1627: Venky B, Co-Founder, Plivo Shares His Startup Story

Plivo provides easy and affordable APIs for businesses to develop powerful voice and messaging applications. Applications built over Plivo seamlessly integrate across web and telephony, including Mobile, PSTN, VoIP, and Gtalk. But where did it all begin?

Venky B shares the story behind Plivo and how they serve thousands of innovative businesses in more than 190 countries, such as IBM, GoDaddy, PagerDuty, Deckers Brand, etc., through SMS and Voice APIs.

I learn more about how the company's founders all met over GitHub, and the team signed its first paying customers before they had a commercial offering. Venky recommends launching early, iterate with few anchor customers to build a product marketing fit, and charge as early as you can.

For startup founders, Venky B offers the following advice.

Debt Funding: This was a no-brainer for Plivo, and other companies should consider this route as there is no dilution and helps with short-term investments.

Entrepreneurship: Venky has guided the company to hold out from taking money and being trapped. This route is less taken, and Venky shares the benefits that he has seen thus far from this strategy.

Recruiting: In the early days of your company, find passionate early employees who thrive in an unstructured environment. Additionally, hire generalists early and then form more specialized teams as you scale.

Growth: The first step is finding a product-market fit with repeatability, focusing on making a few customers happy, and keeping an eye on churn.

Global Expansion: Whenever financially feasible, build a local go-to-market team and engage customer teams to create passionate customers.