Featured Videos

Bootstrapping Using Services: Krish Kupathil, CEO, AgreeYa Mobility (Part 4)

Sramana: When you decided to get into the enterprise mobility space, what is the first area you decided to focus on?

Krish Kupathil: After a lot of brainstorming and a couple of enterprise customer inquiries, we found an area of interest. Several of our enterprise customers came to us asking how they could access their SharePoint from their Android device. This was a nice business problem, and we wanted to bring a solution to the market that was centered on the business problem.

As a startup, the lowest hanging fruit for us was determining how to enable Microsoft technologies on a non-Windows-based handset. At that point Windows phones had not been released. Even today they only have around 4% of handsets. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Krish Kupathil, CEO, AgreeYa Mobility (Part 3)

Sramana: Was that engagement what you used to get a product developed and launched?

Krish Kupathil: That was just one example. We did other engagements as well. We did an engagement for Samsung and have customized devices for operators across the world such as Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.

Orange mobile had made a conscious decision not to go with open source technology that included Android. Any devices launched on their network had to be qualified by our team for compliance. Those were the types of engagements that we started with. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Krish Kupathil, CEO, AgreeYa Mobility (Part 2)

Sramana: Given the market flux that you observed, how did you start AgreeYa Mobility, and what was the premise of creating that company?

Krish Kupathil: There were 18 of us, of whom 13 were in India and four in Korea. I was the only person here in the U.S. We felt that since mobility markets were in a flux that there was an opportunity for a new player like us to find a space. Since we all had backgrounds in the mobility space, we already had contacts at all the major carriers and handset manufacturers.

There was still some doubt in our minds. Each handset vendor had its own proprietary platform. Motorola had PTP, Samsung had SHP, and LG had their own platform. Each of these large handset vendors had their own proprietary operating systems and they launched their phones based on those operating systems. We knew that building application services around each of these handsets would be a lot of work and most of that work would be internalized in those organizations. >>>

Incubating a Fat Startup at Greylock: Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Actifio (Part 7)

Sramana: What is the future of the fat startup situation. Of course the market is skewed towards lean startups. Good angels now want to invest in deals that have traction.

Ash Ashutosh: If you get back to the essence of business and the ability to articulate return versus risk, there is a lot of money that chases and enormous amount of risk. There is a boomerang effect where some of those investors want to see companies with customers. If you look at the VC firms that have been trying to raise financing since 2009, it is remarkable how many have not been able to fill up their rounds. Only the top 10% have made money over the past 25 years. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Krish Kupathil, CEO, AgreeYa Mobility (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Krish Kupathil is the founder and CEO of AgreeYa Mobility, an enterprise mobility and mobile system integration company. AgreeYa Mobility provides solutions for collaboration and communication products for mobile platforms, and has a flagship product lknown as Onvelop. Prior to AgreeYa Mobility, Krish was the vice presiden at Azingo, another company in the mobility space that was purchased by Motorola. Prior to Azingo he worked at FSMLabs.

Sramana: Krish, let’s start with your personal story. Where are you from? What is the story to your personal journey?

Krish Kupathil: I was born and brought up in Delhi, India. I did my schooling and college in India. I started dabbling in software in 1987 and did some initial work in India. I got into software related businesses surrounding finance. I did some work out of Europe and Singapore before landing in the U.S. ten years ago. I was involved in a few startups in earlier years as well. >>>

Incubating a Fat Startup at Greylock: Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Actifio (Part 6)

Sramana: What did you position Actifio to be when it emerged as a company?

Ash Ashutosh: There is a lot of data storage sold because people love to protect, share and analyze their data. People spend more data making copies of data and managing data than they do producing data. They spend 5 to 13 times more just making copies of their data. It used to be the same way in the server world. If you wanted email then you bought 2 active directory servers. If you wanted SharePoint then you bought two more. Along came VMware and now you only needed a single server that ran a bunch of virtual machines. >>>

Incubating a Fat Startup at Greylock: Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Actifio (Part 5)

Sramana: The financing market has gone away from fat startups. Everybody wants deals with traction. If you have a company that requires significant amounts of money to prove validation, how do you get that to market?

Ash Ashutosh: This is a pivotal issue to this day. It is the core of culture. I am a VC and I would try to figure out what the next investment I should focus on is. I did not go and talk to Gartner. I did not jump on the next big trend because if someone has figured it out then it is already past. The key is to listen to data points, not opinions. >>>

Incubating a Fat Startup at Greylock: Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Actifio (Part 4)

Sramana: It is interesting that you used different financial strategies in each of your first three businesses. Was this maturation of you as an entrepreneur?

Ash Ashutosh: In each of these cases there was a method to the madness. Your business dictates the resources you bring to the table. Your business dictates the opportunity. If the opportunity small enough then you really don’t need too much money.

Sramana: I think some businesses should not have funding and others clearly should.

Ash Ashutosh: Exactly. AppIQ was a big enough opportunity and even today it dominates the market. >>>