What If?

As with many college internships, those in the consultancy arm of the massive accounting firm Arthur Andersen are far from glamorous.  In that capacity, Sundeep Sanghavi found himself, like his fellow interns, spending long hours dutifully stapling presentations, making sure they looked nice for delivery.  Yet unlike his fellow interns, Sundeep was doing something more at the same time.

“It was the first truly professional experience of my life,” he recalls today.  “My curiosity got the best of me, and I couldn’t help but look at the data on the pages in front of me and ask questions.  That’s what data’s all about—asking the question, what if?”

Three months later, Sundeep was the first intern in the company to be promoted to a full-time analyst position within 90 days of joining the team.  Now the cofounder and CEO of DataRPM Corporation, a company committed to enacting dramatic change in the way analytics is done today, his professional journey shows that the courage to ask questions can mean all the difference.

With over two decades of experience in the analytics world since that internship during his sophomore year in college, Sundeep noticed that a consistent pain point within the industry was the adoption of business intelligence (BI) and analytics “solutions” vs. one-off projects—solutions which require users to learn software that takes considerable time to master and implement.  “The way the world is moving today, you need the data immediately, in a real-time capacity, to make decisions” he explains.  “Learning and implementation cycles are costly as there is no clear ROI.  Time is money, and you can’t be waiting that long to learn and implement.”

Running again and again into these real-world problems with customers generated a wellspring of ideas and “what if?” questions in Sundeep, which led him to found DataRPM.  The genesis of DataRPM relied on the timely conjoining of the talents of Sundeep and two key serial entrepreneurs, Shyamantak Gautam and Ruban Phukan.  Gautam had a background in Big Data before the term even existed in the financial services industry, having processed billions of transactions in minutes with IBM, and also having served as a chief architect at Sundeep’s previous startup, Razorsight. Ruban Phukan, on the other hand, had been a long-time search engine data scientist from Yahoo who had founded and taken a vertical search company to a successful exit.  When the three got together in 2011 to launch DataRPM, it marked the third startup for each.

In their first meeting, the BHAG, or “big hairy audacious goal,” was to reinvent BI & Analytics by providing a simplistic version of Data Visualization, asking a question using natural language search. Ambitiously, they aimed to enable any data size, format, or source, any time anywhere, within a 30 day deployment window.  “Thus launched the company’s birthing process: eight weeks of hackathon using various technologies, followed by eight months of research and development,” Sundeep asserts.  “We decided that, if we could create a product that eliminated long implementation cycles, kept the user experience so simple that a ten-year-old child or an 85-year-old grandparent could use it, and kept the costs minimal, we’d be onto something breakthrough.”

Sundeep’s team realized that, even after a multitude of vendors in the market and tens of billions invested in BI, the fundamental problems that BI was envisioned to solve largely remained unsolved, and actually worsened with the advent of Big Data. “We knew that, if we did analytics by keeping with traditional models which were built upon a relational data model, we wouldn’t be able to solve the basic problems of agility, ease of use, flexibility, scalability and affordability that have plagued the BI world for decades,” he remembers.  “At that point there was little innovation in BI technology that addressed what we felt were the core issues.  We had to overhaul the stack, including leveraging advanced search engine technology, which was one of the original and surprisingly overlooked Big Data technologies.  We also launched the alpha version of the industry’s first Natural Language Analytics front-end, powered by a back-end computational search engine.”

Sundeep and his team figured out that, if they stored data in a different and unique format and made it available through an index, it could be delivered much faster.  Utilizing a similar technology to that used in Google and Yahoo search engines, they created a product that organizes indexed data in a file storage system that can be used for analytical clustering, eliminating the cumbersome process of understanding how relationships are built from data tables, and making that system part of the file storage solution.

Despite their extensive preliminary legwork, the DataRPM team made no assumptions and kept their high hopes in check.  “I genuinely believe that anything developed without prior knowledge or hands-on experience is an entrepreneurial dream that cannot succeed in reality,” says Sundeep.  “That’s why, in October of 2011, we gave our product to Yahoo as early adopters, as well as to 14 other software companies in our network.  We didn’t charge them anything to try it; we just wanted to know if our solution worked or if we were set up to fail.  Fortunately, we got some very good early indications.”

Even though the signs were good, Sundeep continued to stress test DataRPM’s limits.  The company brought on 18 high school student interns to try out the product, and within the course of a one-hour tutorial, they were slicing and dicing data, running reports, and navigating the dashboards all by just asking questions.  Sundeep also called upon his nonprofit senior citizens group MastiGhar (which means Fun House) for Indian seniors who immigrated to the US to be near their families, but who also face tremendous language and cultural barriers.  Two hours each Sunday night, the group he facilitated gets together to play games, watch movies, or go on outings.  They were more than happy to test out Sundeep’s brainchild, and within a single evening, they too were asking questions to get the instant answers and data visualization they wanted, without having to learn anything about the underlying system.  Just as with the high school focus group, the DataRPM team was able to glean valuable insight from the test to see how the tool could be improved further.

In April of 2012, the founders brought the project out of stealth mode and went live, and several of their early adopters signed on as clients.  “That’s when we knew we had the beginnings of a testable business model,” Sundeep confirms.  Following these initial trials, DataRPM caught the attention of an unexpected path to market—software as a service (SaaS) companies and independent software vendors (ISVs). “They took notice of the ease of use, the built-in agility, and the affordability that DataRPM offers its business users,” he says. “They started asking us for the ability to extend DataRPM to provide analytics to their own customer bases.” As ISVs’ customers became increasingly data savvy and began demanding comprehensive data analytics and reporting capabilities, the ISVs faced the huge challenge of developing these analytical tools in-house, which would require branching off from their core expertise to make significant investments in BI technology and infrastructure. DataRPM alleviated the need for incurring any additional infrastructure costs, man or machine, and gave ISVs and SaaS companies an avenue to remain focused on their main product offerings while still meeting their customers’ demands.

With a target market of independent software vendors and good lead generation, the company continued to grow, and in August 2012, DataRPM won an award for Hottest Tech Startup in DC. “There’s a lot of good momentum building,” Sundeep affirms.  “We’re excited about being the only BI & Analytics Solution provider using Natural Language Analytics, as well as the fastest, simplest, and most affordable analytics solution we know of.”

The entrepreneurial spirit that underpins DataRPM’s success stems from the interplay of  innovation, integrity, and tenacity that shaped Sundeep’s childhood.  Born in Bombay, India, to an entrepreneurial family that owned and operated Sanghavi Constructions, Sundeep started doing spreadsheet work for his father at a very young age. Mr. Sanghavi told his son that if he ever ran his own company, he had to know his numbers inside and out.  “He taught me that any decision you make as a business leader must be based on the numbers,” Sundeep remembers.  “They tell you who you are, what you are, and what you can do to really drive your business.  That’s what got me involved early in the analytics world.

“My father and brother are certainly the guiding principles for my entrepreneurial spirit,” Sundeep continues.  “My father  also embodied the spirit of sacrifice when he gave up his elegant office in Bombay, where he had a chef, a chauffeur, and a servant, so that our family could move to America and pursue a brighter future together.  He wanted to raise his children in a country whose founding fathers believed in hard work, commitment, integrity, and rising to face challenges.”  In the US, Mr. Sanghavi took a job at Time Warner managing the shipping of compact disks.  Sundeep’s mother, who didn’t work in India, got a job testing the barcode strips on the backs of credit cards for Chase Bank.  Both worked hard and sacrificed everything necessary to raise their four children and put them through college.

At nine years old, Sundeep started middle school in America but spoke no English.  To help his parents earn money, he got a job on weekends delivering the newspaper.  He would also go from door to door hanging Domino’s Pizza coupons on doors, even through the brutal Chicago winters.  Recalling the attitude of togetherness that permeated his home in India, where up to 21 people would share his house at one time, he felt a strong drive to contribute to the good of the family.

Sundeep always loved numbers, and though his parents wanted him to be a doctor, he went on to major in finance at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  He worked for Arthur Andersen throughout college and also bartended at night, paying his way through school and learning the minute details of the business world through the prominent firm.  He was traveling, learning, and on track to become an associate partner, but when he graduated at age 20, his parents asked that he move to DC, where they had relocated to join his brother.  Ever the rebel of the family, he was determined to stay where he was, but he soon noticed that one of the firm’s accounts, Cable & Wireless, had an analyst opportunity open in the DC metropolitan area.

It was the early 1990s, and telecom was a hot industry.  Drawn by the challenge of mastering software projects and developing cost-saving innovations, he took a large pay cut and accepted the position, automating the company’s invoice auditing process and getting his telecom engineering degree on the job.  “I learned the ins and outs of telecom, peeled the onion back, and found my first $13 million dispute within the first eight months,” he recalls.  “It was settled for $6.5 million.  I was learning the game—that there’s a business world, an analyst world, and a real world in terms of how things get done.”

His time at Cable Wireless was served well by his experience at Arthur Andersen, which had taught him to ask “what if?” by challenging the way people do things and automating as much as possible.  By the end of his three years there, he had advanced to the position of director, saved the company millions of dollars, and built a strong telecom network that included a man named Atul Jain, founder of software vendor TEOCO Corporation.  TEOCO was an engineering company that wanted to get into the product space, and at 23 years old, Sundeep began developing a vision for accomplishing it.  Atul offered him an entrepreneurial opportunity, and Sundeep accepted, setting out to build a telecom division within the company.  “I give a lot of the credit for my entrepreneurial flame to Atul Jain,” he affirms.  “He really gave me full freedom to learn, fail, get up again, learn more, and lead.”

Four years later, after building the fledgling telecom division from nothing to millions in revenue, Sundeep decided he wanted to start a business from scratch after walking the floors of AT&T in Alpharetta, GA, where he noticed a young college grad doing tedious data entry work.  Sundeep thought for a moment and then asked the VP overseeing the task, “what if?” What if he could find a way to automate the process entirely?  This question ultimately led to the innovation of an optical-character recognition (OCR) scan/convert product called AIM Capture, which became the centerpiece of the company he launched in 2001 at the age of 27, NISCO (now Razorsight).  “The technology positively disrupted the market for inter-carrier payment processing and reconciliation, and led to Tier 1 carriers becoming customers within the first two years of product launch,” he explains.

Sundeep then brought on Charlie Thomas, former CEO of Net2000 Communications, who first served on Razorsight’s Board of Directors and then became CEO in 2005, to take the company to the next level.  “I genuinely believe that, when entrepreneurs launch startups, they must surround themselves with people who are much smarter than themselves,” Sundeep affirms.  “This raises their success factor substantially.  There was so much to learn from Charlie, but the most important lesson he taught me was how to scale a company and how to network among the best networkers.”  Together they raised $20 million in venture capital, primarily from Sierra Ventures leading, and utilized their networks to expand the company. Sundeep’s wife, Sonia, also helped to guide the company to success, using her technical astuteness and engineering background to help solve some of Razorsight’s initial technology constraints while remaining thoroughly engaged in the education of their children and keeping their young family strong.

From its beginning, Razorsight’s culture was molded around the servant leadership model that Sundeep finds most inspiring.  “If you can empower your employees to make the right decisions and lead together, and if you genuinely believe that you’re there to serve them instead of being served by them, you will be tremendously successful,” he avows.  “To me, business should be personal and principle-centered.  If you can’t have a quality personal conversation with the people you spend most of your waking hours  with, you’re more machine than person.  Everyone on the team has good ideas to give, and we embrace that.  I don’t care what my title is, as long as we have a good nucleus of people who want to work with this company because they feel they truly have a role in leading it.”

When Sundeep attended a Big Data conference in Dubai and felt the entrepreneurial itch to pursue that horizon, he began taking strides to leave Razorsight in good hands and ultimately departed in June of 2010.  He recalls Charlie coaching him with his personal adage, “Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur.”  With two young children at the time, however, he wanted to ensure he would have a reliable income while pursuing the dream of DataRPM.  Thus, he also launched SearchRidge, a web and mobile application development company with a great revenue business model that provided funding for DataRPM.  Then, in 2012, Sundeep retired fully from SearchRidge, sold his stake in that company, and is now able to focus exclusively on DataRPM and its future success.

Along with this professional focus, however, Sundeep has also taken great strides to continue to strengthen his focus on his family.  “When I left Razorsight, my father reminded me that while my entrepreneurial dreams were great, I have to give equal time to my family,” he recalls.  “It’s absolutely important to me that the core principles of family and togetherness continue to be a guiding factor in my life.  I truly believe that the definition of success is family.  Family is core to my being able to be a serial entrepreneur, and to anyone who wants to do something that requires tremendous sacrifice, because it’s what grounds you.”

In addition to continuing the service-centered style of leadership that garnered praise and respect at Razorsight, DataRPM was also founded under the firm commitment to always reach for betterment.  “I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my life, and one key consideration is not to repeat them,” Sundeep says.  “You’ve just got to learn.  I believe our society is built on the merit of second chances in life, so long as the same mistakes are not made again.  So along with the principle of integrity, DataRPM is founded on learning from our mistakes.”

In advising young people entering the business world today, Sundeep emphasizes the importance of building upon one’s innate passion with solid skills.  “You’ll have the most success when you pursue something you truly love and then couple it with requisite deep skills,” he says.  “It has a natural element to it—you’re more inclined to see it, breathe it, and live it.  You can make money in any shape or form in this world, and there are so many people who work to put food on the table instead of working for the love of it.  I’d like to see that change a bit where possible.”

Beyond that, he challenges all young people to rigorously challenge themselves.  By asking “what if?” at every turn and on every day, we push society past the status quo and toward new solutions.

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