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Become A Startup Insider With Inc42 Plus
Join our exclusive community of business leaders &makers for in-depth tech stories and intelligence on India’s tech economy you won’t find elsewhere.
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Inc42 and Google Cloud recently held a roundtable titled Reimagining Business Operations And Infrastructure To Scale Cost Efficiently, exploring many critical areas such as:
- The cost of scale: Building business infrastructure, teams and processes and aligning all towards the business vision
- Managing cost with growth: Viewpoints from B2B and B2C space and metrics to measure a successful and cost-effective growth strategy
- Driving financial accountability and visibility, demystifying FinOps and a look at their use cases for startups
Moderated by Soumendra Mohanty, chief strategy and innovation officer at Tredence, the discussion included Subhash Choudhary, cofounder and CTO of Dukaan; Enbasekar D, CTO of MediBuddy; Harsha Pai, director of engineering at Chai Point; Debasis Bhattacharya, customer engineering manager (India) at Google Cloud; Shibashis Sen, head of cloud operations at Tally Solutions; Sujay Koduri, SVP of engineering at Vymo; and Ashish Tewari, SVP and head of engineering at NiyoX and Niyo Global.
How Startups Can Decouple Innovation And Cost To Be Future-Ready
With the fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) well underway, all business entities – both legacy players and startups – are rethinking their business operations to stay future-ready.
Characterised by cloud adoption, AI-ML, automation, IoT/IIoT and more, companies today have emerged on a digital transformation journey to cope with fast-evolving market requirements. However, this is easier said than done.
Industrial Revolutions in the past never failed to disrupt production processes and hence, business outcomes. But unlike the previous ones, Industry 4.0 has ushered in dynamic combinations between technology, market and society, along with unique challenges regarding innovation, resources, scale and cost.
The new perspective is both scary and invigorating.
“That’s where great companies and teams do. They look at problems as opportunities and see how they can create value for the customers,” said Enbasekar D of MediBuddy, an end-to-end digital healthcare platform.
Again, scaling a business should be part of a startup’s core strategy. Even in the early days, startup founders have a vision as to where they want to be down the road. So, they must be prepared early in that journey to scale up as required. And here is where cloud adoption plays a prime role.
Debasis Bhattacharya of Google Cloud wanted new tech adopters to look beyond the obvious benefits a cloud service provider brings to the table. Tech enablers should guide fledgling startups on what solutions to use, how to use them and how to measure the results to track business effectiveness.
But innovation and scale must not be implemented at all costs. It is easy to spawn a new machine, fire it and forget about it. One only realises the folly when hit with a huge cloud bill. That is why startups should adopt a top-down approach and instil a culture of ownership. A regular and meticulous review of operational costs will further keep a startup’s gross margin healthy.
Another critical factor in reimagining operations is the need to onboard and groom talent.
“I think talent needs to be taught, and knowledge needs to be shared. You may have all the money to spend and all the tech to use. But if you don’t have the right talent to execute it, it becomes a big problem for business continuity,” said Harsha Pai of Chai Point.
Talking about ideal teams, Sujay Koduri of Vymo said that startups should build ‘pods’ or groups filled with members from different verticals. This way, they can work as a self-sufficient unit and impact business or end-user outcomes instead of just controlling engineering or DevOp outcomes.
Eventually, the power of simplicity will drive the adoption of digital trends and technologies. Startups must choose early on a flexible or dynamic architecture that will help them leverage the latest technology cost-effectively.
More importantly, each decision to revamp a startup’s business operations and infrastructure must be taken while keeping the needs of customers/end users at the forefront.
