Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 2) 

Sramana Mitra: What specifically were each of you trying to do?

Venky Balasubramanian: I was trying to pull ideas for my new startup back then. The first idea I had was a click-to-call. My co-founder was trying to build a framework for these IVRs. I was trying to build a framework to basically call to India every day instead of every week.

Sramana Mitra: Why IVR at this juncture? There’s been plenty of stuff going on in IVR. What was the gap in IVR that caused you to think there’s an opportunity to build another company in that space?

Venky Balasubramanian: Being telco engineers ourselves, we’ve seen this problem in the market where if I were to build a system, it took us a longer time. You had to understand all the different protocols and all the different systems underneath. With startups, speed is everything. If you can go to market faster, the better it is. You can try out more and more ideas. IVR was not our conscious choice. He just happened to be working on it. Instead of writing everything in telecom by using all the complex protocols, we said, “Why don’t we abstract all of this where if I have to build an IVR, I don’t have to write everything from zero. I can just use this framework and build on top of that.”

For example, how you handle a Lego block. When you use building blocks, you do not have to worry about having to start from scratch. You can just combine these building blocks and create whatever you want in terms of complex workflows and complex use cases. That’s how we started out. IVR just happened to be one of the first things we touched upon.

Sramana Mitra: This is 2011?

Venky Balasubramanian: Yes, I would say around the March time frame. In the next two months, we started to build this framework. It took some kind of shape. We named this framework Telephonie. Soon we realized that this framework has become more powerful. It has a lot of features and functionalities. We were trying to come up with different ideas ourselves. When we searched Telephonie on Google, nothing showed up. We were like, “This is not going to be useful to anybody else because nobody else can search for it.” We put up a dedicated private page of explaining how this whole thing works.

It just happened that at that point we had the domain Plivo. We just picked Plivo and put up a website, which basically explained how to use the framework. It was an open source project. We just wrote documentation. There were a few other players when we started out. We just compared our framework with different businesses out there. Obviously, being in the telecom domain, we understood what is missing in terms of technology with all these other services. It instantly got a lot of interest from a lot of blogs. One of them was ReadWriteWeb. They called us an open source version of Twilio.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo
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