Rohit Choudhary On Raising $100 Million To Build A Platform To Streamline Enterprise Data Efficiency And Reliability

Rohit Choudhary’s journey from a curious teenager in India to a seasoned entrepreneur and innovator demonstrates the transformative power of technology and entrepreneurial spirit.

His latest venture, Acceldata, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Insight Partners, March Capital, Industry Ventures, Lightspeed, and Sorenson Ventures.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Rohit Choudhary’s journey underscores the transformative power of technology and entrepreneurial spirit in shaping a successful career from a young programmer to a seasoned entrepreneur.
• At InMobi, Rohit played a pivotal role in scaling the company, gaining invaluable insights into the dynamics of a high-growth startup and the importance of having the right team.
• Transitioning to entrepreneurship, Rohit learned that while building great technology is essential, focusing on the business aspects is equally crucial for success.
• Rohit’s experience with Appsterix highlighted the importance of adaptability, the need to pivot when necessary, and the significance of understanding your ideal customer profile.
• Founding Acceldata, Rohit applied his previous experiences to create a company focused on data observability, emphasizing the importance of aligning product offerings with customer needs and market opportunities.
• Rohit’s insights on go-to-market strategy stress the importance of extreme focus on solving end-user problems and the need for patience and persistence when entering new markets.
• Rohit advises that while raising capital is essential, founders should prioritize finding long-term partners who bring deep domain expertise and align with the company’s vision and goals.

 

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About Rohit Choudhary:

As Acceldata’s CEO, Rohit Choudhary is dedicated to transforming the way enterprises manage their Analytics and AI data in complex multi-cloud environments.

His journey as an entrepreneur and product engineer has been guided by a customer-first philosophy, ensuring that every solution they develop at Acceldata is not only technologically advanced but also perfectly aligned with Enterprise-specific needs.

Acceldata is at the forefront of the data management revolution, providing essential Data Observability that makes hybrid multiple cloud data journeys possible.

Rohit is based in California, United States, and brings experience from previous roles at Hortonworks, [24]7 iLabs, Appsterix (Acquired by [24]7 iLabs) and InMobi.

He holds a Delhi Public School and has a robust skill set, including Product Management, Start-ups, Entrepreneurship, Management, Node.js, and more.

Connect with Rohit Choudhary:

• LinkedIn
• TheOrg
• Crunchbase
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: alrighty Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Deal Maker Show. so Today, we have a really exciting founder, and a founder that has done it you know a couple of times. and The last one is a rocket ship, the one that he’s saying really right now. and t We’re going to be talking about this. We’re going to be talking about all the good stuff, how to get your first customer, how to say no to big money coming from customers, ah how to think about your go-to market strategy, or even how to go about hiring and and how to think about employees that can have a tremendous impact within your organization. So again, brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation because the building, scaling, financing, and all of that jazz is coming to a theater near you. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Rohit Chudari. Welcome to the show.

Rohit Choudhary: Hey, Alain. Thank you so much. Really excited to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally born in India. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Rohit Choudhary: Well, life was good. You know, I grew up in a family of three kids. You know, I have an older brother and, and ah you know, my oldest sister. ah So always, you know, the extremely pampered one in the house. I grew up where my father was an employee of the National Bank, you know, Bank of India.

Rohit Choudhary: ah It was very, very interesting. My mother was a homemaker and she took care of us while my father was, you know, away trying to make ends meet. ah Grew up in a middle class family in India and, you know, education was primary. If you did not study hard, you would get, you know, let me say a scolding, beating, whatever, but education was primary. You know, education for my family has been the most important thing and my parents emphasized on that, you know, big time. And I think, you know, it’s gone the same way for my sister and my brother as well.

Alejandro Cremades: So how do you get into engineering? Out of all things, Rohit.

Rohit Choudhary: A very interesting story. I think I started reading about you know computers in 1994. I started with you know GW Basic and I just instantly took like a liking to computer programming and you know thinking about building calculators and you know restaurant management systems eventually as my 10th grade project.

Rohit Choudhary: And I just got you know so interested in computers. you know I like the fact that the the keyboard would make a clicking noise. ah The mechanical keyboards were my favorite. And I used to really love the different routines that you could write in GWASIC. And then eventually, I transitioned to C, and then to C++ plus plus in my 12th grade. And i you know ever since, I’ve just been in love with you know everything which is related to programming.

Alejandro Cremades: And obviously, you know you’ve been a software engineer for quite some time, you know for about 15 years or so.

Rohit Choudhary: That’s good.

Alejandro Cremades: But one of the startups that was seen that really played a pivotal role for you was Imobi. So with Imobi, ultimately, you know like that was the segue into you know to you ah getting going into not only the startup world, but you know basically your segue into becoming an entrepreneur.

Rohit Choudhary: right

Alejandro Cremades: So how was that the that experience like, and what was that transition into also the world of entrepreneurship?

Rohit Choudhary: Yeah, I mean, you know, the first three, four years I spent at you know working on different projects, I was at at a company called Tawant and I used to work for Electronic Arts. um I got an opportunity to work on extremely complex and interesting projects like Sims and Sims 3, Sims Carnival. These were like the days when gaming was getting sort of you know online. and And we were you know very fortunate to have seen that transition of massive companies like EA to you know completely online gaming.

Rohit Choudhary: It was very interesting. you know I was responsible for building search and infrastructure. And in 2007, something changed in the world, and it was called the iPhone. um you know October 2007, iPhone came around, and the founders of Inmobi, they spotted the opportunity that you know there there are going to be at least 10, 15 times more mobile devices than there are going to be desktop and computers.

Rohit Choudhary: And the advertising scene on the small screen is set for a revolution. And they felt that you know there’s a huge opportunity to go and build a mobile advertising network. And I met you know the founders in 2008, early 2008, and eight and you know it was a hugely inspirational moment for me to figure out.

Rohit Choudhary: that people who were sitting in India in extremely good jobs, ah they were quitting their extremely high-paying consulting and technology jobs, and they were going after building for a new market. And I just could not resist the temptation of being part of that. So I became one of the earliest engineers of you know in Moby, and depending upon how you counted, say, the number three or number six.

Rohit Choudhary: But you could say that we were there at almost day zero. ah The series H had just been written and we felt that there was a huge opportunity to build a massive platform, something that I had not attempted you know in the past.

Rohit Choudhary: And I think it became an important lesson for me in life that if you can think something up, then you can also find the right people and you can go ahead and build that solution that you think should be brought to life. Hugely important you know moment for me.

Alejandro Cremades: so So then talk to us about that moment where the idea of you know getting going with your own company, you know which which would be upstairs, how did that come knocking to you? and And at what point do you feel it’s time you know for me to take a crack at entrepreneurship?

Rohit Choudhary: yeah Yeah, I think this is this is the question that everybody struggles with. you know I was in one of the meetings with one of the VCs when I was at Absterix, and ah you know a very favorite person of mine, he actually said something very interesting, which I still remember to the state. He said being an entrepreneur is almost like a non-decision, that you must be an entrepreneur. But how did it come to me? I’d spent about four years at Inmobi, and I’d seen the massive ups and some downs, but mostly the ups that came along with the business. It was just unbelievable.

Rohit Choudhary: It was a true rocket ship. We went from like zero to hundreds of millions of dollars in overall ad spend and you know so much more in revenue um on that platform in such a short period of time. We went through many, many platformization changes. we We rewrote the entire platform to cater to the scale of the business at least twice or thrice in those four years that I spent over there. And I felt that I had developed the majority both on the technical side and on the business side to go and give it a crack.

Rohit Choudhary: It also becomes important that you know you feel I felt that I had an opinion and a voice for the next market that I was going to target. I felt that you know I was ready as a technical founder to go and start my own company. Now, obviously, all of that was not true, ah you know as I found out later in episodes, that you know the preparation needs a lot more practice. And you know of course, there’s nothing better than match practice or game time. The more time that you spend you know as an entrepreneur, the better you get at it.

Rohit Choudhary: The way that the idea of Appsterix came to us was that we figured out, while I was working at Inmobi, that this is going to be a multi-platform world in case of you know iOS and Android. And at that point in time, it seemed that you know the world would fragment further. But now it it has obviously turned the opposite way, which is that the consolidation between the iOS and the Android is permanent.

Rohit Choudhary: But at that point in time, it appeared that you know there’s going to be so many more applications coming into the world. The app economy was taking off. And we felt that virtualization for the mobile space, doing things like you know mobile device management, securing the devices, et cetera, would be a big space. So we started off with the idea of your virtualizing ah the mobile OS itself, which itself was like a huge technical undertaking for which we were not really ready at that point in time, but we still gave it a solid crack.

Rohit Choudhary: And as it happens inside startups, you know over a period of time, you continue to pivot over many, many different kinds of ideas. And the good thing that we did at Appstetics was that we continued to pivot like every two months. And what we found out was that you know mobile meetings will be a big theme going forward in the world. And what we ended up building was the precursor to something like a Zoom, ah which allowed you to you know transfer voice and share content on mobile devices.

Rohit Choudhary: We synchronize across you know Android and iOS devices and use the latest and greatest you know web socket and and other technologies that have just come on the scene. Now eventually that ah got subsumed at 247AI and we provided you know this co-browsing experience for customer support use cases for you know people who are trying to look and look for great deals and make purchases, book online vacations. So it became like a very good natural fit. But the inspiration was that you know mobile devices were going to be a big theme in the future. Just like it was almost like a continuation of the work that I had done it in mobile in terms of you know dealing with large scale infrastructure, et cetera.

Alejandro Cremades: So then, so then in this case, you know, like what ended up happening with the upstairs because, you know, it ended up going through an acquisition. So walk us through what were the motions to all of that money process and how did that came about and how did you guys go about executing on that journey to.

Rohit Choudhary: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, two lessons that I i tell all my, you know, entrepreneur colleagues and friends. is that you know our founder friends and colleagues that you know please keep making you know the network and the relationship so that tomorrow if you know your your your rocket ship doesn’t really take off into space at least you have an option of you know doing something else with the time and money that you have so that you at least go through an acquisition and you know networking was important for us but let me walk you through you know the sequence of events which I think you know many will find very interesting and important and

Rohit Choudhary: Many of those hard knocks that I took during the time of Absthetics have now become so crucial and important in you know ah guiding and running Excel data. I think the number one mistake that we made was that we did not focus on the ideal customer persona or profile. We were not very focused on you know trying to figure out or trying to find who are the people that we are actually building this capability or these capabilities for. We were not very focused on that. I think we should have been a lot more focused on you know those capabilities and making sure that we were building for a persona.

Rohit Choudhary: The second thing obviously was that we were very intent and focused on building the product and the technology as opposed to going and building a business. And I don’t think we managed to make the transition from building a product to building a business. I think that was the second mistake.

Rohit Choudhary: And in the absence of you know the ideal customer profile and who and why will you win in the market, it gets really hard for you know VCs to think about your company or product as a fundable business, which will return a certain set of dollars in a fixed period of time. And we were not therefore able to you know raise capital.

Rohit Choudhary: I think the fourth thing, if I were to say, we were not successful in getting the right kind of people to join us. Because I’m sure that you know if a lot more talented people had joined us, the the story could have been way bigger than the outcome that we got.

Rohit Choudhary: In terms of you know how we went about the process, we figured out in about 19 months, no funding, running after customers one after the other, not being able to close deals. We figured out that we were probably not in the best position to continue with that journey. And so the idea there then became was that what is the best home for this piece of technology and the two of us who are co-founders?

Rohit Choudhary: you know, my co-founder and I, we actually took a very quick decision when the offer came to us that, you know, there’s a possibility that this is a tech and talent acquisition, you know, and this will be a great home for the technology and for the mission to continue. And the mission did continue. We we deployed at really large companies after that, AT&T, Best Buy, Hilton. The technology actually took off, you know, in a very significant way, but we were not the best people and we were not the, you know, we did not, um you know, we were not in the position to take it forward.

Alejandro Cremades: so then So then after the transaction happened, you know you were added for about, I mean, obviously obviously you did the integration you know with the company that that acquired the company, you know which was a 24-7 iLapse, I believe.

Rohit Choudhary: Right now.

Alejandro Cremades: But but and after that, you went to Hortonworks. I mean, it took like about give or take about five years you know for you to kind of like feel that—I don’t know if it was the confidence back or the right timing you know for you to go at it again, because as they say, once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. So what were what were what were the um motions there, you know the sequence of events that they that needed to be realized for you too to feel that it was the time to go at it again with Accel Data? data

Rohit Choudhary: Yeah, I mean, it’s the most interesting journey. So you know it is all when you look at it in retrospect, you find that it’s a few dots will join, but you don’t see the the dots joining forward. You only can you know figure it out as you’re looking at backwards. So the first time that you know I started interacting with large data platforms was at Inmobi, because we were dealing with a lot of advertising and publishing data.

Rohit Choudhary: We were doing ad matching algorithms, collecting logs from all over the system. And the first time that we started installing Hadoop in in in Moby was you know way back in 2008, 2009 timeframe. So the exposure for our you know from a big data perspective from large volumes of data for real-time batch and reporting perspective was always there.

Rohit Choudhary: 247 AI was no different. We were collecting a lot of signals. We were trying to you know synthesize those signals and give the right inputs to the operational folks, et cetera. So I think you know that that journey of data had continued. Hortonworks came together very differently. So Hortonworks was very interesting because it was also a moment for the industry which figured out that everybody’s going to collect a lot more data in the future you know compared to what they had at that point in time.

Rohit Choudhary: The second thing that we figured out that, or not we, but I think companies like Yahoo and Google had set precedent that open source software was going to be pretty significant in the next 10, 20 years of computing.

Rohit Choudhary: That was the second insight. And I felt that the communities which are being built to you know around large scale storage, large scale compute on commodity based hardware and not expensive hardware are going to be critical. So I think the selection became very easy. So it was very easy choice that you know I want to go and get involved in the community, which is going to work in the future for both data and AI. And it was very clear that data and machine learning were already you know top of mind problems by you know for people in 2014 timeframe.

Rohit Choudhary: The kind of work that I did at Hortonworks was involving three different personas, people who took care of the infrastructure, people who were interacting with data through algorithms, which are data scientists, and people who were actually dealing with large-scale data processing using batch and real-time processing engines like Hive, like Spark, which have now become the bedrock of you know modern SQL technology and modern data science technology. i was also you know So I was working on all of those projects together and and products together.

Rohit Choudhary: in in you know As an outside-in view, I was also working with a lot of customer requests and a lot of you know banks, financial institutions, telecom companies, and many others. And I figured out that you know operating these massive data systems is going to be a problem.

Rohit Choudhary: But you know obviously, life happens in between. I could see that there is an opportunity to do something way bigger and build a large company, which we are trying to do at Excel data. But life also happens in between. you know My mom was not well. I had two you know young boys between timeframe 2012 and 2015. There are a lot of things happening at home as well. So I want to make sure that you know two things, the mistakes that I made in the previous one, that I want to be clear about the ideal customer profile and persona that we’ll go after.

Rohit Choudhary: I also wanted to make sure that we had the right team with whom I could work for the next 10 years together. And I was very, very sure that you know we have to nail the market opportunity and the right partners from an investment perspective. Once we had all of that figured out, obviously it became a lot easier to make the decision and take the leap and then start again.

Alejandro Cremades: So then talk to us about that moment where you are like, let’s go. you know Let’s do this.

Rohit Choudhary: Yeah, I mean, the moment is actually a year before we started I figured out that you know this is going to be a huge opportunity. As I was thinking, you know as i you know everybody thinks in terms of models, right i mean the whole training of the human brain happens in in terms of care. Where have I seen this and can this be repeated?

Rohit Choudhary: And, you know, another great company that came out of India, you know, many years ago was Appdynamics. You know, Jyoti Bhan is an amazing founder. But we followed his story about, you know, what he was able to do with Appdynamics. Appdynamics was built after 15 years of successful IT application deployment, which became mission critical. And we figured out that, you know, these mission critical pieces of software need monitoring.

Rohit Choudhary: And my assumption or my presupposition for the whole problem statement was that, you know, data applications, data products will become literally the lifeblood of the modern organization as they’re dealing with so many more data, so many more signals. And the amount of outcomes that they can actually produce by focusing their entire attention on data is just immense and massive. Therefore, they will become mission critical. And we felt that probably there’s like a next generation of data talk or app dynamics to be built here for data ecosystems.

Rohit Choudhary: And that was the unique insight. you know And the way that it came together was that operators are having trouble operating these massive platforms. Data scientists were not getting the right level and the right quality of data. And the people who were supposed to produce analytics, they were not able to produce that at the right time or at the right time or at the right cost. And trust me, companies were already pouring in so much money into their BI analytics and machine learning efforts that it just made sense for us to go and start this company in 2018.

Alejandro Cremades: So what ended up being the business model of Excel data? How do you guys make money?

Rohit Choudhary: Yeah, so a couple of things. right So 2018, when we started, you know of course, you have to think about a company in terms of 10 years of Verizon. So it took about you know six months to build the first version of the product. We came out into the market and we actually started providing visibility into operations for big data clusters. That you know if you have thousands of nodes deployed on your on-premise or on your cloud infrastructure, this is how you actually you know gain superior performance, manage it automatically, and you’re not people dependent. So you’re not running after GSIs and RSIs at that point in time.

Rohit Choudhary: to provide the key and the value you know the valuable support in order for you to run your day-to-day operations your queries finish on time your reports are provided to your business users on time and you’re doing it at reasonable costs. So we started that journey first and obviously you know the pricing that we have you know throughout all our products you know and at this point in time we have four different products All of these products are consumption-based, you know the number of nodes that you deploy, the number of cores that you deploy on, the amount of data that you scan, ah the number of queries that you monitor. So we actually put very simple vectors in front of our customers. And depending upon what they choose from the menu, the pricing is on the right side. You know you multiply the whole thing, pay a flat platform fee, and you’re up and running.

Rohit Choudhary: um you know This is very important as well, particularly in times like these where IT budget spending is so you know um is being examined through extreme levels of detail. It is really important that you know large transaction companies, whether it’s credit card companies or telcos or whoever it is, you cannot have the cost of data processing become greater than the value that it returns to the organization, the cost of data processing, the quality of data,

Rohit Choudhary: that all of that has to yield a 10x value. Otherwise, it becomes real difficult to justify you know future investments. And when you put something like data observability, it allows you to manage your data in a way that it becomes the most effective at the most reasonable prices and costs. I think you know that has become the value proposition for the company in the last you know five, six years.

Alejandro Cremades: so then So then also tell us about how do you guys go about, for example, like getting that first customer. you know what What was that journey like?

Rohit Choudhary: Oh, that was sort of a euphoric moment. So our first customer, you know who was one of the largest conglomerates, a very popular company in the US, I don’t think I’m ah i’m at liberty to name them, but you’ know it was a huge customer. um And the first contract that we got was $220,000. And this was built on the back of the effort of you know just four people sitting in a V-Work office and just endlessly coding, specking, coding, specking for about you know five months’ time.

Rohit Choudhary: But it was a huge euphoric moment because what we figured out was that if we could build something as valuable for such a huge company, a Fortune 10, a Fortune 20 company, we figured out that we’ve landed upon something that if we keep at that for many, many years, we will have a large company at our hands.

Rohit Choudhary: So it was an amazing moment.

Alejandro Cremades: So as ah you’re talking you know here about maybe like applying it to others, you know talk to us about go-to-market strategy.

Rohit Choudhary: I think you know many times this has been said before, so this is not an original. I think an extreme amount of focus on your eventual user to delight them and an extreme value ah value engineering or value focus on your buyer will actually get the job done. So if you’re extremely focused on the key problem that your sponsor is gonna worry about and pay for, that’s a great way to you know secure your dollars.

Rohit Choudhary: And if you can provide the best experience to the people who are going to implement, use ah your tools and technologies, if you can delight them, then you actually just satisfied both of those contingencies. And sometimes it’s you know it’s counterintuitive to focus on something which doesn’t exist, because if you’re doing category creation, such as us, you know when we started in 2018, there was no concept of data observability. People did not know that you could actually implement these tools and make life better.

Rohit Choudhary: um It is important to stick to unknown markets for a little longer than it would normally seem to suggest, because the gestation period for new markets to come together is anywhere between six and seven years. So depending upon you know what your strategy is, if you’re entering a new market, if you’re trying to create a new market, you’ll also have to do a lot of work on GTM. And namely, you know to your question, that you know what are things that you should be focused on? Obviously, the ICP focus and and youre know delighting your user, those are two tenets of the product.

Rohit Choudhary: which you also have to organize and create the market, which is ah you do have to speak to the problem. And obviously you have to ah be part of a cohort of companies that get created before and after you. And the messaging has to be sort of you know differentiated, but it also has to support the theme of what you’re trying to create in the market.

Rohit Choudhary: I think if you are an enterprise-first company, which we are, we are basically the only ones which have a massive coverage in terms of all the five pillars of what Carton has defined eventually as data observability, it’s important to also educate your different constituents, which is analysts, buyers, users, and you know you need to keep doing that for many, many years before your product becomes mainstream.

Rohit Choudhary: So I think you know if you’re an early market category creation, you start investing in the messaging as well as soon as you can. Final thing I would say, you know don’t be shy of selling. you know As a founder, I thoroughly enjoy selling. It’s really important that you get empathetic with the problems that your sponsors, the your exec sponsors, your buyers are concerned about and would like solutions for.

Rohit Choudhary: And we take that responsibility very seriously, that you know yes, we’ve taken money and we are going to solve these problems for you. I would say those are like four or five different things that human GTM will do.

Alejandro Cremades: And what about capital raising? You guys have raised over $100 million. How has that been the journey of raising money to you? Because that’s a lot of zeros.

Rohit Choudhary: Yeah, that’s a lot of zeros. Again, lots of responsibilities. um i I don’t think we’ve raised unreasonable sums of capital. We’ve raised so much that we feel extremely comfortable you know with. um you know You don’t need to raise excessive capital because it’s not a vanity metric. Eventually, you have to pay for it. Eventually, you have to actually return business value out of it. So one needs to be very careful. I can i can give like a framework. One, obviously, you have to have long-term capital providers.

Rohit Choudhary: who are not actually limited by the number of years that the company has just been in the journey with. And they have to truly truly be strategic. they have should They should have the capability of opening doors, providing you access to talent, operating models and margins, and everything else. That’s like the first thing. Second thing is, are they in your space or not? And we were very careful to select you know companies or you know partner capital providers, capital partners who had both the operating experience, but they also had the domain deep domain experience when it came to data, because it is very hard

Rohit Choudhary: to explain certain things to people who, for example, are doing e-commerce or SaaS software. It’s very hard for infrastructure companies to actually have you know the same partnership or the same partner presence in a different kind of a company. So we had to be very domain specific because we’re also you know creating a new category.

Rohit Choudhary: And the third thing obviously is that you know you have to make sure that your valuation is is reasonable so that everybody makes money. So if you can keep your the company’s interest and you know the investor’s interest in mind in the long term, I think you know you’ will have the right arrays.

Rohit Choudhary: We raised in different series of rounds. We obviously got the initial series, you know, see series seed where we already had a very long-term relation with light speed. We raised our A with Sorenson leading, D with inside and C with March and we’ve raised four rounds of funding so far. Obviously, there are like many, many associated partners who actually put in small checks in each of these rounds. ah But so far, you know, it has been a very, very fantastic and a very rewarding journey for, you know, for us and the investors as well.

Alejandro Cremades: so Obviously, with the investors, you know there is a bet on vision. Vision is not only important for investors, but they’re also for customers and and also for employees. right so If you were to go to sleep tonight, Rohit , then you wake up in a world where the vision of Excel data is fully realized. What does that world look like?

Rohit Choudhary: That world looks like you know um that world is called the zero-touch data management paradigm, where you know customers are not being forced to act on so many things on their own, but become you know the system has completely, data observability has inverted their life, and they’re actually being you know largely guided and recommended to what they should be doing and where they should be focused there, you know they should be focusing their energy on.

Rohit Choudhary: because the enterprise data landscape continues to grow at a pace that it almost becomes impossible for people to be able to contain that or manage that on a manual basis. so um What does it mean? It essentially means that you should be able to you know search and discover all your important data assets where you should be taking action today across you know CRM, ERP, operational data stores, relational data stores, and big data you know systems, whether it’s on cloud or on premise or hybrid scenarios. You should be able to you know get the action items for you as opposed to a list or a category or an inventory.

Rohit Choudhary: Number one, number two, you should be able to initiate very easy workflows, for example, for business use cases or for business workflows or for data quality or reliability or security. Whether those are operational concerns or whether they are you know business concerns, you should be able to start and finish or accomplish those workflows very, very quickly.

Rohit Choudhary: The third thing, I would say, is that you know when you get into a problem, getting preemptive alerts, which are not noisy, I would say you know that’s like the third leg of the stool. Because if you get these three things to do, where your workflows are centralized, your discovery is you know inverted, and you’re getting the most important data assets, et cetera, and you’re able to act on alerts or things that may happen in the future, which could ah you know cause an outage or business loss, I think you know you then you have set data management straight.

Rohit Choudhary: which I think has so far been an unsolved problem.

Alejandro Cremades: so Now, we’re talking about the future, but I want to talk about the past and doing so with a lens of reflection. If I was to bring you back in time, and I bring you back in time, maybe you know to that moment that you were thinking about perhaps starting something of your own. okay and Let’s say you know now I bring you back to that moment, is let’s say 2012 or so before you got going with Absterx, and you’re able to give that younger Rohit one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Rohit Choudhary: Never mind. The one piece of advice I’ll give is, obviously, that you know keep working hard, but keep working on a few focused things than many different things. I think youre developing some depth in certain areas is better than you know spreading yourself too thin. And I think I made that mistake at Absterix. I was trying to code, test, ah deploy software solution, talk to customers, and everything else. And it’s good. you know um it’s It’s good to have that energy to go at the market.

Rohit Choudhary: I think what I would also tell the younger Rohit is that you know don’t lose your naivet, that you’ll actually get it done. Because when you know too much, it becomes very difficult to take decisions because you also know the downsides. So i you know I’m glad that you know the the story played out the way that it did. you know I made so many mistakes and I’m better with that. So maybe another advice is that it’ll all work out in the end.

Alejandro Cremades: I hear you. So, Rohit, for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Rohit Choudhary: I’m on LinkedIn, RC online. I’m also RC online on Twitter. And I’m always happy to have like a thorough conversation on technology, product, customers, GTM, whatever you feel like, data management. you know That’s a passion area. Happy to talk about that at any point.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Rohit, thank you so much for being on the Dealmaker show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Rohit Choudhary: and Thank you so much, Alejandro.

*****

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