A Fireside Chat with the Startup Community, AWS, and PubNub
SourceFuse recently co-hosted a Fireside Chat session with AWS in collaboration with PubNub. The agenda was to invite a diverse group of startups to take part and engage in lively conversations on ‘Hyper-Scaling Your Startup on the Cloud’.
All our speakers warming up the session with great energy.
PubNub a Perfect Choice for Real-Time Features
About PubNub: PubNub is a global Data Stream Network and real-time infrastructure-as-a-service company based in San Francisco, California. The company makes products for software and hardware developers to build real-time web, mobile, and Internet of Things applications.
The particular theme was chosen for the session, to help the Startups invited, discuss pragmatic practices for scaling on the cloud and learn from fellow startups, their experience with Hyper-Scaling & more.
The event put forward ideas about the strategies, methods, and techniques, that can be learned and implemented in a quick and painless way. The ‘Fail fast and grow’ strategy was reminiscent to most of the audience and many startups seemed to have gotten a sweet taste of it.
Gautam addressing the audience & kickstarting the session
The keynote address was given by our CEO, Gautam Ghai, elaborating on the theme with some statistics concerning the overall funding growth, the internet penetration growth & the 4G smartphone rise. He mentioned that the overall funding rocketed to $4.2 billion across 451 deals with an average of $9.4 million in funding per deal, as per Nasscom’s Indian Startup Ecosystem report. Adding to that, increasing internet penetration is leading the way for the growth in Marketplace at a pace of 12% and is expected to touch over 627 million by the end of 2019.
He was proud of the fact that we have Indian SAAS giants like Zoho & Freshdesk scaling their businesses globally and companies like OYO, Zomato & Ola have taken the ‘made in India’ products and really shown the world that the best-in-class scalable tech is designed and built in our country.
Next, we had the highlight of the evening. The FireSide Chat session led by Bhavish Sood – Venture Capitalist at BlueSky Capital Management. He started with a warm welcome and asking the other speakers, questions about their experience in the Startup Ecosystem.
Jonas Gray answering queries put up by the audience
One of the speakers, Jonas Gray, VP of Business Development at PubNub, was asked a very intriguing and commonly occurring question, “What is the most important thing when building a company?” The answer as Jonas put it, “Customer! Customer is the most important. Nothing comes ahead of that. You would be surprised to know that, Sam Walmart once mentioned that the number one Rule for business is that the customer is always right. Rule number two is ‘Go back to rule number one.’ Hence, your customer service and experience must be your first priority.”
Snehesh Mitra, Co-Founder & CTO at Nearbuy.com, was asked about the technical aspects involved in the Startup’s product development, to which he replied that “Writing a bulky code and hoping that it would serve all purposes is not a good idea. You need to write something that works in the real world, using one of the technologies that prevail today. When you follow this strategy, your implementation of the new tech will become more effective and failing fast & growing will become your forte.”
Adding to that, Kabir Chandhoke, our COO, added, “ As a startup, you must focus on Scaling from day one. If you postpone it for a later stage, you would never know how powerful your product can actually get. And agreeing with Snehesh, over-engineering is also not a good option. Making something workable is, as some very brilliant startups like Angelist & Groupon have showcased.”
A shot of a few people in the audience
AWS and PubNub Help Launch Many Start-Ups Into Hyper Growth Mode
More than 70 Startups showed up at the session to discuss and share ideas about Product Scaling and more. In all, the chat session was very lively and helped bring out new ideas and other startups’ real-time experiences. We all learned something about what are the most used techniques to bring up a company and most importantly, we all agreed on the fact that the ‘Customer’ is the first priority when it comes to building a business. The talk also moved towards mentioning the capital aspects of the Ecosystem and the idea of ‘having a life’ without feeling guilty, even though one is very much occupied with their Startup’s growth.
