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Episode 163 / April 3, 2022

Rahul Sasi on the key challenges in Cyber Security and how his startup CloudSEK is solving this for Axis Bank, OLA, IndusInd Bank & MakeMyTrip etc

37 min

Episode 163 / April 3, 2022

Rahul Sasi on the key challenges in Cyber Security and how his startup CloudSEK is solving this for Axis Bank, OLA, IndusInd Bank & MakeMyTrip etc

37 min
Listen on

 

  # China Accused of cyber-attacks on Ukraine before Russian invasion

# Buget 2022: $9.9 billion towards cyber security aims to make Australia a key ‘offensive’ cyber player  

These are some of the recent headlines around Cyber threats globally. Cyber attacks have been rated the fifth top rated risk in 2020 and continues to grow in 2022 as IoT cyber attacks alone are expected to double by 2025.  

In this episode our guest Rahul Sasi, Founder CloudSEK, talks about the key challenges in Cyber Security in India today.  

CloudSEK’s customer list includes Axis Bank, NPCI, Netcore, OLA, Sun Pharma, ICICI Lombard, IndusInd Bank, MakeMyTrip and many more who don’t wish to take a chance with the growing threat of global cyber crimes.    

11 of the Fortune Global companies, and 7 of the world’s biggest banks, trust XVigil (one of CloudSEK’s flagship products) to safeguard their security posture.  

During the episode, Rahul talks about how they started CloudSEK, customer acquisition strategy, and much more.  

Notes – 

04:04 – Background before starting CloudSEK

08:55 – Current ARR and scale in terms of customers

09:45 – Milestone since launch

12:04 – Products and Problem Statements solved by CloudSEK

14:44 – How has been the industry response? 

20:19 – Challenges with hiring the right people

24:40 – Targets for the next 2 years

26:17 – Learnings from their fundraising journey

28:26 – How to leverage your investors?  

Read the full transcript here:

Rahul 0:01  

As a company, our long term objective is, can we predict cyber threats before it even happens? If you look at security right now, a lot of things get hacked. But our objective is to make that prediction. And it might sound like a science fiction thing. But we can accurately predict rain today, how much it will rain, where it will rain, when it will rain. How do we do that? We pass a series of data sources through a mathematical machine learning model, which makes these predictions, which is a similar thing we do at the company, we build different data sets, and machine learning models. So our focus is on data collection and this machine learning model, which is giving us these predictions. 

 

So core platform XVigil, which is what we are selling, is a digital risk monitoring platform. Every external threat, any threat that can impact you, outside your perimeter, we monitor it, whether it’s someone creating a fake domains in the name of your company or fake mobile applications in the name of your company, to someone discussing cybercrime or mechanism to attack your company on a dark web forum, to any misconfigurations of your Internet facing digital assets and your internet exposure, all in a platform is what XVigil does. 

 

Siddhartha  1:25  

Dear listeners, this is your host Siddhartha Ahluwalia, founder of 100x Entrepreneur Podcast. Before we begin, I would like to thank our sponsors Prime Venture Partners. Prime is the first institutional investor in category creating tech startups like Dozee, Planet Spark, Niyo, Mygate. Prime is now investing out of his fourth Fund, which has more than 100 million dollars. Today, I have with me Shripati Acharya, managing partner Prime Venture Partners. Shripati, we would like to know from you, how does Prime work with the founders, and what is so different about Prime from other VC firms. 

 

Shripati 02:05

So Prime is a high conviction, high support VC. And so our process is different both during the evaluation and after the investment is made. During the evaluation, it’s less of a typical q & a, but more of a joint brainstorm where we are jointly looking and brainstorming on what the product could be, and what the ultimate vision of the company could be in terms of its impact. And in the process, entrepreneurs engage with all the Prime partners and this is very important because after the investment is made, the entrepreneurs can engage with individual partners directly who can assist in different areas. For example, we had a company just looking for a US go to market. 

 

And there we helped the company directly connect with prominent valley angels and get an investment from prominent VCs there so that they could not only get an investor base, but also develop an ecosystem partnership in the US, which was very helpful to the company. So in that fashion the engagement is both deeper and more intimate with the founders once we have constructed the company. 

 

Siddhartha 03:11

Thank you Shripati. Dear listeners, let’s dive directly into the podcast now. Today I have with me, a founder who is a very good friend of mine, and he has built one of the top cyber intelligence companies from India. Rahul Sasi, founder of CloudSEK, CloudSEK  is one of India’s top cyber intelligence platforms, which gives intelligence from cyber threats to all b2c business to consumer facing internet farms. Rahul, welcome to the podcast. 

 

Rahul 03:43

Thanks Siddhartha. Thanks a lot for having me. 

 

Siddhartha 03:45

So Rahul, first of all 100x Entrepreneur Fund is really privileged and grateful to be a part of CloudSEK’s journey. It is amazing what you have built in the last five years, and I can’t fathom right what it took you and what a sacrifice is made on this journey. So I would like to start with your background before starting CloudSEK. Where did you grow up? Where did you study? And what got you introduced and interested into cybersecurity?

 

Rahul 04:15 

First of all, Siddhartha thanks a lot for supporting us, I have the fund. 

 

Siddhartha 04:20

Appreciate that.

 

Rahul 04:21

About me, I’ve always been into cybersecurity. And the reason I was always into cybersecurity is I joined engineering, with the aspiration of doing cool things. I joined Computer Science Engineering, as any kid I want to do really cool things that’s why I joined engineering. But then I understood engineering that well, that we’re kind of far behind where the state of the art is. So anyway, I got access to the internet at that point of time, because this is 2006. That’s when I actually got access to the internet. Once you got access to the internet, or till that particular time, I always felt that I didn’t belong anywhere. I mean what is my identity in the world?

 

It was a bit of a confusion. But when I got access to the internet, and I saw the cybersecurity community, I kind of understood that this is where I belonged. And the reason is, this is one community that doesn’t take no for an answer, they always find a way, whether it’s bypassing

a security system, or finding innovative ways to do something with security, they always stood in front of it. And then the community approach, that sharing and learning, kind of all motivated, and I felt that this is where I belonged. And so once I understood that I started contributing back to the community. And so all throughout my college life, you could see a lot of papers, courses, etc. getting published. But when I reached my seventh semester, there was a startup, I was absorbing all these things, the startup was iSIGHT, by the way, which later got acquired by FireEye. Now it is Mandiant today it is getting acquired by Google. But anyways, this startup was observing the work I was doing. They kind of invited me for an internship, which is six months, but my college was like, you can’t go for a six months internship, because you have to be on campus. And this is back in 2009. 

 

But then I understood that, I figured out what I want to do with my life, and this is what I want to do with my life. So why spend another six months in college, just to get an engineering degree, just a piece of paper, you could get knowledge from anywhere. And then this is an application of knowledge, which is going to happen when you have work. So I spent a week thinking and I quit engineering, when I worked for the startup. During this time, and that’s in 2010, and 2015, I worked for many companies, three companies. One was iSIGHT, which, as I said, is just getting acquired by Google Cloud. The other one was Citrix. But while working for these companies is what I did, I continued publishing papers back to the community. 

 

So this got a lot of international attention. People from conferences on other worlds are inviting me to their country. So I got the opportunity to travel to almost 22 plus countries free of cost, meeting them and interacting with them. So every conference I go to, there is a startup booth. I was very curious, I used to go to all these startup booths and pick a brochure, so I could read more about them.

 

But every time I went to a conference booth, I understood one thing, all these startups are from the US, UK, Israel, but there’s always an Asian guy in the booth, which made me think, why do people have to leave their country to build these companies? Why can’t you do it here, though, that thought got into my head in 2014-15, I was at Citrix. In fact, I was the first guy to get hired in Citrix, without an engineering degree, things were really good. But then I understood that well, this is what I would want to do now, go build something and see if we can get it adopted by the world.

 

So that is how we found CloudSEK in 2015. I mean, the first three years were bootstrapped. It was just me, and then a bunch of people who are still with me right now. But we were just bootstrapping. And the idea was, can we build a company without funding? With limited support, can we build it out? Because that’s kind of an aspiration, because I’ve read about all the other businesses, that has come up. And if you look at businesses in the 1990s and 1980s, the venture capital funding was not there. It was like a proper business coming up. So that was one of the aspirations. But bootstrapping for three years, we even made profit, we even made a team, we had enough customers, but they understood that if you have to scale and go really fast, you have to go to venture capital. So that has been the journey, now we’re touching 150 plus people, and we have almost 100 Plus customers actually. 

 

Siddhartha  8:55  

And Rahul, can you also share the current ARR of CloudSEK? 

 

Rahul 09:03

So we’ve crossed two ARR, but if you look at the ACB we are at somewhere more than that, we are at 2.5 Plus ACB. More than talking about the numbers, we have some of the largest international consulting firms, executive consulting firms as customers, we have the largest tech companies in the world as our customers, and the largest bank from India as our customers. So anything you touch on a daily basis whether it’s the brush you use, to the Ola, Uber cabs you booked, to the banking system, all these verticals are our customer because it’s a cybersecurity company. 

 

Siddhartha 09:45

And you can also share the milestones that you achieved either in number of customers or in terms of ARR from 2017 each year to this year. 

 

Rahul 09:56

So the first three years of bootstrapping, we managed to only get seven companies as customers. But these companies were the biggest companies, the largest bank to basically the fortune 50 companies we would say. The idea was that we’ll just go focus on the big ones. Because if the big ones come, you will get the small ones. Not the small ones, the other ones, eventually. If you can’t make that, there’s no point in it. So we were like, put all our efforts and time with the bootstrap approach to get these companies. So that was like the first three years. And once we got our first series A funding, we went from 7 customers to 80 customers. Close to 10x growth in terms of customers, we were at 250K ARR to 2 million plus ARR. 

 

So that was the growth, which again, I mean, we were able to do things a little faster. If you ask the question, wouldn’t you be able to not do this without investments? From what I’ve learned in that timeframe, you have to wait for the money to hit your bank, and then you have to use that money, spend that money. But that approach made us wiser. Right now, when we spend, we know where to spend, we spend on things only which are going to be beneficial for our customers, we don’t spend on other things, we didn’t spend a lot of money to reach 80 customers. In marketing, we don’t have a marketing team at all in the company. It was a very organic growth. One customer refers to the other. And word of mouth is how we got all those 800 Plus customers actually.Now that we have raised our 7 million, we will invest some in marketing, but is our marketing initiative valuable to our customer? Is it adding any value to our customer? That’s how we do marketing. 

 

Siddhartha 12:05

And Rahul if you can share the various products that CloudSEK has built, and what problem do they solve?

 

Rahul 12:11

As a company, our long term objective is, can we predict cyber threats before it even happens? If you look at security right now, a lot of things get hacked. But our objective is to make that prediction. And it might sound like a science fiction thing. But we can accurately predict rain today, how much it will rain, where it will rain, when it will rain. How do we do that? We pass a series of data sources through a mathematical machine learning model, which makes these predictions, which is a similar thing we do at the company, we build different data sets, and machine learning models. So our focus is on data collection and this machine learning model, which is giving us these predictions. 

 

So core platform XVigil, which is what we are selling, is a digital risk monitoring platform. Every external threat, any threat that can impact you, outside your perimeter, we monitor it, whether it’s someone creating a fake domains in the name of your company or fake mobile applications in the name of your company, to someone discussing cybercrime or mechanism to attack your company on a dark web forum, to any misconfigurations of your Internet facing digital assets and your internet exposure, all in a platform is what XVigil does.And that’s what our enterprise platform is . 

 

But on the other end. And by the way, we can monitor all these different data sources, filter them through a machine learning system and trigger alerts. So you will get intelligence, you will get information on what is going to happen or what is happening about you, which you don’t have accessibility with XVigil. But with BeVigil, what we have done is we have put all of our data sources in a searchable manner. So you can go search on BeVigil, it’s a free platform, you can put in a company name, and it will list you all the threats in infrastructure. Just infrastructure related, and it’s free. So if you want to just get, if you’re an app first company, you can go search your app name, and we’ll give you all the security scores of the mobile app. Same you can do with your web apps and that’s free. 

 

So the model is, we’re obviously trying to make the community use the free version. And from the free version, people now pivot to the XVigil, because XVigil, you don’t have to, on a daily basis, enter any keywords. But with XVigil, you can set a predefined set of keywords, it’ll automatically monitor all the threats and alert you proactively. 

 

Siddhartha 14:46

And can you share how the industry responded to these products when you first launched and how these products grew over the years? 

 

Rahul 14:55

So XVigil was a very word of mouth sort of thing. We got the first customer, the customer told this to 10 of their vendors. From there it was like growing at a gradual pace. But with BeVigil, the growth was, it’s kind of crazy, by the way, I mean, when we launched, we had almost 5000 apps, data sets and almost 100 Plus users. Every month that user base and the number of apps which are getting scanned is at a 2x rate. So today, we have half a million apps scanned. And we have almost 5000 Plus corporate users on the platform. And we are expecting this to touch

a lakh users, 100k users in total. And we would expect that to have almost 10,000 Plus corporate users signed up to the platform. 

 

Siddhartha 15:59

And can you share with our listeners, what is the dark web and what is the threat to these companies from the dark web? All the information leaked on dark web and who leaked this information?

Rahul 16:11

Dark Web is an internet inside the internet, which is created, it will build on top of Tor network. Tor as a privacy is like a VPN. Tor is a VPN inside the network where people, everyone who’s connected to the Tor network are anonymous. So you don’t know who is connecting to that particular network. So whatever they post, whatever they write, you will never be able to know the original identity. That’s a Tor network, and it is built for anonymity, it is not built for anything bad. But on top of the Tor network came forums and communities where illegal trades happen. 

 

So what the trades happen is, well, there are good hackers and there are bad hackers. The bad hackers, when they get access to your information, your infrastructure, they will download some of that data and put that data for sale in different marketplaces. So there’s an Amazon sort of marketplace inside the Dark Web exactly like you can go shop, you might be able to shop for your competitors data, you might be able to search all the drivers of Uber, that someone would have hacked all drivers of Uber. And then they would put for sale the driver list of Uber for $10,000. 

 

Or they will come and say, this is the username and password to a large bank’s swift server, swift server is where you make transactions. So this is the access to that search server. And you can buy it for a regular price, or they will be selling a marketplace for every stolen credit card. Because the thing is that the people who hack it, don’t indirectly use it unless you’re a government entity. The other hackers what they do is they put that data for sale. So that someone else is actually utilizing it. May publish enormous reports where we call data brokers, data brokers are the people who collect these data. And their full time business is brokerage.

And if you look at this page, and this page has been there for very long, I mean, back in 2010, Bitcoin, the trade of Bitcoin finally was in this Dark Web market and it evolved to where it is because that is where it all started.

 

So one of our product capabilities is to tell our customers, whether anything which is related to them, their digital assets, their infrastructure data, their documents are being sold on the Dark Web. And that is just 15% of our capability. We have capability to bring in or look at data from any data source, whether it’s Dark Web, or the Surface Web, Deep Web, whether it’s network clocks, any textual information, we have the capability to analyze and then give our customers actionable insights. 

 

Siddhartha 19:08

And Rahul, if you can share in your journey to reach the current 2.5 million of ARR, what have been the biggest challenges, either from building a team or building a product or raising funding? 

 

Rahul 19:23

Hiring will always be a bigger challenge. I mean, again, so it is very simple. There are three things: speed, quality and money. Well, you can’t have all three together at the same time.  If your focus is on speed, you will suffer in quality as well as money. If you focus on money, you will lose the other two. In our perspective, what we are building the technology has to be relevant 10 years down the line as well. That’s how we are building, we are not building something which becomes pointless in a couple of years. And our ability to predict these threads will become very, very relevant and surely going to get relevant as every year passes. So the quality part is very important. And quality is directly tied up with the quality of people brought in to build the technology.

 

And that has always been a challenge. But again, if you just compromise on quality, it becomes very fast, you can just have a ton of people. But that I would say, would be a challenge, even if, let’s say we have 20 million more. This would still be the challenge. 

 

Siddhartha 20:39

And what have been the other challenges besides hiring the right set of people in your journey? 

 

Rahul 20:46

So even the hiring part is very tricky. Is there anyone in the world who can add 95% accuracy, do the right hiring? No, you will always get better at it. But this is one field, irrespective of how good you are, you will make a mistake. But that’s not the same case with many other fields, you always get better and the chances of you making a mistake comes down. But when it comes to people, you can still make that mistake.

 

I would say when it comes to sales and hiring. References are very important. This might not be applicable for engineers, engineers, you can evaluate him with the code and then do an aptitude test and then you’re sorted. But sales folks, you can’t qualify them with an interview, which is why good reference is important. That’s one of the biggest learnings I had. In terms of hiring good people, One of the things and one of the questions I always ask is, describe your work. If you are at a party with 20 other people, and you’re speaking, and you have to speak about your work in an exciting way. 

 

So basically, I’m trying to pull out from the candidate, what exciting thing he has done. If you’ve done exciting things, you will be able to speak about that in a party, that I did this, this way, and there’ll be a lot of clarity in those, depth on those. You will be able to easily spot whether he or she is taking up someone else’s work, and then projecting it as his. So the clarity and depth is then whatever it looked for, and the passion in which he achieved those things. 

 

For instance, I was hiring for this technical writer, the technical writer who works for one of the large firms. And she was saying that, well, I was given the task to do the technical writing of this product. And I created the whole document, but while creating the document, I also studied UX and UI. Why? Because that learning, of how to present the data in the form of images, because it’s not anymore text, you’re putting images as well. So the learning I had from UX and UI also helped me in putting up this new work together. It gave me the flow, what images should I put where, how should I put it, etc, etc. Now you see, that’s a unique or a different way of doing a job, you can still do the job the same way every day. Or you can always figure out a better way of doing that job every day. 

 

The second kind of people are the ones who are very passionate, they’ll always figure out new ways of doing things. And that clarity is when we would want to bring in people. So I would say the depth in and the passion, which they have done things is what I would definitely look for. And last but not the least, it’s not about having the best people. It’s not like you just go hire the top 20 players in the world and bring them into a team. It’s very simple. Like how do you put a proper football team together? Let’s say Messi and Ronaldo and all the other top 10 players are playing for one team, that team is not going to fly.

 

The job of putting together a team is identifying complementary skill sets. You don’t need everyone to have this, you don’t need to be the same. But you need everyone to be working together and understanding how the other person complements them. And working as a team is more important than having the top players. So that is another bigger learning.

 

Siddhartha  24:35  

And Rahul, what’s your vision for CloudSEK for 2022 and 2023- 2024 in terms of ARR, in terms of capabilities you want to solve, in terms of regions that you want to expand to?

 

Rahul

We have 100 customers. We will go from 100 to 250 customers, this year, this financial year. From there, we will go from 250 to 400 customers the other year. So within two years, we will grow, reaching close to 400 customers. And we have a very scalable way of doing it with BeVigil and the way we are operating right now. We’re getting a lot of incoming leads right now. We have customers now in the city who are signing up. We have customers from South Korea, who have now signed up to our free platforms and then are coming onboard. So that is what we will focus on this year. We have almost 22 plus countries identified, which we think we need to establish a strong presence. We have customers in other regions also, but we will not spend enough effort there. These are the regions we will focus on.

 

And because each of these regions, we think eventually can have a revenue potential of more than a million, eventually, within a year, and then eventually it can grow into 5 million to 10 million in revenue. So that is how we have identified these regions. And that’s how we will be accelerating. 

 

Siddhartha 26:16

Got it. And Rahul, in your fundraising journey, the people you brought in during the journey, the funds that you brought in, what are the synergies that you were looking for? And what value do you think that few of them or each one of them added during the journey. This is especially for entrepreneurs who are listening from the point of view of fundraising and learning from your journey from that.

 

Rahul  26:40  

So that’s very important, I mean, more than the fund, who was on the board is very important.

That’s one, and investors are like your team members, you will have to see some value when bringing them on board, And I don’t know if you remember, we spent a lot of time going back and forth and did something similar with some of the new investors that came in. Khosla has this important saying that, Investors are employees whom you can’t file. And if you look at that, it is very accurate if we look at that statement. 

 

Because if you get the right set of investors, you can just go really well, they understand the vision, they can add a lot of value, they can be very supportive, and things are always going to get difficult in terms of business. There’s no business that has taken a smooth ride upwards. So it’s very clear whether they understand your business, and are they ready to support you? For instance, one of my angels even participated in the series A round. Angel, where there are three pre rounds, and in the series A round they participated, they were like, we are ready to support you throughout the journey, because we like what you’re doing. So this kind of creates a very exciting set of people whom you’re going to work with. And the culture also can be driven that way with having the right set of investors.So I would say not just money, don’t just try to get the money, try to get the right set of people who believe in your ideas and direction is very important. 

 

Siddhartha 28:26

How do you leverage your investors? That’s a very important skill for founders to develop. 

 

Rahul 28:33

So one of the things I go the most is in terms of hiring particularly. Introductions to something, I mean, see the thing with introductions, you can always cold call someone also. You can still pick up your phone and call the largest tech company CEO and just say that this is what I want.

 

But what is more important is they might know people who are good. And getting that reference from them as one thing I do. Second thing I look for is they have experience sitting on board of other companies, there’s a lot of learning. We are a cybersecurity company, there might be another technology company in the b2b that has some sort of learning. If they could share some of those learnings without giving out much information, high level learnings, that’s very beneficial. And then I would say these are the two primary things and then corporate governance etc. you shall bang on the board to have. 

 

Siddhartha 29:49

Rahul I would also like to understand from your own thinking or analysis, what are your strengths and weaknesses as a founder?

 

Rahul  29:57  

Yeah, so I see, I’ll tell you what I like to do a lot. I like to spend a lot of time with the product and tech part, I also like to spend a lot of time on hiring. So these are the two things, which I love doing. And when I say I love doing these things like I couldn’t get enough of it. So I have this huge data, which I built, which basically talks about, what am I good at? What am I an expert?  What am I not an expert? So the idea is that things you’re an expert at, you should make the deficient things, you’re not an expert at, you should delegate. So now that I’ve delegated, what should I be persistent about, and what should I be flexible? I’ve given someone a task, what should I say that this should be like this? And what I can say is, well, it’s okay to be in that particular way. 

 

So, I’ve built a deficient graph, which goes back to my personality and goes back to what I know etcetera, to derive these things. So, persistence are things I know, things I am an expert. So people and culture, I would put, I think I know that enough. cybersecurity, I know that enough. Product and directions, I know that enough, the branding part, I know that enough/. Things I don’t know, policies, those are the things I don’t know, and I will delegate it, and I would expect someone to do it, and I can’t make a comment, or  an expert feedback because that’s not my core expertise. Now, when it comes to people and culture, building internal external training programs, because you constantly need to grow your team, then only then will they stick with you. 

 

So what are the things you need to grow in your team? Where do you invest that time? Again, some of those things will be taken by me, some of the things will be delegated. Should I be confident or cautious when I make a decision, what are the decisions I firmly believe that this is how we will only do it. Why should I be cautious? I’m not sure, I need to get three other validations from three other people. Cybersecurity is something I’m very confident about. Cautious when it comes to products, even though I’m an expert, I can still ask customers, our customer success team, sales teams, whether this makes sense or not. That’s where the question comes. When should I go with data vision or data? 

 

Well, sometimes the thing is, you can’t always do things just by data. Or you can’t always do things just by visual, if you need to have a mechanism to figure out what is mission driven? For instance, if there’s anything futuristic, which doesn’t exist. You can’t say, Well, you can’t then go with data and then say, well, this is how I would do it, or this is how I wouldn’t do it. A good example is most of the product functionalities or let’s say a new product will never come from a customer. Customers will never know the exact solution, they will always have a problem. Building the right solution is the innovators job.. And that is where vision comes, you will have to have a very forward thinking approach and say, well, this actually makes sense if you build it. And this will actually solve the problem, which I just assembled. So a very long answer, but this series of structured thought processes, which I’ve written down, helps me make some of these decisions easier and faster. 

 

Siddhartha 33:3

And if you could summarize, how could other entrepreneurs who could learn from this conversation, help build that strength and weakness graph and then implement it in their organization for decision making? 

 

Rahul 33:54

So in fact, I was actually thinking of publishing this system.But the point I’m trying to make is, the system of decision making is very important. You need to document it because you are going to always be stuck. A lot of time will be gone, because you’re not able to make the decision fast. Once you have written these down, you’re very clear on your decisions. And you can make those quick decisions. And which is very important in a startup. If you’re just spending many days making a decision, then you’re not a fast growing startup.

 

So having this organized, putting it down together as a doc would be a very simple thing. Should I take risks with something or should I minimize risk? What is that one thing I should take a higher risk for? When you can take the higher risk in terms of a product functionality, but you can take a higher risk in terms of hiring, you can have more engineers in your team. Because they’re always building new things. So even if you spend a lot of money there, it still gives you a long term. So how do I decide what is my long term and my short term investments?  That is also a decision.

 

Siddhartha  35:33  

And one question, which I want to ask is, what’s your vision for CloudSEK? Do you want to make it a 100 million ARR company? Do you want to make it an IPO at some point in time?

 

Rahul  35:49  

See, our objective always remains: can we build a great company out of the region from where we all started? The idea is to continue focusing on that objective. Can we build a great company out of this region, and a great product, is what I would say my focus is. Whether it’s an IPO, whether its ability to sustain as a private company throughout, that’s why we’re putting a target as such. Our objective is to build a long lasting company that can sustain as long as possible, whichever route we take does not matter. But that is what we are trying to do. 

 

Siddhartha 36:30

But great is a very subjective word. How do you define great for yourself? 

 

Rahul 36:35

It’s for a target of every company in the world that I have used or if you think CloudSEK products. I would say it would be great. Because eventually, if you look at the space, everyone would need cybersecurity. Even the smallest of the companies would need down the line, not immediately, down the line would need and that opportunity is there. What you need to capture those opportunities is what we should be thinking. I always say as if just building a house, knowing that you would sell it eventually, you’re not going to put all your thoughts and efforts into building that house. Rather, you’re going to build a house knowing that you want to live in that house forever. You will design and build the best houses. 

 

Siddhartha 37:20

Thank you Rahul. I think you’ve summarized it very aptly. How a founder wants to create a house wants to live in it forever.Thanks for that. It’s been a pleasure Rahul, hosting you on the podcast. Thank you so much. It’s been a privilege sharing this journey with you as a small stakeholder for me, for 100x Entrepreneur Fund. And I wish 100x From here, where we stand for CloudSEK and our journey together.

 

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