This Serial Entrepreneur Raised $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.

With a rich background in software engineering and a track record of building successful ventures, Rohit’s story provides invaluable insights into getting your first customer, navigating the complexities of raising funding and go-to-market strategies, and scaling a tech business.

In this exclusive interview, Rohit also talks about hiring top talent and the tremendous impact of the right skill sets on the organization. Here’s a detailed look at his journey and the lessons he has learned along the way.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

A Journey Begins in India

A strong emphasis on education characterized Rohit’s early life in India. He recalls growing up in a middle-class family with a father working at the National Bank of India, a homemaker mother, and two siblings.

Rohit was instilled with a deep respect for learning at a young age. His fascination with computers began in 1994 when he encountered GW-Basic. This initial spark ignited a lifelong passion for programming.

This interest led Rohit from building simple calculators to restaurant management systems as his 10th-grade project in high school to developing complex systems during his professional career. He loved mechanical keyboards and the different routines he could write in GW-Basic.

Eventually, Rohit transitioned to C and C++ in his 12th grade. He has been a software developer for more than 15 years now. His early career took off at Tawant, where he spent three to four years.

Here, Rohit worked for Electronic Arts, working on extremely complex and interesting projects like Sims, Sims 3, and Sims Carnival. Online gaming and EA were starting to gain traction, and Rohit was responsible for building search and infrastructure at the company.

The Startup Catalyst: InMobi

Rohit’s professional journey took a significant turn when he joined InMobi, a pioneering mobile advertising company. At InMobi, he was part of a revolutionary shift in mobile advertising, a field that exploded in potential with the advent of the iPhone in 2007.

Rohit recalls how the founders of InMobi spotted the opportunity that there would be at least 10 to 15 times more mobile devices than desktops and computers. They also recognized that the advertising scene on the small screen is set for a revolution.

Joining the company in 2008 during its early days, Rohit played a crucial role in its rapid growth and helped navigate multiple platform changes. He also contributed to its scaling from a nascent startup to a significant player in the mobile ad space.

Rohit’s experience at InMobi was not just about technical growth but also about witnessing firsthand the dynamics of a high-growth startup. This experience laid the foundation for his subsequent entrepreneurial ventures.

Rohit saw how people were quitting their extremely high-paying consulting and technology jobs and going after building for a new market. He dived right in, wanting to be one of the engineers starting almost at day zero.

At the time, series H had just been written, and Rohit and his team saw a huge opportunity to build a massive platform, something that had not been attempted in the past. He also learned a vital lesson that if you can find the right people, you can go ahead and build any kind of solution.

Transition to Entrepreneurship

Opportunity and personal readiness inspired the transition from a successful engineer to an entrepreneur. Rohit realized the potential for innovation in the mobile space and decided to leverage his experience to start his own company, Appsterix.

In retrospect, Rohit talks about how the general assumption when the iOs and Android emerged, was that the world would fragment further. However, it has now turned the opposite way: the consolidation between the iOS and the Android is permanent.

Further, Rohit could see that many more applications would be coming out into the world, and the app economy was taking off. He predicted that virtualization for the mobile space, mobile device management, securing the devices, etc., would gain traction.

Accordingly, at Appsterix, they started building on the idea of virtualizing the mobile OS, which was a huge technical undertaking. However, Rohit concedes they were not ready for it at that time.

Like many startups, Appsterix underwent several pivots and platformization changes, sometimes rewriting the entire platform.

Rohit and his team eventually focused on mobile meetings, creating a precursor to platforms like Zoom. He recounts that the company was a true rocket ship, going from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars in overall ad spend and much more in revenue within a short time.

Rohit reveals how they provided a co-browsing experience for customer support use cases for people looking for great deals, making purchases, and booking online vacations—a very good natural fit. The inspiration was that mobile devices would be a big theme in the future.

The Art of Pivoting and Selling

Looking back, Rohit emphasizes the importance of networking and maintaining relationships. These connections were instrumental in navigating the acquisition process and finding the right fit for the technology and team.

Rohit learned important lessons like focusing on the ideal customer persona or profile and identifying the right people for whom they were building the capabilities.

Another error in judgment was that they were so intent on building the product and technology that they overlooked the building on the business aspect.

Other vital lessons Rohit learned include the importance of adaptability. The absence of the ideal customer profile, a great team, a go-to-market strategy, and projected returns made it impossible to raise funding. Appsterix eventually faced difficulties in scaling and attracting investment.

After nearly 19 months of struggling without significant funding, the decision was made to pursue an acquisition. The sale to [24]7 iLabs was not just a financial transaction but a strategic tech and talent acquisition to ensure the technology and mission continued to thrive.

Post-acquisition, Rohit and his team deployed at really large companies like AT&T, Best Buy, and Hilton. The technology took off significantly, and Rohit went to work at Hortonworks.

The Decision to Join Hortonworks

In retrospection, Rohit reveals how he started interacting with large data platforms for the first time at InMobi. They were dealing with a lot of advertising and publishing data, doing ad-matching algorithms, and collecting logs from all over the system.

In 2008-2009, they were already installing Hadoop at inMobi. So, the exposure from the big data perspective and large volumes of data for real-time batch and reporting was always there. Things were very similar at [24]7 iLabs, where they collected many signals.

Here, the team was trying to synthesize those signals and give the right inputs to the operational folks. In essence, the journey of data continued. Hortonworks was unique because they figured out that everybody would collect a lot more data in the future than they had at that time.

Like Yahoo and Google’s precedents, Rohit and his team saw that open-source software would be pretty significant in the next 10 to 20 years of computing. Communities were being built around large-scale storage and computing on commodity-based hardware instead of expensive hardware.

Rohit wanted to get involved with the community that would work in the future for both data and AI. It was also very clear that data and machine learning were already top-of-mind problems in the 2014 timeframe. These factors prompted the move to Hortonworks.

At Hortonworks, Rohit was involved in three different personas– first, people who cared for the infrastructure. Second, people who were interacting with data through algorithms and data scientists.

And third, people dealing with large-scale data processing using batch and real-time processing engines like Hive and Spark have now become the bedrock of modern SQL and data science technology.

Rohit was also working with a lot of customer requests like banks, financial institutions, telecom companies, and many others. He quickly figured that operating these massive data systems would be a problem. He recognized the opportunity to do something bigger and build a large company.

But this time, Rohit was determined to leverage his previous experiences. He wanted to be clear about the ideal customer profile and persona to go after. He also wanted to ensure they had the right team he could work with for the next ten years.

Rohit also wanted to nail the market opportunity and find the right partners from an investment perspective. Once he had all of that figured out, it became a lot easier to make the decision to take the leap and then start again.

Rebuilding with Acceldata

After reflection and strategic planning, Rohit founded Acceldata in 2018. Drawing on lessons from his previous ventures and his work with large data platforms at Hortonworks, Rohit aimed to address the growing need to monitor mission-critical pieces of software.

Rohit also followed the story of Jyoti Bansal and his company, AppDynamics, for inspiration. His presupposition for the whole problem statement was that data applications and data products will become the lifeblood of the modern organization since they’re dealing with so much more data and signals.

The amount of outcomes they can produce by focusing their entire attention on data is immense and massive. Rohit felt that the next generation of data talk or app dynamics should be built for data ecosystems.

He saw that operators were having trouble operating these massive platforms. Data scientists were not getting the right level and quality of data. And people who were supposed to produce analytics could not produce results at the right time or cost.

Essentially, companies were investing significant sums into their BI analytics and machine learning efforts, so building Acceldata was the right thing to do. Acceldata focuses on providing visibility into operations for big data clusters, ensuring performance and cost-effectiveness.

Rohit reveals how building the product’s first version took around six months. The product would help enterprises with thousands of nodes deployed on their on-premise or cloud infrastructure. They could gain superior performance and manage it automatically without relying on people.

Rohit’s approach to Acceldata reflects a refined understanding of the market and customer needs. The company’s consumption-based pricing model aligns costs with usage and value, which is crucial in tight IT budgets. Four different products are available to customers.

Acceldata has simple vectors for customers. Depending on what they choose from the menu, the pricing is appropriate. They calculate and pay a flat platform fee to be up and running.

Acceldata is committed to ensuring that large transaction companies, credit card companies, telcos, or others keep their data processing costs down. It also ensures that the costs don’t exceed the value returned to the client or compromise on the data quality.

Thanks to efficiency and reasonable pricing, they have landed top clients. Acceldata’s first-ever contract was worth $220K, and Rohit recalls it as a euphoric moment. This achievement validated their approach and provided a solid foundation for future growth.

Insights on Go-to-Market Strategy

Rohit’s insights into go-to-market (GTM) strategy highlight the importance of focus and customer satisfaction. He advocates for an extreme focus on the end user and the buyer’s problem, ensuring that the product not only solves a significant issue but also delivers a superior experience.

The key objective should be to provide tools and technologies that delight the end users who will implement them. Sometimes, focusing on something that doesn’t exist is counterintuitive, particularly when category creation is the goal.

Rohit advises patience and persistence for startups entering new and unknown markets, as the gestation period for new markets can be extended. He estimates that it can be anywhere from six to seven years.

Rohit also advises founders to start investing in advertising early on and enjoy selling their products. They should empathize with the problems their executive sponsors and buyers are concerned about and look for solutions.

Rohit reveals how they have successfully raised funding worth $100M for Acceldata.

Storytelling is everything that Rohit Choudhary was able to master. Being able to capture the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides is the key. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

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Rohit cautions that:

• Capital is not a vanity metric. Eventually, founders have to return the business value for it.
• It’s crucial to find long-term capital providers that are not limited by the number of years the company has just been in. They should help with talent acquisition, operating models, and margins.
• Partner capital providers should have operating experience and deep domain expertise.
• Valuation should be reasonable so that everyone makes money. Founders should keep their company’s and investor’s interests in mind.

Vision for the Future

The vision is toward a zero-touch data management paradigm, where customers are not forced to manually intervene and manage many aspects of their data stack independently.

But the system, with the help of data observability, has the knowledge and smarts to flag issues automatically, and customers are being guided and recommended on what they should be doing, where they should be focused, and what they should be focusing their energy on.

The enterprise data landscape continues to grow at a pace that it almost becomes impossible for people to contain or manage manually. They should know, search, and discover their important data assets.

Using this information, they should take action today across their CRM, ERP, operational data stores, relational data stores, and big data systems, whether on-cloud, on-premise, or hybrid scenarios.

Enterprises should be able to initiate very easy workflows, for example, for business use cases, business workflows, or data quality, reliability, or security. Whether operational or business concerns, they should start and finish or accomplish those workflows quickly.

In case of any problems, getting preemptive alerts is crucial so they can act on them and prevent outages and business losses. Accomplishing these objectives means that data management is operating optimally.

Final Thoughts

For anyone looking to embark on a similar path, Rohit’s story serves as a potent reminder that success often requires not just technical expertise but also a deep understanding of market dynamics, customer needs, and the ability to pivot and adapt in the face of challenges.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• 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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