Sramana Mitra: Very good. It’s wonderful to see that you pulled a hardcore technology product company out of India. Varun Singh: You asked me earlier where the engineers were from. They’re from Veritas and IBM. Sramana Mitra: It’s a good place to hire from. That’s a good thing about India right now. There are actually
Sramana Mitra: You have good defensible IP. Varun Singh: Very good defensible IP. That started a few conversation with other VCs. I started a conversation with BV Jagdish from NetScaler. I was one of BV’s largest customers in India. I knew him through Net Magic because he was on the Board. He introduced me to Justin
Sramana Mitra: You guys have already done six months prototype building with seven engineers? Varun Singh: Yes. Sramana Mitra: Nexus gave you money before that process started? Varun Singh: Nexus gave us our seed round. Sramana Mitra: How much? Varun Singh: $750,000. Sramana Mitra: How long did that take you?
Sramana Mitra: This was what year? Varun Singh: This was 2009. Sramana Mitra: What is ScaleArc? Varun Singh: ScaleArc is a database traffic management company. We provide a software that runs on top of MySQL and provide users the ability to run on a distributed data source without having to understand the application. Sramana Mitra:
Varun Singh: They had a lot of problems with the website. They weren’t search engine optimized. They really didn’t have any traffic other than the traffic that CNBC would push to them by doing TV advertising. I’m like, “It’ll take you guys a long time to figure out how to go ahead and do this.
Sramana Mitra: I didn’t find studying engineering boring at all. Varun Singh: The guys at PC Quest were so exciting. It probably wasn’t boring, but I started working with people who were a little too exciting at that point in time. Sramana Mitra: At 18, you were in Mumbai working for Chip Magazine. How long did that
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. There are very few true technology product companies out of India that have made it to the global market. Varun Singh founded one of them, ScaleArc. The company is currently headquartered in Silicon Valley and is executing well. Some of the others are: Druva, InMobi, and