Haseeb Budhani | Rafay
HASEEB BUDHANI
Co-Founder & CEO of Rafay, a company that enables developers to automate the distribution, operations, cross-region scaling and lifecycle management.
What Is Rafay? Tell Us About What You Do And How It Works.
Rafay is on a mission to make it easy for companies to operate their modern applications in the cloud. Modern apps are being predominantly developed using microservices architectures, and containers are a packaging mechanism developers are using across the board to simplify their development efforts. Rafay provides the easiest-to-use management platform for container orchestration across any cloud, datacenter or Edge environment, which companies can consume as a service.
What Is Your Background? Tell Us About Your Journey To Starting A Company And How You Ended Up In This Space.
My colleagues and I come from the security world where we were consumers of orchestration technologies. Our experience was that the market-leading orchestration technologies at the time were designed for highly sophisticated companies who could allocate a large number of resources to consume said technologies. With so many companies being early on their application modernization journeys, the market clearly needed a more turnkey platform that they could consume as a service. And that lead to Rafay.
What Have Been Both Your Favorite And Least-liked Parts Of Your Entrepreneurial Journey? What Have Been Your Most Challenging And Most Exciting Moments For You And The Company?
My favorite part of the job is sales. No startup can be successful without the CEO being the primary sales person, and I take my duties as sales rep very seriously. My least-liked part of the job is finance/accounting. We have a fractional CFO supporting us, but a lot of the bills, vendor conversations, etc., fall on me (I also serve as the office manager for now), and I’d much rather be doing demos and getting feedback from customers.
Rafay is a young startup with limited resources in a space occupied by a number of large, generation-1 companies that create a lot of noise in the market. We win every deal that we’re in, but we lose every deal we’re not in. Getting recognition and visibility in the market is a tough job, but we’re slowly seeing success. But every time we beat the incumbents in a deal is cause for celebration for the company, because every deal is bringing us closer to market domination.
What Was The Inspiration Behind The Company Name?
The company is named after my son, Rafay. The previous startup I was involved with was named after my daughter, Soha, so it made logical sense to name the next one after our second child.
Who Are Your Co-Founders Or People Who You Work Very Closely With? How Do Their Skills Supplement Yours?
My Co-Founder, Hemanth Kavuluru, heads up Engineering and Operations for the company. He’s built an incredible leadership team that allows him to spend most of his time engaging with customers pre and post sales. Because Hemanth is so close to customers, he is able to effectively deal with product management to address customer needs in record time every day.
Because I spend most of my time in a sales representative role, having Hemanth supporting me as an SE on calls is a powerful combination. This business/technical combination is why we’ve been able to quickly and successfully prove product market fit, and partner with a large number of very happy customers.
What Was The Fundraising Process Like For You? Tell Us About Your Investors And What You Use The Money You’ve Raised For.
The best investors are those who bet on the team first and foremost. Sometimes the initial idea doesn’t work out, but the best teams know how to iterate and keep at it till they find gold. And perhaps more importantly, the best investors are believers in the problem you’re solving. In our case, our Series-A was led by Ben Metcalfe at Ridge Ventures. He and I first spoke while I was at Newark Airport waiting to catch a flight back to San Francisco. I had barely spoken about the problem we were tackling for 2 minutes when he stopped me and explained why he completely understood the problem (he had lived through this during his time at WPEngine, which he founded) and was convinced that a company like Rafay would soon exist. Ben is the best type of investor an early company can ask for.
We’ve used our Series-A funding to focus on building a differentiated product, and prove out product-market fit with a small sales team. We have been successful on both fronts.
Anything Exciting That Will Be Launching Soon?
Rafay continues to push the envelope on enterprise-grade Kubernetes management. We release major updates to our platform every 3 months. By the end of April-2021, the platform will support turnkey workflows for gitops-based infrastructure provisioning, configuration drift detection capabilities to help enterprise IT manage their Kubernetes fleets, and much more. The Rafay team moves fast and is fast outpacing the rest of the industry.
How Has COVID-19 Impacted Your Growth And Operation Over The Last Year?
With everyone working from home due to COVID-19 and not everyone having a setup where they can work in an environment conducive to focused work, some of my colleagues have had to deal with a lot when it comes to balancing work with childcare, etc. But it's been amazing how people have stepped up to make material contributions to the company’s success. These are the times when it's so clear why small startups with highly motivated people are able to compete and win against companies 10 times their size.
What Does Your Typical Day Look Like?
I usually have 6am calls with prospective customers, and tend to focus on external meetings till midday. The middle of the day is spent handling internal meetings, email correspondence, etc. I spend the early evening with the sales team working through the day’s sales activity, planning for the following day, etc. Right before I go to bed, I review any emails I may have missed one more time before passing out to start another day at 5’ish in the morning.
How Do You Think Your Industry Will Change Post-COVID?
Pre-COVID, I used to travel a lot to visit prospects and customers. I am not if we’ll be going back to that type of environment anytime soon. Most of our customers are continuing to work from home, and plan to come back to the office over time. Not sure when they’ll be comfortable meeting with a sales rep in person who just got off a plane, even if I’ll have had my vaccine shots by then. :)
What Are The Top Three Qualities or Skills You Believe Entrepreneurs Need In Order To Be Successful? Also, What Advice Do You Have For Entrepreneurs Who Are Just Starting Out?
The two things all successful entrepreneurs clearly have in spades are:
Grit
The ability to hear NO and keep going
Grit gives an entrepreneur the crazy amounts of energy needed to make forward progress while everyone is telling you you’re wrong. Your (current and future) investors may not see it yet, the market may not see it yet, maybe even some of your colleagues may question it. But you have to keep going - because you know you’re on the right track and soon enough there will be enough evidence to prove that you were right all along. Just stay with it.
And here’s the third quality every successful entrepreneur also has:
3. They don’t lie to themselves. If they know they’re wrong or something isn’t working, they don’t make up a fantasy in their heads about how things will turn out just fine. They take action to address the issue they’ve identified. The result may be pivoting the company or finding another creative path forward.
Tell Us A Story Of Something That Happened To You, Something You Heard, Or Something You Saw, That Either Made You Laugh Or Taught You An Important Lesson.
A couple of months after any deal closes, I like to check in with the project owner on the customer side to see how things are going, if they’re happy with the decision, etc. I always ask what they love most about working with Rafay. Consistently, customers say that they love working with our Solutions team a lot. No one brings up the product in the first sentence. Of course, without a solid product, no customer would even entertain a purchase, but its great to see that our Solutions team is a key reason why customers love Rafay. The lessons here is that customer experience is always the most important thing in an enterprise engagement. You may have the best product, but if the customer’s experience working with your company is not excellent, your business may not last a long time.
If You Can Have A One-Hour Meeting With Someone Famous Who Is Alive, Who Would It Be And Why?
I’ve read a bunch of business-focused books over the years, but “The Hard Things About Hard Things” has stayed with me more than most. I’d love an hour of Ben Horowitz’s time and get his feedback on the various decisions I’ve made here at Rafay and get his feedback.
What Is Your Favorite Quote?
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take," by Wayne Gretsky rings true for me. If you don’t even try something, you are guaranteed to fail. Very true in every aspect of a startup.
What Do You Do In Your Free Time?
Help with homework; hit the gym a couple of times a week; binge crime / Law & Order type shows on Netflix.
What Does Success Mean To You?
Success to me has to do with impact and betterment. Impact by the company on the industry we’re in, and betterment for each team member in terms of personal and professional growth, finding a great set of individuals to work with, and hopefully achieving a financial reward at some point down the road.
