Our Startup Journey – Part 1

When you make that decision to start a new business, it’s normally both exciting and terrifying in equal measure. For the co-founders at Ventriks the stars were aligned when we got together. My good friend and ex-colleague Kowshik Rao has just ended his last consultancy assignment and looking ahead for his next opportunity, and I had sold my previous company DataGenic and was itching for a new challenge.

When you have the initial conversations on strategy, market competition, technology, architecture, funding, business plan, staffing, client profiles, etc., – although all important – nothing is more important than the co-founder’s single mindedness in building a successful company. This was so apparent at the outset.  Although we are mature enough to understand the rollercoaster of building a company, we are very driven in our pursuit of success. But what does success look like?

Well one thing we agreed on was that success is not about the amount of money the business earns or what we could earn. If you start with that goal, you will likely fail. I have been there before and so have many of my industry peers. You chase the money and fail at making a successful company. For us, success is building a SaaS Cloud offering that provides fair value to our customers, offer the best service that you can provide (using a combination of technology and people), and has the ability to the level the commercial playing field of larger customers over the smaller organizations. So that’s our success measure and is at the heart and cornerstone of everything we are building. If we get this right (of course we need excellent technical architecture, functionality, extensible, scalable, etc.) clients will use our platform and we will grow from there.

It may well happen that we will be financially rewarded in the future by our ‘success measures’. That is great and as a for-profit enterprise we of course require revenue and profit to sustain our future. But by putting our customers first and playing fair in everything we do, we provide a more sustainable growth platform for our customers to enjoy in the months and years to come and a better and brighter future for this startup called Ventriks.