Gangesh Ganesan On Raising $70 Million To Help You Organize Your Data

Gangesh Ganesan is the cofounder and CEO of PeerNova which enables financial firms to quickly optimize their data, processes, and business. The company has raised over $70 million from investors such as Revolution, Blockchain Capital, Mosaik Partners, Three Tree Ventures, Medici Ventures, Intuitive Venture Partners, and Overstock to name a few.

In this episode you will learn:

The cost of mining bitcoin
How PeerNova is using Blockchain in fintech
How much capital PeerNova has raised already
The $2B market that is on its way to being a $10B industry
Gangesh’s two top tips for new founders

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About Gangesh Ganesan:

Gangesh Ganesan is the founder and CEO of PeerNova.

Gangesh Ganesan has been a successful entrepreneur for over two decades, and his journey into blockchain entrepreneurship began with the founding of PeerNova in 2013, preceding both Ethereum and Hyperledger.

Gangesh Ganesan and PeerNova attained a unique understanding of decentralized and distributed networks and their inherent trust and transparency attributes while building one of the largest bitcoin mining operations in the world.

At its peak, this mining operation had over 6k servers, used 10+ megawatts of power, and mined 47,000 bitcoins in approximately nine months. Under the leadership of Gangesh Ganesan, PeerNova hired top Silicon Valley engineering talent with deep expertise in real-time streaming, enterprise security, and Big Data.

Additionally, financial industry veterans in post-trade processing, collateral, custody, and middleware applications joined Gangesh Ganesan at PeerNova. With collective expertise in both technology and finance, PeerNova has built the Cuneiform Platform, a solution that enables financial institutions to perpetually synchronize their data across multiple internal and external systems guaranteeing data and process integrity.

Cuneiform is purpose-built for reducing friction both within and in-between financial institutions that execute high-value transactions in multiple asset classes, involving complex multi-party workflows and large datasets.

Over the past five years, Gangesh Ganesan has worked closely with large financial institutions globally to solve specific challenges in post-trade processing, trade validation, and exception management to eliminate traditional reconciliations.

Under Gangesh Ganesan leadership, PeerNova has become one of the first blockchain-inspired technology companies to generate recurring software revenue from key financial institutions.

Connect with Gangesh Ganesan:

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FULL TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INTERVIEW:

Alejandro: Alrighty. Hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMakers show. Today we have an interesting guest who has been at it for 20 years, so there’s a lot of experience there, a lot of lessons, and a lot of insights. I think without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today. Gangesh Ganesan, welcome to the show today.

Gangesh Ganesan: Thank you, Alejandro. It’s great to be on the show today with you.

Alejandro: Originally, you grew up in India, born and raised in India, so how was life there?

Gangesh Ganesan: It was good. I grew up in southern India. I had a great life with my family and one younger brother. I ended up doing my early schooling there, and I did my undergrad engineering degree in India. Then I came to the U.S. in 1993.

Alejandro: Just out of curiosity, why is everyone in India doing engineering? What’s going on?

Gangesh Ganesan: It’s a very interesting question. Broadly speaking, India is a populous country, so by very definition, there are lots and lots of people studying advanced degrees, engineering being one of the more popular fields. In my specific case, my father actually worked in an engineering company. It was a chemical engineering company. My father was not an engineer; he was an accountant. He worked in the finance area, finance and accounting. All the people who were friends of my father’s and therefore, people that I looked up to at that time were engineers. That’s why I ended up being an engineer. In India, engineering is regarded very highly because people in India want value education too. They think engineering is probably one of those good career choices for their children, so parents highly encourage their children to study engineering.

Alejandro: Was it a crazy transition where all of a sudden, you found yourself in Minnesota doing your Master’s in electrical engineering?

Gangesh Ganesan: Absolutely. The interesting thing is that I grew up in the absolute southern part of India, which is roughly a few degrees north of the equator. So, obviously, my life experience was entirely living, where the lowest temperature was 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the highest temperature was 120 degrees Fahrenheit. I came to Minnesota, the Land of the Lakes and the Land of the Cold, an absolutely frozen place, so welcome to the real world, and I was facing -20 degrees and the like. It was a transition. But I came to do my Master’s in engineering. I had enough skills in my engineering that education-wise, it was okay, but culturally and temperature-wise, it was a dramatic shift.

Alejandro: Obviously, it took a bit for you to go at it. First, you did a little bit of a rodeo in corporate. I know that this was your first exposure to networking and telecommunications. Your first job was Bosch, and then you did Cypress semiconductors. What were the key insights that you got from those two experiences, which were about eight years?

Gangesh Ganesan: Bosch was an interesting company. It was my first company, a global conglomerate, one of the largest companies in Europe, and they had a division out of North America. It was a very diverse company. The particular division I was working for was on telecommunications, based in the Mid-West. The culture was very Mid-Western. People there typically worked in the company for 20 to 30 years. When I joined the company, there were a lot of references in the company, people who had worked for many years. It was an interesting culture. I started there as an engineer, and then eventually moved to product management, and ended up running a small business inside Bosche. At Cypress, though, the company is very different — a Silicon Valley company. The CEO of Cypress, a gentleman by the name T. J. Rodgers, who is a legendary founder in Silicon Valley, a very interesting personality, very outspoken, very abrasive. He used to write Wall Street Journal articles frequently on technology and how to run a technology company. I came to Cypress, where the culture was very fast-moving, Silicon Valley culture, and very different from Bosche. In both places, the interesting thing is that in Bosche, the culture of the company is very strong. Obviously, they value their employees very much and wanted to satisfy their clients at all cost. So that was the Bosche culture. Cypress had a very strong culture as well. They believed that the culture of the people translated into success with customers. They screened for culture on the people who they hired. Both were interesting journeys for me. I learned a lot of interesting tools and skills at both companies.

Alejandro: For you, now, it is the first time to get to experience what business is all about rather than being so engineering-focused. What was that transition for you where all of a sudden, you’re starting doing business, which you had no clue of because all you knew was how to resolve complex situations as an engineer?

Gangesh Ganesan: That’s right. The first part of the transition happened at Bosche. When I first took over running a business, it was a rough transition for me. I was heading up an engineering team. I started as an individual contributor, and very quickly, they liked me, and they promoted me a couple of times. I ended up running an engineering group. Then suddenly, they asked me to run an adjoining sister business that was looking for a business leader and was very different. I had to go, I recall, in the first week on a trip to the UK and meet with the team there. Part of the business was located in the UK, and part of it was located in Germany. Here I was, purely an engineer, at least in the minds of those people, trying to come in and suggest ideas on how to run this business better. So it was a learning process. A couple of years at Bosche, I was entirely learning. I should say, in retrospect, I have great friends today at Bosche that I remained in touch with. There were some great mentors there that helped me. I should say, in that first transition from engineering to business, the first couple of years, I really struggled. I was bringing mostly an engineering-centric view into running a fairly complex business, and I needed a lot of help from a lot of people to a) contribute to that area, and b) even make that transition. Now, I look upon it fondly, but at that time, I should say that I probably struggled.

Alejandro: What kind of help did you need, and what kind of people did you surround yourself with to be able to get back up and running.

Gangesh Ganesan: There are several key people at Bosche. The president of the business unit’s name was Dan Dantzler, who took me under his wing and helped me, coached me. He would even tell me how to run a meeting or how to interact with some people. I owe a lot of thanks to Dan. The head of the business to whom I reported to was Ralph Strader. Ralph, as well, gave me a lot of coaching, particularly on product management. Bosche decided to send me to an executive MBA program. The University of Minnesota had an executive MBA program at the time. I continued working fulltime, but every other Friday and Saturday, I would go to school to the University of Minnesota for a time. In two years, I finished my MBA. They thought interacting with other peers who were coming to a management school and having a broader business vision would help me in my job. So those were the things that happened for me. What I surrounded myself with were peers from the industry from whom I could learn, and also other key mentors in the company. That opportunity was offered to me.

Alejandro: On your next gig with Cypress, you start to experience Silicon Valley. You start to make good friendships there, and one of those friendships got you into the world of startups. What happened there?

Gangesh Ganesan: Yeah. Cypress is still a very large semiconductor company, one of the largest semiconductor companies today in Silicon Valley. I did well in the booking area. The clients are mostly Cisco and a whole bunch of other networking clients. Some of them don’t exist anymore directly in the same way, but Nokia, Exxon, Lucent, some big telecom vendors in Japan, Asia, so global clients. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about global business. Cypress gave me that opportunity to travel and meet networking clients around the world. That was one. 2) I met the person who ran the entire business, who was Cathal Phelan. Cathal had been a long-time Cypress executive. He had grown up in Cypress since the early days of Cypress. He reported directly to T. J. Rodgers, and he became my mentor. Together we had an opportunity to spin out one of the businesses at Cypress, which we did. We brought in an investment banker and then spun that business out. Then we ended up selling it to a company called NetLogic Microsystems, which eventually became Broadcom, and we learned a lot. The thing that I learned most there is not just about how to do such transactions, which is one part of learning how to run a business, how to sell a company, how to put a deal together, and the like. I also got a lot of help and coaching from Cathal, who became my mentor. After selling this business to Broadcom, I worked for another company called Marvell Semiconductor. Cathal went on and took over as CEO of a company called Ubicom. Subsequently, Cathal recruited me to join him at Ubicom, and I joined him at Ubicom. It was a good journey at Cypress.

Alejandro: Now, once you joined Ubicom, there are some tough times that happened because we experienced the economic downturn and all the different events that were no fun. During one of those times, you were literally meeting with the board and with your friend as well. Then all of a sudden, things took a turn. What happened there?

Gangesh Ganesan: Yeah. I owe a lot to Cathal because prior to that, I was always working one level below the CEO. Cathal reported into the CEO in Cypress. When I came to Ubicom, Cathal was the CEO, so I reported directly to him. Cathal was very open and friendly, and he made me present to the board directly. During the board meetings, I had an opportunity now to work and work with large VCs who had invested in Ubicom and also with members. I learned that skill and Cathal coached me a lot in how to present to the board. As you mentioned, you’re absolutely right. In one of the board meetings, the meeting took an interesting turn. At the end of the board meeting, I found myself being requested by the board to take over as the CEO because the board was deciding to let Cathal go. Here I was, my mentor who brought me into the company and coached me for many years, that I’m going to replace him and take over his job, which was a difficult time. Interestingly, Cathal helped me in that transition. He was very graceful and kind toward me and helped me in that transition to take over as the CEO. It is something that I’m eternally grateful to Cathal for.

Alejandro: That’s probably a lesson for all of us because here is the founder of the business, being literally told to leave by the board, and here he is setting up to succeed. What did you learn as a human being and professional from that?

Gangesh Ganesan: I learned a lot. Even today, Cathal is one of my closest friends and mentors. We meet very often and talk about life and business. But you’re absolutely right. This was not just about business learning. It was about learning about life, that life can be different and difficult at times, and that you can have challenges, and that you can have some situations that you’re not even foreseeing because when we walked into that board meeting, certainly we were not foreseeing the particular outcome that ended up happening that day. So, within a matter of a couple of hours, here I was in this particular situation. What I learned was that you have to learn to accept things in life, and no matter what and loyalty to people comes first. So, Cathal, in that sense, was absolutely teaching me the life lesson that people matter and that loyalty to people matters because that’s what he taught me. It’s been something that’s been deeply embedded in me and how I work now for the rest of my career.

Alejandro: Now, you’re taking over the reins. It’s 2008, and the world is falling apart, and you’re tasked with fundraising. What happened there?

Gangesh Ganesan: 2008 is when this happened. As you all know, 2008 was the absolute meltdown of the financial world. In general, the world went into a very serious liquidity crunch. The most interesting part of the story for me is that Ubicom, at this time, was funded by venture capitalists. There were a couple of Sand Hill Road VCs that were investors. We also had a strategic investor at that time, Samsung. One of the other big investors was Lehman Brothers. If you recall, it was Lehman Brothers going down that actually caused the original panic in 2008. Lehman Brothers had a VC arm, and it was called and still is called Kinara Capital. They were one of our big investors. This was a particularly challenging time to go raise capital. For a few months, it was touch and go. I did not know whether the company would make it. The association with Lehman Brothers in itself was looking like it would pull the company down, but eventually, I made it through. My existing investors and some new investors came in, and we ended up raising the capital. The big lesson that I learned was that financing is very important, particularly in the context of finding. When there is an opportunity to raise capital, do it and do it quickly rather than drag it and look for the best terms because sometimes, external market forces can come in and hit you, and you may not be able to recover from those shocks. At Ubicom, I was lucky enough at that time to recover, but that was purely being lucky. That’s the big lesson I learned at that time.

Alejandro: In terms of fundraising in a downturn. Let’s say if you had to deal with another downturn again in the future, what was your biggest lesson about raising money in a downturn?

Gangesh Ganesan: Two things that were big lessons. 1) Perseverance — you have to go to a lot of people during a downturn. In particular, you have to be ready to think about non-traditional sources of financing. You’ll have to go wide and talk to lots of people. I should say at Ubicom, I may have talked to over 200 investors, and finally, two of them agreed to invest. Two hundred investors were 200 meetings, and maybe in some cases, more than one meeting. In some cases, the meetings were spaced apart by many weeks. It was a very long process. As the CEO and founder, you have to persevere during these difficult times and not give up. That’s one lesson. 2) Lesson two is one that I shared earlier. When you have an opportunity to close a deal, you have to be ready to close the deal quickly rather than focusing too much on terms, valuation, and the like because it is a downturn, and you have no idea how long a downturn will last. You’re better off with cash in the bank rather than facing an even longer journey. Those were the two key lessons I would tell anyone who is trying to raise money during a downturn.

Alejandro: Very cool. Today, I read a stat that the bear market is 30 months and then is 22 months to recover after that. So, pretty interesting data. Here, Gangesh, you were lucky. Preparation definitely met opportunity, and you guys ended up selling to Qualcomm, which is quite a positive outcome given the circumstances that you were facing earlier. Then you really went at it, and you started your very own business. Tell us about this with Locomatix.

Gangesh Ganesan: This was a journey again. After selling the company to Qualcomm, I decided that I would take a brief hiatus. I was off for a few months, mostly traveling and recovering from my Ubicom time. It was a very busy five-year career. Even though I was taking a break, I thought I’d attend a few conferences and the like. I attended a few data conferences. The Big Data World was just emerging. It was somewhat immature at this time. A lot of companies were getting formed in the Big Data World. I must have attended maybe 10 or 15 conferences, mostly here in Silicon Valley. I was blessed to be here in Silicon Valley. I attended a lot of meetups and conferences and found the whole area of big data fascinating. Now, I had mostly a background in networking, and data really fascinated me at that time, thinking that data is going to be the next big revolution. So I decided that if I’m going to do a company, I’m going to do it in data. I joined a group of entrepreneurs, a couple of people that I had known socially. One of them was an active faculty member at that time at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in computer science. His name is Dr. Jignesh Patel, and another co-founder was Karthik Ramasamy. He had been at Yahoo briefly and at a few other places. There were four of us, and another co-founder was Sanjay Kulkarni, who had spent most of his career at Google at this time. The four of us decided to do Locomatix, which was, how do you do streaming and real-time applications using Hadoop? At this time, Hadoop was entirely batch in non-real time. We thought doing real-time using Hadoop and solving this big data problem would be very valuable. So we founded the company together and built the team. At this time, Twitter was just about getting to be a popular mainstream social tool. Obviously, Twitter needed a lot of data sites, and they were trying to build a business around selling ads on their platform. They thought the technology that we were building would be very valuable for them. Very quickly, within about 18 months of founding the company, they came in and bought us, and they brought the technology. That technology today is open source. It’s called Apache Storm, and Storm is very popular even today as stream data framework used in Wall Street and many other application areas. The company Locomatix technology is part of Apache Storm. When we went to Twitter, we built the next-generation version of it called Apache Heron, which is a successor of Storm. Both of these are fairly popular in open source streaming frameworks today. I was very happy to be part of that journey into the data world.

Alejandro: Eighteen months sounds like not a long time. Why so early? What was that discussion that you guys had when you said, “Let’s pull the trigger and make this transaction”?

Gangesh Ganesan: As I told you, I had a couple of different experiences before. I sold a business to Broadcom, and I also had an opportunity to do the sale of the company to Qualcomm — Ubicom to Qualcomm. When Twitter came in, we were fairly early. We had built our first version of our product, and we had a few early clients. Orange, the large telecom company, was one of our clients. The retail giant, 7-Eleven, was one of our clients. We had just gotten our first couple of clients, and we were working with a few other clients when Twitter came in and said, “We think this technology is very valuable for us. We’d like to buy. Like I said, in some cases, timing is everything. We felt, at least at that time, the four co-founders, that the best opportunity for this industry, for us, and for that technology was at Twitter. The big data world was still nascent. Hadoop was still young and immature. Companies like Calera and Hotworx, which all went public much later, were still trying to establish their business. So building streaming applications on Hadoop was still very early. We thought that was the right decision for us personally, as the co-founders based on the deal that was being offered to us, and for the overall enablement and usage of the technology. My personal take on it is that’s co-founder-led, founder’s-led. Founders have to make the decision as to when is the right time to exit? For that company, we thought that was the right decision. In retrospect, it was the right decision.

Alejandro: Very cool. This was a nice segue into PeerNova. PeerNova is your latest baby, and we’d love to hear how you incubated the idea, and how did you bring it to life?

Gangesh Ganesan: We did the deal with Twitter. Another friend a mine pointed me to Bitcoin, which was very early. At this time, no one knew about Bitcoin. This was 2013 when Bitcoin hadn’t hit mainstream consciousness. No one even knew about this. Very few people had enrolled in the industry. I read the original famous Satoshi Nakamoto white paper. I got interested and got a learned idea by starting a company. I started this company, PeerNova. The idea was that we’d learn more about this Bitcoin, and what is this technology, and what is its potential? In some sense, this company was started without a very clear mission early on, other than saying, “We’re going to learn about this very interesting idea called Bitcoin, and we’ll see where the journey takes us.” It was a true plunge as an entrepreneur into the unknown for me. I started the company. The only thing we thought that we would do at that time was learn the technology, and one way to learn the technology was to deeply immerse ourselves. The way we immersed ourselves was mining bitcoins. We mined a few bitcoins. It looked interesting, and then we said we’d mine a few more. We joined a group, and very soon, we were mining bitcoins at scale. We were having 10 megawatts of power within nine months. We had mined thousands of bitcoins. Bitcoin, suddenly from about $10, went up to $1,000 in pricing. We thought, “Wow. There may be a business here to do. It was a journey. The early learning that we had was that Bitcoin mining itself was somewhat a commodity. While we did mine some bitcoins and bitcoin price went up, it was quite expensive to mine the coins because the power cost for mining was generally offset by the price of the bitcoin. To pay the power bill, 10 megawatts of power every month meant that the power bill was huge. We were paying power bills in the range of millions of dollars every month, but we were mining bitcoins as well. We realized that maybe that’s not the best thing to do, this technology. By now, we had gotten a deep understanding of the core technology behind bitcoins, which is called Blockchain, which allows us to build distributed software for many different applications, including the financial markets. Within a year, the company found its true mission, which is how do you use this Blockchain technology, secure data, and solve some problems that are very hard to solve within the financial markets? My knowledge of Hadoop and the streaming applications that I had built for Locomatics became very handy. I tried to combine the ideas from the Big Data World together with this Blockchain bitcoin world, and that’s PeerNova for you. Our core technology combines the best ideas from Blockchain and connects it together with some big data ideas to solve some core problems within the financial market. That’s what PeerNova’s journey has been.

Alejandro: Obviously, there are going to be a lot of people that are not as sophisticated when it comes to technology, that might be listening, and they’re wondering how do they do this? How do they combine Blockchain? What’s Blockchain? What is this data play that they’re doing? How would you make it in a way that someone that has no clue from a tech perspective understands?

Gangesh Ganesan: I’ll give you a simple example of how things work. I’ll take two contrasting companies. One will take Google, which is obviously a very modern data company, which has essentially been the backbone of the internet companies for the last 20+ years. In Google, they’re cataloging and searching the entire internet, and they’ve invented many wonderful technologies that allow them to operate at this giant scale. How do you allow anyone to search anything on the internet and produce the result within a second of typing anywhere, on your mobile device, laptop, computer, anywhere? That means Google knows how to organize all of the internet’s data in some uniform way and give you the results quickly. That’s Google. There are a lot of companies in the new data world that model themselves on this kind of idea. I’m going to contrast this with some other company. Let’s take a company like Citibank. As we know, Citibank is another very big company. They have branches in hundreds of countries, thousands of branches, and is one of the big sprawling financial companies in the world. But Citibank has been put together by many merges and acquisitions. The parent company of Citibank Corporation had been around for probably 100 years. The financial industry is a mature industry. Compared to Google, if you look at Citibank, Citibank has lots and lots of data. They have client data for hundreds of millions of clients worldwide. But the challenge for Citibank is that because they’ve been built over many decades, their data is fragmented across many, many different systems and many different applications. If I’m running a business inside Citibank, and I want to get a consolidated view across all these different things, the effort that they have to do is very different and somewhat more difficult in some senses than Google’s problem of organizing the internet. The reason for it is that here, you’re faced with many fragmented legacy applications and systems, not all of which have cataloged and organized their data in a uniform manner. What we at PeerNova do is help Citibank or any other financial institution like that organize their data in a more unified, streamlined manner so that they can access any information instantaneously like Google does. That’s number one. Number two, because the data is fragmented in so many different places, it is hard to know what data is correct. This technology behind Bitcoin is called Blockchain allows us to more quickly and easily verify and validate the correctness of the data in real-time. To the first order, what does PeerNova do? We take many fragmented data sources that are there in any enterprise, particularly financial enterprises, and bring them together in a way so we can unify them, validate, and share the correctness of that data so that their business people can use it or their clients can use it to make intelligent business decisions. That is what Peer Nova does.

Alejandro: Very cool, and for this, you guys have raised quite a bit. How much have you raised so far?

Gangesh Ganesan: We’ve been fortunate. PeerNova is supported by some great investors. Our clients have been the reason why we’ve been so successful in raising capital. Sometime in October of 2019, we announced a new round of 30+ million dollars. Over the last 5+ years that the company has been around, we’ve raised north of 60 to 70 million dollars so far. We’ve been very blessed and fortunate to have investors and clients and customers that have supported us in our journey.

Alejandro: Very nice. Where do you see your industry going as a whole?

Gangesh Ganesan: Let me give you this following take. As we all know, data is the oil of the next generation of economy. It’s already the oil for many industries, as we know. What PeerNova does is provide a set of solutions in an area that we call Active Data Governance. As we all know, data not only is the oil of the economy, but there are lots of people around the world, including regulatory bodies, countries, governments, and others that are wanting to make sure that data is handled correctly by the institutions. If I’m a client, and I’m providing data to any financial institution or otherwise, I want to make sure that my data is secure, safe, protected, that my data is not being exploited in the wrong way. In the data world, data security and data governance become very important. In the year that PeerNova has chosen to focus on is in guaranteeing the correctness of the data and also ensuring that the data is governed and managed and all the policies and rules are correctly enforced on the data so that any business that uses the data is a responsible data custodian of that data. And so that anyone or any data citizen using that data can feel confident and secure that their data can be trusted because the right governance infrastructure is in place. That’s where we see PeerNova going, and we think this is a very big area. GDPR in Europe is an example of where people are trying to see some governance around that data. The state of California has similar laws in the U.S. that are lots of laws about data perfection, so broadly, the area that PeerNova works on is this area called Data Governance.

Alejandro: How big do you think this market is?

Gangesh Ganesan: It’s already a fairly big market. There are many different tools broadly used in the active data governance area. People have what I call metadata management tools, which in itself is a big category. It’s about a billion-dollar category today and growing rapidly. Then there are tools for doing data quality, which is another probably a billion-dollar category, and this area is also growing. There are other aligned areas. How do you manage business necessities? How do you ensure data quality across and into applications? So there are some new and emerging applications coming. My forecast for this market is that — today, it’s net/net is about two billion dollars or so, but it’s growing. It’s going to be growing at a very rapid rate. In the next five years, tools for governing and managing your data are probably going to go to be a huge segment in the range of about 10 billion within the next five years. This is my belief, and that’s why PeerNova is focused on this market.

Alejandro: Got it. One of the questions that I typically ask the guests that come on the show is knowing what you know now if you had the opportunity to go back in time and give that younger Gangesh that was thinking about launching a business, what would be that one piece of advice that you would give to your younger self and why knowing what you know now before launching a business?

Gangesh Ganesan: It’s a great question. My first advice to my younger self is, learn patience. Things take longer than what you like. Building a business can be difficult, and it certainly required patience. That’s one advice I would give. The second advice I would give to my younger self is, learn how to have the right kind of work/life balance. This is a big thing I would give to my younger self. The younger Gangesh used to want to run all the time and wanted everyone in the company to run with him at the same pace. Because patience is the real virtue here, you need to know as an entrepreneur and founder, given all the difficult situations you’ll face, how to learn tools that would help you manage your work/life balance. Today, I have a morning routine. I meditate every day. I have a certain exercise regimen. I try to follow that almost every single day. When I was younger, I didn’t have the patience for it or sometimes did not know the value of tools like that. I would say this to any entrepreneur, “Learn how to manage your work and life in the right way. Don’t be consumed by work because, at the end of the day, it is life that matters.” That would be the advice that I would give.

Alejandro: I love it! Gangesh, for the folks that are listening, what is the best way for them to reach out and say hi?

Gangesh Ganesan: I’m on LinkedIn. You can look me up, Gangesh Ganesan, CEO of PeerNova. You can go to PeerNova.com, our website. Come in and learn about us. At PeerNova, we’re always interested and excited to talk to new people. We’re always looking for new people to join our team, so welcome. Emails are connected through LinkedIn. That would be the best way to reach me.

Alejandro: Amazing. Thank you so much, Gangesh, for being on the DealMakers show today.

Gangesh Ganesan: Thanks, Alejandro. Thanks for having me. It’s great being a part of your journey, and I really appreciate the opportunity here.

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