Powered By Inc42 Brandlabs

Brandlabs

The brand solutions arm of Inc42 Media combining Inc42’s creative and editorial strengths to create compelling stories for brands partnering with it.

Chasing Hypergrowth: How Startups Can Innovate And Scale Securely

07 Oct'22 | By Inc42 BrandLabs

Inc42 and Google Cloud recently held a roundtable titled Charting Secure Growth Strategies To Balance Business Innovation And Risk, exploring several critical areas such as:

Demystifying the notion of scale: Building blocks for a business to ensure sustainable scale at early stages
A close look at the cogs necessary to build securely, a deep dive into rising threats and challenges, and essential counterstrategies and metrics to help B2B and B2C players
The art of balancing scale and security: Strategies and technologies necessary to reduce complexities, promote innovation and increase collaboration
Solutions in the market and their impact on startups; the concept and implementation of FinOps

Moderated by Arnav Gupta, product and strategy lead at Scaler, the discussion included Isaac John Wesley, director of product management at Plum; Alankar Saxena, founder and CTO of Mudrex; Karthik Krishna, VP of engineering at Refyne; Suraj Prakash, VP of engineering at Kuvera; Madhav Krishna, founder and CEO of Vahan; Saurabh Odhyan, CTO of Freshtohome; Thejasvi Bhat, head of engineering at BlackBuck, and Chintan Shah, head of digital native business at Google Cloud.

Chasing Hypergrowth: How Startups Are Innovating And Scaling Securely

India was still busy celebrating its 75th year of Independence when a Bloomberg report stated that the nation had surged past the UK, its former coloniser, to emerge as the fifth-largest economy. And much of this credit goes to the innovation and execution excellence of Indian startups.

The Indian startup ecosystem has not lost its dynamism despite geopolitical conflicts (read the Russia-Ukraine face-off), record levels of global inflation and an ongoing funding winter with startup funding falling 17% YoY in the first eight months of 2022.

However, coping with these crippling challenges is not easy after a debilitating slowdown during Covid times. Sooner than later, most startups (even those flush with money) have faced critical issues and aimed to align business innovation and growth with risk management and profitability.

So, what strategies can startups adopt to scale up securely and efficiently while keeping an eye on the bottom line?

RECOMMENDED FOR yOU

In this age of digital transformation, user data and cloud adoption are essential enablers, muscling up a startup’s ability to innovate and scale. But with a great amount of data at their disposal comes greater responsibility.

“For us, security was not a bolt-on effort but a built-in effort. So, we build security into the engineering DNA of every product,” said Chintan Shah, head of digital native business at Google Cloud.

Not everyone follows that approach.

Take, for instance, Vahan, a full-stack labour marketplace startup that integrated security processes reactively rather than proactively, its founder and CEO Madhav Krishna candidly admitted.

Building the right technology platform for a startup to scale up is critical, according to Thejasvi Bhat of BlackBuck, an online B2B marketplace for inter-city Full Truck Load (FTL) transportation.

The startup claimed that 80% of its growth happened after the pandemic disrupted traditional supply chains. Timely investments in on-ground personnel and cloud-based infrastructure saw BlackBuck’s telematics business grow 6x in the past 18 months.

For Odhyan of Freshtohome, the end game is about seamless user experience as the Bengaluru-based startup delivers fresh fish and meat. But he also stressed the need to prepare for critical challenges like resource splitting so that a business could focus more on its core competence.

Finally, the conversation around tech boiled down to the ever-raging debate – build or buy?

“Always try to delay that choice. Take what is available in the industry, even if it is a little expensive. It will give you a better ROI in the long term than building it on your own,” said Saxena of Mudrex, a crypto investment platform.

India currently ranks third in the global startup ecosystem, behind the US and China, and is home to 107 unicorns, startups which have reached billion-dollar valuations or more. So, the country is rightly optimistic about new milestones as Indian entrepreneurs work tirelessly to balance business innovations and risks to prepare for hypergrowth.