created inside the data center. What are the right reasons? Because it just evolved naturally. And so when folks wanted to move those applications into the public cloud, their time-tested, proven thing was to take exactly that same seven-layer sandwich, bring it into some software form factor, and bring that into the public cloud and so. And we look at that and say, That’s so wrong, because you have the ability to create something from scratch day one that’s clean and lean, and so why wouldn’t you? And it really boiled down to like, organization, friction, different guys owning different things, which we’ll come into in the good market context quite, quite soon as well.
And so we found ourselves in a hand, this is an area that will get disrupted. And we found that the hyperscalers themselves were also struggling with this, because they wanted to give a nice playground that folks could build on in nice and modular and lean, but folks were just bringing stacks and stacks and stacks of software appliances and building the capability that way. So we started Prosimo to essentially address that problem.
So at the root of it, think about it as if you keep the application in the center of the universe, what does that application need to talk to it needs to either talk to another application or it needs to talk to a user. It really boils down to that much infrastructure underneath the covers, networking, security, and whatnot is a means to an end to make that happen in the best way possible. And so we said, Let’s shift the focus to a higher level of that stack, where applications can talk to each other, or users can talk to applications, and the rest of the pieces we handle. And so this was the context, and we didn’t see there was any real good player that was addressing this.
There were seven layers of the sandwich, and you had each vendor, vendors in each of those categories, trying to address but it wasn’t the lean way that we were thinking customers wanted to think about it. And so this is so this was the problem statement. So when we wanted to just the first thing is, like we look for forces of gravity. So we asked ourselves, if we didn’t solve this problem, what would happen if the seven-layer sandwich continued to be there? Or would something change?
And we saw that the hyperscalers had enough investments happening that we found that this disruption was happening. The white space we found was the hyperscalers had a very purist view of how this needs to be done. And so they collapsed those things fairly quickly, and they only addressed it for themselves. And customers were increasingly getting multi-cloud so. And so and so there was a white space that we saw, and we said, nobody’s addressing that, so let’s go address that. And so when we sought initial funding, we fortunately had access to quite a few infrastructure-focused investors, and so we went there.
And so the natural question was like, Why can’t AWS do this? Why can’t Azure do this? Why can’t GCP do this, right? Yes, they all can. They have armies of people, but would they want to? They’re good at building foundational blocks. So the example I used to provide was the enterprise customer. One needs a latte, the other one needs a cappuccino, and the other one needs an Americano. And what the hyperscalers give you are coffee beans and different types of milk and sugar. And each enterprise is forced to build their own right, like they have to make their own coffee. And so is that what you want to do right? And so we found white space in terms of being able to provide that latte, in terms of providing that cappuccino, and so forth.
Yeah!
And so that’s kind of what led to us.
Now, investors look at this differently, depending on kind of where their background is and how they come from. But fortunately, we landed a couple of really good, high-quality investors. One had been operating he was the C. CEO of SMB, a 500 company at that time. Now he’s the CEO of Intel. He just recently got the job of CEO of Intellibus. And then we also had one who, from General Catalyst, was a CTO of VMware, and so he had a very profound understanding of the evolution in that stack. So trying to find the right people was important, and so we found, then we got this upgrade.
Fantastic. So how did you go about getting your first set of customers?
That’s a learning number, I would say, seven. By that time, we already made six mistakes. So let’s say, let’s start with learning number seven. Learning number seven is choosing your initial few customers when you want to build something is extremely important. And so right now, looking back, I feel like we did not choose the right, good sample set of customers. What I mean by that is I had 10 customers who were guiding us in terms of what to build in the capabilities and what value to offer and so forth. But they were all large enterprises, right? So you had some of the big S, p5, 100 global, and 2000 customers on our advisory, essentially helping us try to build this, right?
Now that was good because, well, we got access to a whole bunch of care about customer challenges and whatnot. It was bad because I never balanced that out with the needs of the mid-market. Balance that out with the need for anything else. And so if you’re bang on right about your customers, and you can move forward with that, that’s great. That’s a playbook that works. But if there is any chance that you have to pivot, or if market conditions change and you have to pivot, then, and if you have a bad sample size of initial customers, then you’re pretty much stuck with that, because the initial assumptions matter a lot, right? Whether it’s what you build into the product, or what you build into the go-to-market, or what the value that you’re trying to deliver because since the audience was a large enterprise, we were trying to build a big hammer.
And so anybody that had a small nail, yes, we can hit the nail, but we’ll also take out the board along with it, right? And so, yeah, we built, like duty capabilities, and so that naturally kind of put us in a corner and trying to only serve really large enterprises, right? And so looking back, that was one of the big learnings that we had, which actually manifested itself really well.
So the knockout punch that we got was really when we got out of stealth and we went out to the market and said, what we did, which is essentially the version one of the go-to-market engine. To put it really, really bluntly, everybody said, amazing idea. We love the concept. I’ll talk to you in two years, like, what is this?
But didn’t you have design customers by then with LOI and all those?
Yes, we had so. But the thing is, because of the sampling bias we only had those out of the 10, five of them were doing beta and so forth. But those five, it wasn’t that that five could lead to the next 50 and so that five could have become 10.
Yes, you could have found more, but in a startup, you don’t want that type of growth u want to get to the next 50, right? And so we found ourselves kind of back to a corner in terms of what we had built and the capabilities. So some of the learnings in there were again collapsing a seven-layer sandwich into one. Appealed to the CIO, to the head of infrastructure.
But when you go one level down, budgets were still with the head of networking, head of security, head of cloud, and head of operations, and so we found ourselves trying to convince four different constituents about a common goal. So even though the CIO was aligned, the four different guys were not aligned. So that’s why everybody was like, Hey, come back in two years. Because I see this as very transformational. My CIO says this is great. All that is good, but let me talk about it for two years, right? And so, so the urgency in trying to move today was largely missing.
Got it so the buying signals were not there.
So, yes, exactly, right. And so the buying signals for why I would do something today were not there. So that was kind of the first gut function in hindsight. It was like, how did we miss this, right? But at that time, when you are coming out of stealth as a startup, you want to plant the biggest flag possible on the largest possible mountain and make some noise, because you get to do that one time in the company’s history, and I felt like we got a good megaphone and said all the right things, but it just did not lead to immediate customer opportunities. So that was kind of version one of what I would call a failed go-to-market iteration.
And. It didn’t fail because, because we weren’t able to get to the customers. It’s just that we were not able to get the customers to move. We were able to get to everybody who wanted to have a conversation. But it ended up being a project, yeah, as opposed to an immediate here-and-now, burning thing, right? And so the lesson learned was, hey, unless you have a here and now burning problem that somebody can act on today, and that is not cross-functional, you really don’t have, especially, especially as a startup, you don’t have, you know, you can’t really kind of magnify that, right? And so, so, so that was the first punch that we got in the boxing ring, and we said, okay, good, we can now start to so we said, okay, let’s not take a whole seven-layer sandwich. Let’s cater to at least one buyer.
That’s interesting. And so we said, okay, who’s the this is the second iteration. So we said, Okay, we’ll cater to one buyer. We could have chosen between the networking, the security the the cloud, and the operational buyer. So we said, okay, operational buyer, no, because they are very reactive to things, and they’re not the ones in the front end making those decisions. And this was a transformative technology.
So we said, that doesn’t match networking. We said I have done this networking play before. I know the networking guys, a little bit of that bias.
Yeah.
So we said, okay, let’s not focus on networking. Guys, security.
We said, okay, let’s choose between security and cloud. So we went and spoke to a whole bunch of security buyers, interestingly, and the vast feedback we got was, this is good, but two things came out from there, right? One is security never tends to be a very transformative conversation, because the risk appetite is not there. And so if you rock the boat too much, then you don’t know what you’re rocking, and then you open holes for others to attack. Nobody wants to do that. Demo one, the second one is the CIO tenure. The CISO tenure was, was a large factor, right?
Because most of these guys are with the company for about one and a half to three years. And so as a CISO, they’re like, hey, I need to operationalize a strategy today, get that to a certain point, and then I need to kind of move to move to the next thing, right? And so this came beyond that scope. And so we really didn’t get the traction required, and we didn’t want to be in this science project land past the first iteration. So we said, okay, then maybe it’s the cloud buyer. So we went and spoke to a whole bunch of cloud buyers. And interesting, interestingly, the feedback was, yes, this was good. But there was one nagging feeling that we overlooked, and then the cloud buyers are like, Yes, this is good, because I have these fundamental capabilities I’ll get from the hyperscalers. You guys are augmenting that, correct? And so that is great, and you’re giving me homogeneity across multiple different hyperscalers. So that’s all good. But I think what we overlooked was the fact that these guys live and breathe with the hyperscalers all day long. And so only that delta functionality that is not offered is where they would even start to look for a third-party piece of software correct? And so not being Native was the biggest and the biggest
lesson that we learned, right?
And so ultimately, in the end, it came down to a really simple thing that he said, when a car drives off the lot, if it has a radio in it, that radio stays in the car for 80% of the people,
Right.
The other 20% that want some rise in nearly good fancy capabilities, are the ones who will end up switching, and we ended up being the 20% category. So we said, Okay, this is good. It’s better than version one, yeah, but it’s not going to give us, like, a huge amount of new logos. So we were able to land so there was one good data point, which is we were able to get a whole bunch of POCs. We were able to land the initial opportunities, but the land to the expand just ended up being a pretty big, pretty big lift.
One more impression of your go-to-market there,
Exactly, right! And so then we said, okay, you know what this is like. And so the other piece of this. And mind you when you say, go to market, this means our sales guys need to be armed with the right messaging, yes, our product marketing needs to come up with the core value.
Correct.
All built out of what the product can actually deliver. Unlike big companies, like small companies, if you say something, it better be true because otherwise you get one shot and you blow it. And so you make a whole bunch of changes in the product. You get your sales teams kind of armed. You have your marketing machine kind of tuned to that, which means inbound, outbound messaging, or imagine all of those things need to so you get to a certain point, and then you realize, oh my god, okay, I like this second iteration also, like it’s there, but I don’t think this is the play that we want to make, right?
And from an online point of view, are we talking like three to six months?
Yes, exactly. So each iteration lasted about, I would say three months, four months at most, yeah, but it does require a lot of calories, right, and fortunately, we were constrained in terms of capital. Fortunately, if we had more capital, we would have run multiple parallel go-to-markets, which actually is a bad thing to be doing because we were capital constrained. We said, okay, there’s going to be, like, a very small 4% 5% team. And so there’s like, one salesperson, one solution architect, one marketing person, myself, and one product guy. We said, we’re going to run this machine, which means in the morning, we’ll create the messaging.
The guy will pitch that to the customers. Will get slapped around, he’ll come, provide the feedback, iterate over that, create the marketing messaging, try something, and then kind of just keep that client moving. And so in about, in less than a month, you get a good feel for the direction, and then what you’re pressure testing after that is really, can you move past that initial first meeting to getting to and landing a POC right?
And so in three, four months, you pretty much know whether one such iteration is working. And we found ourselves, it’s like, hey, you know what? It’s better than version one, but this is, this is not this is not it, right?
Like, and so you have this, you have this feeling that this is not it. So we said, okay, you know what, let’s take all the learnings from version one, take all the learnings from version two, and apply this. But this time we said, Let’s go after the cloud networking buyer, right?
And so, and that was the disconnect. We saw, that the value inherent in the product appealed to the cloud guys, but many times they would have to go and ask for permission from the cloud networking team, and that was in the networking tower. So the guys that we initially overlooked, ended up actually being the guys to make the decision. So we said, okay, version three, now we got the core value. We know what’s really appealing. We know that the cloud guys love this because we don’t want them to be friction in the process. So we know they like it. The security guys like it because we have spoken to enough people, it’s just that they didn’t want to own it.
Right.
And so the budget is now with the cloud networking buyer. So let’s go run that play. And that play worked beautifully. Then we said, okay, cloud networking buyer, so we knew, if you’re the head of networking or the CIO, all the way down to kind of director of networking, to the architect too.
So there were, like, multiple layers of the organization who resonated with what messaging, what capabilities of the product? How do we run a tight POC? How do you take care of external messaging?
For the listeners who are not familiar with the names and brands and the cloud networking, so if you can just list out some of the names.
Yeah, absolutely. So Cloud networking. I mean, it was born inside of Cisco with the acquisition that was done, which is my previous product, and then from there, it’s a company called Aviatrix that came about, that started to build capabilities. And then Alkira was born, and then f5 started to get in, and then we came in, and then you have a slightly different. The approach to solving this problem from HashiCorp is completely kind of community-led, and has different GTM motions, and different GTM motion. And so you have, these are the kind of class of players. So we found ourselves with, okay, no, this is an enterprise play. We hadn’t built the capabilities to serve the mid-market just yet. So this is an enterprise play. Cloud networking is our buyer.
Right.
The message that resonated with them, and this is here’s a beautiful thing, right? Initially, and even within Cloud networking, what you keep us number one number two, and number three really matters, right? In terms of value. So we said we wanted to be the best at something. Cost is not that thing. Like, this is 2022 right around the time when cost was not really, like, high up. So he said, Okay, we don’t want to keep the cost up. Networking guys care about reliability. But, like, do we really want to call ourselves the most reliable cloud networking solution?
No, no, no, not really. So we said, we are the ones who give you the best possible application experience.
right? Sounds good, right? Like, yes, we take care of the application needs, we take care of all of the networking required for that, and we give you the best possible application experience.
Why do you move to the cloud? Because you want agility and you want experience. We’re giving you one of those things, and we give you at like great speed, this has got to work, right? So we enter the went to the market in that order, which is application experience, followed by reliability, cost and performance, and all of the good things around it.
The part that we missed was the fact that nobody wants to admit no networking person wants to admit that they have an application experience problem.
Yes!
It’s true. They all have it, but nobody wants to admit it, right?
So we found ourselves in this weird thing because they would tell us in private conversations that, yes, I have like, Guys are screaming because this application is broken, the experience is bad, and blah, blah, blah, but in the demand gen and digital world, nobody wants to agree to that, and so we were not able to pull people in with that Message to have a conversation. Based on that, we were like, oh, man, this, like, we missed this, like, pretty badly. So those are, again, all the go-to-market iterations that you have, and we learn from them, and then we switch the order. And we said, okay, application experience is important. But then here are kind of the core networking care about agility and all of the cost control. And this was like 2023, at that time. And so suddenly cost started to come into the main focus. Because, right, we didn’t find a single customer that said, I’m happy with my cloud cost. Everybody was focused on that. FinOps guys were in the picture. So it helped us morph. And so, yeah, so if you look at the matrix, you have your product which needs to evolve. You have your customers who are slightly changing the balance of power. Also it was shifting a little bit. Cloud guys have some control. Networking guys have some control. So you had to play this very carefully, not to piss off either one, but side with your budget order, and then you add your macro forces, which is what I cared a lot about, like, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed. Everything needs to move to the cloud, you know what?
Like, Cloud is now my biggest pain, because of my bills, and so I need to take care of cost control.
So it’s a very dynamic environment, but that’s the beauty of it, right? You try different things and you see what works, and then do that champion.
So the buying champion, was the persona was the head of cloud networking, that’s correct?
Yes. And so, we found that buying the personal cloud of the head of cloud networking was really organizationally in two different places, depending on the type of enterprise. If you were a super mature organization responsible for cloud the head of cloud networking was in the cloud organization, so they were part of the CCoE, or this cloud Center of Excellence organization. Their care about asking the head of cloud networking was somewhat the same, but somewhat different. In other cases, we saw that the budget was within the networking tower, and so was the head of infrastructure and networking owned the budget, and there was a cloud of the network, a head of cloud networking, and a player under the networking tower. So our go-to-market had to be slightly nuanced to take care of both because it’s great to do that one-on-one with a customer. You find out exactly where they are and you have the conversation. But in terms of what you put on your website, what you have in terms of your Demand Gen material, and whatnot, we found some interesting things there.
Actually, let me double-click on that. That’s a very important point you just mentioned Ramesh, which is, that you can do this on a one-on-one basis, right? But if you were to do it in a multi, like a multicast scenario, like a website or a campaign, which person and which messaging Did you gravitate towards?
Yeah, we honestly had to resort to AB here, yeah. So we did a bunch of AB testing, and we found that because not many enterprises were so Cloud forward by that time, the vast. Majority. So we went with kind of, who can we latch on to in terms of volumes. It was really for the former, which is the head of cloud networking, in networking. So we rotated towards that. There was a flavor of the website, a flavor of our messaging, which made sure we didn’t leave the other guys out, because if the transition happened, and then we would find ourselves completely caught off guard. And so we had to, we had to somewhat straddle. But we put, like, 80% of our eggs in one basket, the other 20% for the other which, which lends itself to, okay, you know what we said? Head of cloud networking, we have nailed, we have nailed the messaging. By that time, we had like, a few dozen POCs and few customer contracts. And so we said, Okay, this is proof enough that is working. And so we said, now it comes down to volume. I want to spend as little amount of time, energy, and resources to get the most number of high-quality connections into the company.
Right.
They said I don’t care whether this is a marketing-led function or a sales-led function. We had our inbound, we had outbound. All of the functions were there. It was a skinny team, but all the guys were working together to make that work. But we had a goal that we need to have high-quality conversations if we are spending time, then pre-screening should have happened leading up to that point, right? And so we said, what is the best way to do that?
And there again, these are kind of micro-optimizations, or micro iterations that you do within your primary go-to-market motion. We had this brilliant idea that, hey, you know what a few, a few customers actually landed up on AWS Marketplace, spun up our product, and started to use it. And then by the time we actually got to know about it in terms of, like, meaningful usage, these guys were using the product already. So we got, we had our free version on the on the marketplace, and so we said, You know what? If savvy guys are there, then they might be able to do it. So let’s try a PLG motion. A product like growth motion. That makes sense. We have proof points as well that a few guys have done it. And so maybe we should, we should try that. So we put our focus together to create a plg engine and found the hard way that it would not work. And very simply, it came down to a plg motion.
This was an aha moment that you get which does, really doesn’t help, right, to do anything other than just kill that project, right, which is a plg motion works when somebody is able to resonate with the problem that you have identified, that draws somebody in, is able to take action all by themselves, correct, in hopefully less than a day and see a value, yes, and see value in less than a day.
And so we found ourselves in an interesting place where cloud networking belonged to a person. Yes, that person was able to do things, but in order to really play around with stuff and whatnot, you have your Iam controls, where the security person I had to go get permission from the cloud guys and whatnot. And so before you knew it, that enthusiasm fizzled away. And so even though we were like, Man, why? Why is this not working? It was because they could not do it in, quote, unquote, one sitting, right? You need to be able to deliver value in one sitting. And so this really didn’t help in terms of a plg motion, but what it allowed us to do is actually find out what brings. Because we had a whole bunch of people come in, 1000s of people actually would an ad on LinkedIn, or we had a DG campaign. People would come in, and they would land on the site, but then we were not really able to get them into, the the product, easily. And so we found that there was friction along the way, but we found that they were able to bring people incorrectly.
We use that as a good awareness and a middle-of-funnel channel exactly.
Correct, right!
And so you are able to bring people in. So we said we’ll bring people in using the appropriate messaging, but now we will not land them in the product, right? We will have a couple of filters ahead of that. So we will poke that off one into, hey, come, come, play around with it, right? You don’t need to kind of set things up in your infrastructure, but start to look at the value, at least. And so that became a relatively low-friction way to get people to experience the product. And from there, we were able to see a lot of conversions. The advantages.
On that note, I was having the exact same conversation yesterday with another founder who was at about 1 million Arr, right, and he did something similar for his mid-market buyers, where he thought it was in the BI data connector space, and he thought he can do a PLG, right? And clearly it led to a bottleneck, where, because he had to get permission from other groups, they could not do it. But here’s where I actually applied the lens. It is still a PLG, but not self-serve.
Correct Exactly. It’s still Yes.
So remove the friction so you don’t need to have like, active, outbound, AE, or outreach. You don’t need to have. Too much of a front end. I want to show you this demo, that demo, and whatnot, before you sign up for the POC so you’re able to remove that friction, yeah, but it’s not like completely unattended so you can start utilizing the product and get to scale. And then I’ll call you when, when you have a problem.
And so, yes, so self-serve part of it was missing. And the great distinction you bring up, which is that many people look at PLG and say, PLG and say, also have to come together. So I put, like, 1000 people on the front end, I get, like, I know, 15 people utilizing the product on the other end.
No, it might be that you get 15 people who are ready, but then you still need to hand-hold them through..
The product to drive that initial top of the funnel, and then exactly the interesting motion.
Exactly, correct.
Yeah. And so again, this is where I don’t think there was, like a playbook that we could follow. We had to write the playbook as we went. But it was a great experience because then you’re building enough capability to kind of address the friction in the system, remove a bunch of things, and so forth. So again, starting with we were in the boxing ring. Got a good punch when everybody was saying glorious things to actually seeing the go-to-market version work across three different iterations and landing there was a great experience. And we fortunately had a smaller team at the beginning by the time we get to we get to version three. Because something was working, we did have to pour some gas on it.
And so I found that it’s hard to do iterations when you have more than a handful of people because when you have a handful of people, like a simple Slack channel or one call, you call and like, everybody’s aligned and across all the functions, everybody’s moving correct, even if you have an organization that’s like 2-3 people, now suddenly you have 10-15, people to deal with, and they don’t move the same way, the same velocity, right? And so optimizations and iterations are hard to do, and new-found respect for what large companies go through, right? Because you have a primary motion and you have to introduce a product by looking at it from the outside. I was always like, why does this take so long. But it does. We got a good flavor for that as well, yeah.
And in fact, the last point that you made, Ramesh, actually brings me to my next question. And did this should be very relevant, especially for the founders either CTC or Series B, right?
So, do you have like, a guidance or a checklist? Like, when do you need to raise funds while you’re iterating on your first set of customers to your first 10, to your go-to-market iterations, and so on? Like, if you were to give like, a quick one to two, yeah.
So I’ll give you the version that I think stands true today because the flavor of that has been changing rapidly over the last, I would say, 24 to 36 months, right? So right now, I would say, if you’re starting something first before you go get a single dollar from any investor, have the conviction yourself that this is a problem with a burning need, at least, at a minimum, a burning need and three potential prospects on the other end, if you’re not able to grab by yourself when you can do that without a product, you can do that with PowerPoint and concept in architecture and so forth.
Ideally with the LOI.
Yes, exactly right. And so I deal with it with an LOI. So that’s a good litmus test to say that there is this problem has legs, and from there go. Don’t raise a series a do a seed or a pre-seed, because you want to build nothing in a startup works like lack of capital. Because if you know that the wall is closing in on you, it makes you focus on one thing and one thing only, and that really is both a blessing and a curse.
It’s a curse, because when you have more capital, you try to do many things, you burn through capital, and then you’re laying those things. Didn’t work, but you wasted money along the way. But in this case, put yourself through a nine-month time horizon at that point and say, how do I convert these Lois into actual beta, which means I need to get my product really, really functional.
Right.
Yes, it need not have all the bells and whistles, but it needs to start delivering value, right? And so deliver value. Get that deployed with your first few customers, and make sure that the endorsement for why they said they would have an LOI translates into actual usage. And so if that happens, then that’s a very good point at which you can say, I am now ready to raise the capital. So I can now start to look at a two-year horizon until then, I would strongly advise you to look at like a few month’s worth of a time horizon, because that puts pressure, enough pressure for the right reasons to make sure that you get to that point then you raise the first round and have a certain room to play with, because, at that time, the assertion, and this is to.
Particularly in series A the assertion is, okay, what I have a line of sight to either a million or I’ve crossed that point one, one to 3 million. I’m operating in that, in that time, in that region. And I have, maybe my I’ve moved from founder-led sales to I can now have one or two sales guys really pick this up and run with it by mess by themselves. And I have enough of a pipeline now to substantiate that, to say that, okay, you know what, in the next year, I’ll be able to convert x to x to y.
Right.
The thing I would ask folks to caution and caution, not in a bad way, is to think about this carefully. Is, if you raise outside investment, there is a natural expectation you are now setting right, that in two years, you are going to be at like 2x or 3x of where you were.
Yes.
And at the time of raising, if you don’t have that line of sight, don’t raise.
Yes, that is what I would say. I had made the mistake of raising because we had access to the capital, and we had folks who actually wanted to put money in. But deep down, I was like, I don’t think I’ve cracked this just yet, but then you have, like, nice juicy capital, and capital can do to you. It gives you a lot more freedom to do things and whatnot. I got sucked into that a little, but that set us back a bit, right?
And so I would highly encourage founders to look at it as, okay, in two years, can I really deliver on that 3x growth? Because that’s what everybody’s asking for. And so if you’re able to greatly raise the capital, is the right time to be raising capital as well, and then grow to that point, once you’ve passed the A going into the B phase, the B phase, I think the criteria has changed quite a bit. Earlier, it used to be that at B you could still figure out, say, you need to have a core market, but then there was no expectation that your channel was set up properly, your technology partnerships were there, but right now, I think the criteria for B is pretty, pretty high up there, right? It’s almost like you have to hit a double-digit way past your 10 million Arr, and you need to have a certain threshold and certain growth trajectory as well, right? And so keep the scrutiny pretty high, at B, and make sure again, you’re able to deliver on that right? Is never, I think people always look at it as if I’m not able to raise, it means I’ve failed. But it’s not the case, right?
The alternative is far worse, where you raise and you pay up absolutely. So, I would rather you go down the more frugal path of preserving what you have, making sure something is working, and then growing, growing from there it and so in a very fast-moving market, if you have enough competitors, and you need to kind of outpace everybody else in terms of your spend in order to get to the growth, yes, then raise if it is. If you’re trying to still figure a few things out It could be technology partnerships. It could be an indirect channel or a direct channel. It could be some mega I always encourage folks, and I was looking at it as well, right? You want to have some behemoth in the industry that’s Betting on you at that stage because you have, what do you have? You have built a product, you have a few customers that are like big-name logos, or you have a volume of certain types of customers. You prove something.
Correct.
That should be proof enough for somebody in the industry to take notice, take a bet on
Absolutely!
And if you’re not able to, then, I think that’s a pretty data point that you have to take.
And it’s a very hard one for a founder, right? Like, I crippled with this quite a bit for sure, six or seven guys like circling around, but nobody has leaned in just like the sign that even if it’s an MOU or an LOI or like a signed sign, something that says, like, I’m committing to this business over the next, like, one year, two years, right?
Yes.
if you don’t have that in hand, I would say, ask yourself, like, what does it take to get there, right? And that would be the next thing to look at. So those are some of the wonderful, wonderful learnings that we have as well.
Great checklist, for sure. I know we are coming towards the end of the show. Here we can go on and on round two later on this year. Who knows? So last two questions for you:, who are the one, two, or three people who really shaped and helped you, especially in the deepest and darkest moments? And, oh, wow.
Great. Great question. So I think I learned a lot from Praveen. Praveen Akkiraju who was the the CEO of Viptela around the time of the acquisition. He joined us quite late and led us through the acquisition. I learned a lot in terms of the organization’s process, and what to look for when. Have to put your foot down and when not. And most importantly, one that I learned, that I carry till today when in doubt, bet on yourself because we always have this thing that other people know better than you on things that you don’t know. And it is not until you try a few things you realize that everybody is in that same world. Nobody has the crystal ball there, right?
And so when you find yourself in those moments, get expert advice. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Get expert advice, but go with yourself, right? Like, what is, what do you feel, especially if you’re the one to make the call, go make that call, right? And so, so I’ve actually kind of learned a lot from him along the way. Second, I would say it’s like a coho cohort of advisors, and not just one or two. I have probably about three, four guys who kind of, every time I have a conversation with them, I come back with, oh my goodness, like I’m getting that clarity that I need, right and they always say, like, I didn’t tell you anything that you didn’t know.
And sometimes it’s just useful to just sound it out. Sound it out because, along the way, your brain works in a certain way to figure it out, like you have that clarity. And so my cohort of advisors, I lean on them quite a bit, and I deeply respect, what they’ve done for me as well.
And a lot of gratitude for that. So that’s, that’s number two. And the third one is just, that I’ve always looked at investors as people who provide capital and and just go away, right? I think the acute version, somebody says, Like a seagull. You go fly around, you poop, and you anyway, you go right? And so I’ve always had that impression.
But there are a few who, in the darkest moments, have called me and said, like, I know I’m an operator. I have been an operator as well. And so I know what you’re going through. You can’t have this conversation, even with your own co-founder, and have this conversation with your wife. You can’t have a conversation with anybody else. So I’m here for you, in case you don’t want to have this conversation. And I’m like, Oh, this is so you need to have whether it’s a friend, it’s an investor, or it’s somebody who has skin in the game, importantly, not just a buddy that has skin in the game but can give you that advice and have them along with you.
In my case, I had one, to two investors on our board who actually were, where that, where that people, right? Like they would call and just check on me, just check on me to make sure that, yes, you know it’s okay. And they’re like, I’m not here to do that, because I put money in the company. I just want to make sure you’re okay. And so, those are, again, people that were there for me during my darkest moments.
And so I’m eternal gratitude to those, to those folks, right? And so those are, those are my, my cohorts of people. And so naturally, as a result, having gone through this a couple of times, this is what I would recommend to founders who’ve been through this journey a few times give back. Like I have, it’s hard to give back when you’re running at 100 miles an hour, but post the previous startup, I actually wanted to consciously spend time giving back, right? Like and people are going through that, just be there for them, because sometimes you might have thought through a few things that they are yet to think through, and all you can offer is, like, maybe a couple of words, right? And that will help them. So it’s an ecosystem that helps itself, not expecting much in return, and so just gives back wherever possible.
Fantastic, especially the last piece is what really makes Silicon Valley stand out. Yeah, super hard to replicate that. Yes, any part of the world. I mean, you can do some scale, but not at the scale.
Yeah, exactly. And I must say that back to your previous question, Vijay, on who has helped me in my darkest moments, those were the guys who actually expected nothing in return.
Yeah.
And that’s so, yeah, so that’s very hard, and the value is full of a lot of good people like that.
All right, fantastic. The last question for you, Ramesh, is, what advice would you give to your younger self,
Oh my God!
Like, let’s do a time check, right and time point which is day one of your go-to-market journey?
Yeah. So tune out external factors.
I think that in the startup world, the yardstick should not be. How are you doing with respect to others, but rather, how are you doing with respect to what you did yesterday or last month? Because I’ve been in this so many times where you look at like, Hey, this guy is growing, that guy is growing. Why the hell am I not growing? It just goes down real. A bad rabbit hole, right? And ultimately, until you pull your socks up and say, What the hell, I did not do things that I did better last month to this month. If you can’t fix that, then nothing else matters, right? And so your first yardstick should be, what did you do better last month to this month? Right? And just be very honest with yourself and see if there is a natural progression there. So this means for that to happen, you need to tune out everything around you, right? And yes, it could be an AI craze. It could be multiple companies getting billion-dollar exits, and guys who started two years after you doing well, all those things don’t matter if you can’t show month-over-month, growth, just looking inward, right? So that’s number one.
The second one is and I might come across as a really bad psycho for saying this, but put yourself in a deprived position.
Yeah.
because deprivation causes clarity.
Correct!
I’ve seen that in so many cases, right? When you’re in a time crunch, you focus on one thing.
Yes.
When you are capital constrained, you focus on one thing. Deprivation causes that clarity to occur. Right? Because you know lack of action at that time meant existential crisis. And when the existential crisis is in question, you will do the right thing right. You may make mistakes, but you will end up doing the right thing and doing it fast. And so find avenues where, of course, don’t do this recklessly, but find avenues where you can do this in the best possible way. Just because you can get access to talent, time, people, capital, and whatnot, doesn’t mean you’re entitled to it. And so always take care of that, right?
And so I would say where we operated the company, in the last year of the company, was very different from how we operated even in the first couple of years, right? And you say, usually you see that the first couple of years are the most intense in a startup, we felt like we were operating at a much higher velocity with the right amount of focus, just because we knew, you know what? Like that the walls are gonna close on us if we don’t get our things together, right? And so just put yourself in a situation where you have that natural lack of resources, lack of something, and that will cause you again, if you’re a betting man, bet on yourself and make sure that you can, you can come through that way. It’s not for the weak of heart, as you can imagine, because when the ground under you is going to get pulled at any moment.
You don’t know when that is it. It does cause a lot of sleep deprivation, but, well, that’s the fun and thrill of a startup!