S0E9: Millionaire Mondays - Venky Balasubramanian, Plivo

Learn more about Plivo here: https://www.plivo.com/

In this podcast, we sat down with Venky Balasubramanian to talk about the story of Plivo, a cloud communications platform that simplifies and personalises businesses’ customer communications. Every kind of business, from startups to public companies, can benefit from Plivo’s enterprise-grade communications platform, which includes a premium carrier network with connectivity in more than 190 countries, an API platform for messaging and voice calls, and solutions for sales and support teams. Venky Balasubramanian started Plivo in 2011 along with his co-founder Michael Ricordeau. Initially, Plivo was an open-source GitHub project, but after attending a developer conference in Chicago, the co-founder duo decided to commercialise their voice-based app communication framework. Initially, they applied for Y Combinator’s Winter 2011 Batch, but were rejected. Venky emailed Paul Graham to ask why they had been rejected, and he said: 1. Venky B and Michael Ricordeau didn’t have a lot of in-person co-founder experience; they had only met offline in Chicago at that conference, and 2. Plivo was a pre-revenue company. Venky Balasubramanian got to work proving to Paul Graham that he and Michael had what it took to succeed as a business, scoring Plivo’s first customer and beginning to generate revenue. He also raised a pre-seed round from Morpheus, Seeders and One97 Mobility Fund, along with Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Following this, Plivo was accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 batch, and counted companies like 9GAG, Boosted Boards, Coinbase, Soylent, and Zapier as its batchmates. Venky B clearly remembers seeing Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong offering other Y Combinator founders bitcoins in exchange for signing up for Coinbase. By the time Plivo’s time at Y Combinator was over, they were generating more revenue than most of their fellow startups, and were able to raise a $1.5M seed round from investors like YC, Battery Ventures, A16Z, and Qualcomm Ventures. This fundraise grabbed media attention and also solidified Plivo’s reputation as a business with trustworthy, legitimate backers. In 2017, Plivo raised $8M in venture debt, rather than pursuing a Series A. While these funds did temporarily alter the startup’s culture, Venky B and Michael Ricordeau were able to course-correct, saving the company from the high-burn trap many other SaaS businesses fall into. By raising debt instead of a Series A, Venky and Michael were also able to retain their equity in Plivo. Plivo has no plans to go public or sell, and are looking forward to growing Plivo’s new offerings including Contacto and Sellular. Contacto is an omnichannel contact center that seamlessly combines your customer conversations and your existing systems, and Sellular is a modern sales platform built for Salesforce users. Both Contacto and Sellular have been internally funded by and set up within Plivo, but with siloed teams and goals which enable them to grow independently. Today Plivo has a team of 300, the company is fully remote across USA and India, they’re profitable, and are bringing in somewhere between $50 to $100 million in annual revenue from customers across 190+ countries. They’ve also been profitable for 6.5 years!

Stay updated on what’s new at Plivo: Twitter — https://twitter.com/plivo Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/Plivo/ LinkedIn — https://in.linkedin.com/company/plivo-inc GitHub — https://github.com/plivo Connect with us: Twitter: https://twitter.com/bwmillionaires/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/backstagewithmillionaires Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/backstagewithmillionaires/ Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5rGPalovc6AKsfbOyjh32p