The Internet of Things category is not slowing down for anyone to catch up. It is projected to be a $1.1 trillion category by 2027, with the number of active IoT-connected devices ​​expected to reach 30.9 billion units by 2025. Targeting this, we have our guest Yadhu Gopalan, CEO & Founder at Esper, with a vision to power the next billion smart devices.  Currently, Seattle-based Esper has more than 200 paying customers and over 2,000 developers using its platform for product development. During the episode, Yadhu talks about his journey building Esper, how he met his cofounder, what learnings he has brought from his stint at Amazon and Microsoft, and much more. Notes –  01:12 – Journey before starting Esper 02:20 – Early Childhood and moving to the US 03:48 – Problem statement behind starting Esper 05:25 – Product offering and clients 10:25 – The founding team at Esper 15:43 – Attracting the best talent 16:50 – Building a team across geographies 19:07 – Execute distribution and partnerships at scale 20:39 – Work Culture & learnings from Microsoft & Amazon 27:51 – Key learnings from his startup journey Read the full transcript here: Yadhu 0:00   I think we are one of the best customer teams. We have a great customer success team, our engineers are customer obsessed, our marketing team is customer obsessed , and the sales team will get on a call and help the customer with anything. And that’s really important. And that’s a testament to the zero churn we have across the board. We have customers that love us, and will give good feedback. And that’s one of the things I took away from Amazon. The other thing is kind of like this whole idea of being able to bias faction leaders to have, like, borrow what you need and bring those on. Even kind of like, how do you build great scalable engineering? What are the processes you do? So many aspects of that we take, but at the same time, like let’s say tech engineering is like how do you have a built scalable system but also don’t over build? Because you’re at a startup phase, you don’t want to over engineer and over build, yet you don’t know if this particular thing is gonna work. So, you get to do just the right amount, and it’s a big balance. Siddhartha 1:10   Dear listeners, this is your host Siddhartha Ahluwalia, founder of 100x Entrepreneur Podcast which I started with my wife Nansi. Before we begin, I would like to thank our sponsors Prime Venture Partners. Prime is the first institutional investor in the category creating tech startups like MyGate, Dozee, NiYo and PlanetSpark. Prime is now investing out of its fourth Fund, which is more than 100 million dollars. Today, I have Amit Somani, Managing Partner Prime Ventures, Amit, how does prime help the portfolio post investment? Amit  1:45   Thank you Siddhartha. So, at Prime, all of the three partners Sanjay, Shripati and myself have been in the trenches. We were operators and entrepreneurs before we were VCs. So, we work with the founders in many different ways, largely depending on the company and their needs. So, we can help them with products, with brainstorming about business strategy, about go to market, about partnerships, etc. All the way to really sort of help get the company both to product market fit, and perhaps even find escape velocity to grow beyond that. Last but not the least, we help the company prepare and get access to subsequent rounds of financing. Siddhartha  2:24   Thank you Amit. So, listeners, let’s dive straight into this week’s podcast. Today I have with me Yadhu Gopalan, co-founder and CEO Esper, Esper is a device DevOps platform that helps organizations remotely scale and manage their mission critical devices. Esper offers an Android DevOps Saas platform that provides a mature cloud infrastructure for customers across industries who are building app solutions for mission critical devices. Yadhu has over 25 years of experience and 35 patents in embedded systems and security. His career includes roles as chief architect of Windows CE, Windows Phone. At Amazon Yadhu designed the backend solutions for the first Fire OS and AWS before he owned system engineering for Amazon Go. He is a pioneer of the DevOps revolution, and hundreds of millions of devices run code that he’s personally built. Yadhu, welcome to the 100x Entrepreneur Podcast. Yadhu  3:25   Thank you, thank you for having me on. Siddhartha 3:27   Yadhu, we would love to know your journey, your professional journey you can summarize before building Esper. Yadhu  3:35   As you said, we spent 25 years in the industry, about 16 of those were with Microsoft, and six or seven of those were with Amazon. So I really started off as a kind of an operating system developer building kernels and file systems at a really low level. And then along the way, kind of grew up as clouds came on and started building on cloud and larger scalable systems that are interactive with both devices and the cloud. built many different devices of various types and forms to automotive, to even gaming machines to music players. So a lot of experience there. And as we talk later on, a lot of this experience for experts comes out of my experiences from a lifetime of building the substance with whether it’s in Amazon Go to 1000s of devices in the store, etc. But I’m really proud of being able to do some really core engineering. Siddhartha  4:40   And if we step back, if you could tell us about where you grew up. And then how do you move, across countries for your study?  Yadhu 4:49   So at a very young age. We moved to, I think I was eight years old when I moved to the US when the three gentlemen.My parents were both computer engineering professors back then. So that’s where I kind of, I was born in Tamil Nadu, and then even at a very young age, we moved over there got into elementary school and stuff and ended up doing College in the same state in the state of Maine. I think back then I was the only Indian in the whole school as far as elementary and etc, college a little bit more so a lot better. But it was a different time, it was definitely the corner of the United States. But I had a lot of fun. And that’s where I kind of got my  start, I would spend a lot of time because it was right next to my college, I would spend a lot of time with the college professors in the computer labs. From very early on, I had a graduate student who used to teach me programming when I was in fifth grade. So he’s an IIT Professor now. And so that’s kind of the background, growing up with mainframes, and then eventually having to work on devices in corporates. Siddhartha  6:06   And what problem did you observe in the industry that made you start Esper? Yadhu  6:11   That’s a really good question. So as I said, I have spent a lot of time with devices. And really went from early on, we used to basically ship CDs to manufacturers and manufacturers would build devices etc, to a one year two year cycle. But we are kind of cloud connected, connectivity came where you could push updates, the ability finally came out that you can actually send an update to a device. But then also like consumer devices, though, it’s kind of changed. Everybody expects updates, everybody expects to be able to have rapid development, and agile programming, DevOps, and all these things that they can be fairly new. Like DevOps has really been in the industry for 10 years. And when I was in Amazon, Amazon is an example of how we had to build up this new systems and new devices for these amazing stores, and no, what we spent, I think the first six months or more just building infrastructure. And before we could actually do the value prop of the system.  And that’s what kind of like this thing started getting into my head like, what if we could kind of democratize this? What if we could kind of make this really available? So you don’t have to spend very precious engineering resources, trying to duplicate infrastructure over and over again? So that’s really kind of the negative idea or the thing of like, that’s something interesting to do. Siddhartha 7:42   And can you describe the current solution of Esper and which industries are using it the most? Yadhu  7:49   Yeah, definitely. So what we’re really trying to do is kind of make deployment to devices as easy as what it is now on the cloud, being able to push code at will. And that’s key, push code that will push, have a repeatable process, have great monitoring, so you can trust it, and that it doesn’t exist right now is taken for granted on the cloud, like I got a security patch, that I have to push up, it’s like, within weeks, you’re like working on something, you got a solution, you’re pushing it up. Devices, like you’re paranoid about what you need, what you’re going to do to the devices, you really want to push these important security patches, or even like customer facing features, you find it really hard to get that out there. Because you don’t want to kind of rip the device. So you don’t want to create this and you have no idea you might have missed the device. And you don’t want to do a recall. So that is where we come in. It’s kind of like other places, we do a lot of other things, but the basic is create the trust that you can have to be able to push code content configuration to your devices that will. Siddhartha  9:02   And which of these kinds of devices that you are talking about, where are they installed? Yadhu 9:06   So the main focus of ours is when we talk about devices, these dedicated devices, devices that are mission critical devices that are used for a single purpose, whether they’re in a word like a restaurant, point of sale, self service kiosk, healthcare, telemedicine, like the device that you’re interacting with the patient, hospital monitoring devices, the digital signage that you see in airports, even your consumer devices that you like, inside your home, like fitness, any connected devices. It could be your weather monitoring device, delivery, even logistics. So there’s a lot of different use cases and verticals that we address anywhere you’re looking at a device that’s not being used by for multiple use cases, like a phone or a tablet, and just needs to work day in and day out, and where, though, software developer wants to be able to control and is really a single software that’s going on their release to be able to push software updates, I would give an example of one of these devices, is your Tesla car, you would never have thought of a car being updated. And that’s a single purpose device. They push updates, even to add features to the car, self driving up to the top, a decade ago that you would do that new create value and additional value. And that’s the state I think we want to enable for everything, every device out there. That’s core to our principles. Siddhartha  10:51   And can you take an example of the Fortune 10 industries, how are they using Esper right now? Yadhu  11:00   Some of them are like your top name, like a restaurant chain. If you look at a restaurant these days, like 15,16 devices per store at the minimum. From the kitchen display, what’s in the kitchen backroom to point of sale, to what ordering, to tabletop, to self-service kiosk. And they’re all cloud connected now, then there’s no backend, back room server that the thing they’re connected to a service in the cloud, they want to keep the features, basically the coherent feature set between the cloud and the device of the mega cloud update, they may want to make a device, they want to continue to improve on the usability of all the software, they want a single pane of glass to be able to monitor this heterogeneous compute inside the restaurant. And that’s one example. And this is a restaurant chain that you would run into anywhere in the United States or even in the world. And so they’ve seen the value of Esper.  Another example is, in a retail store that we have this, it’s a product that I can’t talk about too much. But as you’re talking about 2000 devices per store, and it’s an amazing use case, and you can see there are 1000s of these stores. And can you imagine having to manage all of these independent devices that are everywhere, and that are distributed around the world. And that’s where we really, Excel is being able to scale. But we also allow, like, even if you have 500 devices, it’s really important to be able to push updates and show your value proposition to your customers, and so that you can have the opportunity to scale in the future. Siddhartha 12:43   And how did the founding team for Esper, you and Mr.Shiv Sundar come together? Yadhu 12:49   So, good question. As I said, I worked for Microsoft. And during Microsoft years, when I was in Windows Phone, Shiv Sundar was kind of on the business development part as I was in the development area, kind of the Nokia relationship. And while we were on Windows phone, I got to know him really well, because Nokia was our biggest customer at that phase of Microsoft phone. And I’ve had a really great relationship. And then eventually he left for the Sunnyvale areas in the Bay Area, and worked for companies like Samsung  and Cyanogen. But that’s when  I started thinking about doing a startup I’ve been thinking about the last, like 2018 is when we started Esper. Like for a couple of years of modeling, the idea of doing Esper and one of the things I really wanted to do is have joined up with someone that wasn’t like me.  So everyone else I was talking to was a bunch of developers and engineers and stuff like that, I got to have someone that’s kind of given me the complementary skill set. So at the same time, I think that Shiv was also trying to do a start up and he called me one day and said, hey, do you want to do the startup and like, oh, yeah, that sounds really good. I think I know you, I know kind of how you work. It’d be perfect if we got together and started a startup. And that’s kind of like the story. And then eventually, we pitched the idea, got seed funding around 2018. And that’s kind of how we get started. Siddhartha  14:27   And if you can share the current scale of Esper and how it has evolved since 2018. Yadhu 14:33   Sure, yeah. So as we say, 2018 we got started. Infrastructure is kind of you got to build it, and you got to build enough of it before our customers go to put some devices out that’s in production on your platform. So we spent about a year and a half building the system and then originally started to get some early trials and pilots out there by the end of 2019. It got enough traction that we got to a point where Madrona Ventures invested in January of 2020. And I don’t think we’ve yet actually, at that point in time, like other than pilots we hadn’t, we’re not talking about real, lots of revenue. And then they did a series and 2020 is an amazing year that is likely to often be turned on revenue. And by the end of the year, we had like 180 customers that were paying us and lots of 80 logos, and we had about 1000 customers that were kind of doing a free tier, and kind of getting up to scale. And that’s what was really exciting about that, and kind of really, were able to demonstrate Product Market Fit by the end of that year.  And since then, in 2021, despite COVID and everything that we had, we saw a 4x growth in revenue from 2020. We ended the number of customer logos around 253,000 or more customers using our platform. 18X the number of devices. So really great growth. Yes, like we were in hospitality, like we were everywhere, lots of verticals. So we were in hospitality, as far as hospitality kind of hit a roadblock during COVID. But in lots of other verticals, we saw tremendous growth. Successfully we are now continuing that on into 2022, and in 2021 also one of the good things is like we were able to secure a series B funding with scale Venture Partners, in about three months later, we actually had, we actually raised about $90 million during that year, giving the good amount of capital to be able to kind of build it up, build this out and grow our teams in India and US. Siddhartha  17:05   And approximately how many devices today would be an Esper? Yadhu  17:10   Greater than 200,000 devices that are like our continuous use by our customers, there’s a lot more devices that are out there. But we want to call for mission critical use for about 200,000 devices. The amazing thing is right now we’re growing at more than 1500 devices per day. And we’ll get there about like, we’re predicting about 50,000 devices within the next couple of months. And so the growth rate trajectory of devices is exponential. Siddhartha 17:43   So by this current year, and you will have crossed, like a million mission critical devices easily. Yadhu  17:49   That’s the hope. And that’s the trajectory that we’re looking at. And especially with a lot more bigger customers being on board right now, as we speak. Siddhartha  18:01   How did you manage to get some of the best people in the industry to join Esper? Yadhu  18:06   I think it’s the opportunity, we have a really good value proposition from the opportunity, we really wanted to, from day one have a great culture, it’s not just about the people, we’ve built culture from day one, and the type of people we want. And I think when all these top notch people they look at us, and they look at the founders, they look at the team that we built, and the culture we built and the value proposition of the product that we’re building, all of that kind of like comes together to have, like something that people desire to be able to join and built and join us in this growth. And we have a ton of builders, in all aspects, not just engineering. And that’s what’s exciting to me. Siddhartha  18:59   And you have built a team in India, you have built a team in the US  and you spend half of your time across India and US which have been the challenges of building a team across geographies. Yadhu  19:11   Obviously the timezone is the thing, but that’s something that we continuously strive to improve. There are also different ways. They’re great talent everywhere, but I’m really impressed with the talent that we have in India. And that’s why when we started off the company, I flew I think day two after we got funded, I flew over to India to start building the team because I knew there’s this amazing talent in India and especially even this amazing talent in this kind of local area with Bangalore. We might grow in different parts of India, but this is a great place to start. The challenges are there, I mean how you recruit them, what type of culture and what type of this thing that you’re looking for, looking for diversity is different. We have really great diversity in India, we have really, really great diversity in the US.  But it means different things. There’s obviously the interview process, and even how we people work, I mean, I come into the office, and I see like, it’s so vibrant and active, and people are working together and talking together and create little bots. And I just love coming in. And it gives me so much energy to be in the office here in Bangalore. So that’s why you gotta take advantage of that you got to take advantage of regardless of where the talent is, and where the capabilities are. And so that’s really important to me. And so yes, there’s challenges on a global scale, but I think the benefits completely outshine any of the challenges. Siddhartha  20:57   and how big is the team today at Esper? Yadhu  20:59   We have about 226 people worldwide. I think about 120 of them are in India, the rest of the United States. And we’re going to, I’m looking to double the team, or more in India in the next year. So I would expect we’re about 300-320 people worldwide. Siddhartha  21:20   And if you can share your journey of building distribution and partnerships, because if we see the ecosystem, most entrepreneurs are good at product, very few are good at sales. And very rare is a breed that can execute distribution and partnerships at scale. You are one of them, and your team is one of them. So how do you go about building that? Yadhu  21:42   I think that comes from, I think one of the things in a distribution process is that comes with experience. Having done that, having seen partnerships in the past. That’s one of those places where I think where Shiv and I may have to work in multiple years where these larger companies partnered with a huge billion dollar companies, when we’re in Microsoft, or Amazon, or Samsung gives us that kind of edge or knowledge that this is how this works. When I was in Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, and all these people are the regular operators. So I’d be there in San Diego, with Qualcomm every other week. Shiv called for Samsung, and he had a ton with me. So I think that’s one of the benefits that we do have, we’re the wise men of a startup. So that I think that’s a place where we can take advantage of, and in our business partnership is really key. Because we do software, but there’s hardware that we’re using. So being able to talk to hardware manufacturers and partners is a really important aspect of our business. Siddhartha  22:54   And you served, as you said, a large part of your life between Microsoft and Amazon, what are your learning from them? And what are you applying, in building the culture, the team, and even the product and distribution side at Esper? Yadhu  23:10   Definitely. So I worked at these two behemoths, Microsoft and Amazon. But interestingly enough, almost all the projects that I worked on, were always zero to end projects. So it was a small team, and very much of a startup type environment where any project I joined is like, okay, we’re forming this team to do this. And I joined it. And so I was usually like, the founding member of all these small team, so glad to see, like what it is to build up teams from the inside of these bigger cooperative, it’s not I mean, you don’t in that case, you don’t worry about funding, you got a big, you got a much better, bigger check that you can do. So you’ve got some safety nets that you don’t have in a startup.  But that’s one experience, but you also get the experience of like, I think Microsoft was really great at operating systems and building out like lots of different projects from when you saw how word or office would work on your top. You Can walk through the culture at windows, and you get a little bit of sampling of all these different cultures. And when I moved to Amazon, very similar, Fire OS, Amazon Go, these small things that kind of came out of Amazon. But the other thing that I got out of this experience is that Amazon is one place where they build great engineering managers. So you get a sample of how to build and manage huge complex systems.  And I take a lot of that with me, with a little bit of sprinkling of salt because we want the startup vibe so we don’t want to over process but it’s always in my head. This is probably the best practices, etc and how we use it from either Microsoft or Amazon But we got to be pragmatic, you got to kind of overlay that with what you need in a startup to take all these things and kind of make a lighter weight version of all these things and then grow those infrastructure that you have to be able to company, little by little. Siddhartha 25:14   And can you share a couple of examples of the best practices that you adopted from Amazon? Yadhu  25:22   I think that let’s talk about like, I think one thing that Amazon did really well is its customer obsession, they’re amazing at customer obsession, and I took that like the date zero like day when I go in, they talk about customer obsession, they give me 20 examples of how they were customer obsessed, that’s my orientation, they talk about a story where like they’re in a cruise, somebody is in a cruise ship, they damage the Kindle. So the customer person ships them another Kindle, while they’re still on vacation. So they kind of drill that into the customer. So that was really cool. And that’s something that we’ve taken.  I think we’re one of the best customer teams across the board. We have a great customer success team, but our engineers are customer obsessed, our marketing team is customer obsessed, as well as our sales team is customer obsessed. We’ll get our call and help the customer with anything. And that’s really rather important. And that’s a testament to the zero churn we have across the board, we have customers that love us, and will give good feedback. And that’s one of the things I took away from Amazon.  The other thing is kind of like this whole being the bias for action, this leadership principle to have, like, borrow what you need, and bring those on. And even kind of like how do you build great scalable engineering? What are the processes you do? So many aspects of that we take. But also at the same time, the classic tech for engineering is like how do you have a built scalable system, but also don’t overbuild. Because you’re at a startup phase, you don’t want to over engineer and over build things yet, you don’t know if this particular thing is going to work. So you’ve got to do just the right thing. And it’s a big balance. Siddhartha  27:03   And can you go into more detail about the culture of Esper? Yadhu 27:07   So I think the main thing is that of all the leadership principles we distill down our producer principles into three things. That’s trust, bias for action, and customer obsession, and lot of other companies they have, but one of the things that like all these things come down to is accountability. Like we’ve hired an amazing set of people who are very accountable. And the thing that I would talk about with them is, all of them are great at their art. And that’s what’s important to me is what in when I define art, it can be marketing, it could be sales, it could be customer success, it could be engineering, it’s they are passionate about their art, it’s not just I gotta do my job and come in, they’re passionate about their art. And that means that they’re passionate about self improvement, they’re passionate about trying to become better.  And our hope is they got after Esper. They have an amazing career in their art, and they’ve learned a lot. So that’s, that’s really important about it. And the key thing is, they’re looking to prove the public very true in trying to improve and becoming better continuously in what they’re doing. And that one’s across all of us. That’s what I’m really proud of. Siddhartha  28:37   And how are you looking to grow your team in India? Yadhu  28:41   Not fast enough. That’s all I can say, we’re absolutely looking to hire across all disciplines, putting a lot of emphasis on engineering. We’re doing a ton of college hiring, we’re looking at veterans across industry. And obviously it’s in the Bangalore area, and from across India, trying to recruit people from marketing in sales and customer success. Really important that we grow here. We’re able to take advantage of the talent that’s available in Bangalore. And then the other thing is, we’re really in the office, all of our people in the office, we kind of have a hybrid, but we ended up like investing in a really great office. It’s an amazing place to come in. And when we want to have a good experience and good atmosphere for the people that are coming in. I love being in this office. It’s just that all the decorations we had in the suite are real, it’s not a background image. So we want it to be fun. We want it to be a great place for them to kind of do their art. Siddhartha  29:59   Yadhu, if you have to reflect back and take out some three to five key learnings, which other entrepreneurs can learn from, from your own journey, what would they be? Yadhu 30:11   One of them is to never stop learning. I mean I’m an engineer, so one of my things about being a CEO is just learning, absorbing, being a sponge. Whether it’s picking up marketing, picking up sales, picking up all these things, I’m not going to be a salesperson, but I gotta understand I’m not gonna be the marketing person, I got to understand. So never stop learning. I mean, every day is a learning opportunity for me. And then the second one is never try things. I think there’s a difference between being conservative and trying to be adventurous. And the way I look at it is like, is it a one way door or two a door, if it’s a two way door offer, and know how to have mechanisms to know where you’re, whether you’re successful, and that’s really important, we’ve tried so many things that have not worked. But we’ve also tried many things that work. And so that’s super important.  And then the other one is, have fun, enjoy it. it’s an opportunity, you’re building something amazing. So it is going to be a lot of work. But enjoy it, surround yourself with great people. So that you can have fun. And I think that’s the key thing. Hiring people, hiring talent, is what’s it really all about. And if you have the right people around you, you can actually build amazing things. Siddhartha  31:33   And Yadhu, since you over indexed on the learning capabilities that you have as a CEO, would love to learn, like, what are the learning mechanisms you adopt? You read a lot and what do you read in that case? Or what are the forces that you learn from? Yadhu 31:49   So I do listen to a lot of podcasts. So they’re really great, I read a lot. So I read in all forms. So I have physical books, I have Kindle ebooks, and I do a lot of audiobooks so that I can use that opportunity. Even go to bed with an audible book in my head sometimes. And then talking to other people. And I think that when talking to my team, I spend a lot of time with my marketing team, or my sales team, but then as well as other founders CEOs like to make that point, we take a lot of the same advice from many people who have done it before. And it’s important, even people who are in marketing from other organizations, etc.  And the key thing there is we have to be able to kind of build on top of that. I know learning is so important and one of the first things I did as we were expanding was make LinkedIn learning free for everyone in the company. And so it’s important to know I’m always looking to figure out how we can continue to encourage the team to learn more. We’re growing so we probably have first time managers that they’ve never met before. How do I get manager training and all these things, so I want to equip it up with as many tools as possible in order to succeed. Siddhartha  33:19   Thank you so muchYadu. It has been wonderful to learn from your journey from what you have built at Esper. And it amazes me in a short span of time the scale that you have achieved. Yadhu  33:31   Thanks. It was great talking to you about all this. I love talking about a lot of these subjects. And thanks for having me on board and allowing me to talk with us for the people we have behind us. **Sponsor** Prime is a high conviction, high support investor, backing star teams with differentiated ideas. All partners at Prime work actively with the entrepreneurs post-investment to accelerate building a great company. Prime focuses on building differentiating companies whose solutions are 10X better and are powered by technology and product. Prime is now investing from its fourth fund of $100M and is often the first institutional investor in category-creating tech startups such as MyGate, HackerEarth, Mfine, Wheelseye. To know more about Prime visit primevp.in

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