Anurag Gupta of Shoreline.io: Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup
An Interview With Paul Moss
The humility to pivot — While you have money, you have time. It’s important to listen to your customers and see if there is even a small piece of what you’ve built with which they resonate. Some really big successes such as Uber, YouTube, and Slack pivoted from their initial concept. The intuition of when to persevere and when to pivot is the mark of a great founder.
Startups have such a glamorous reputation. Companies like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Uber, and Airbnb once started as scrappy startups with huge dreams and huge obstacles.
Yet we of course know that most startups don’t end up as success stories. What does a founder or a founding team need to know to create a highly successful startup?
In this series, called “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup” we are talking to experienced and successful founders and business leaders who can share stories from their experience about what it takes to create a highly successful startup.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Anurag Gupta, current founder and CEO of Shoreline.io.
Anurag is the founder of Shoreline.io, a DevOps company focused on incident automation — making it easy to automate away commonly occurring incidents and possible to quickly and safely debug and repair new incidents. Before Shoreline, Anurag was a VP at AWS, where he was responsible for transactional database and analytic services, growing this business a thousand-fold over his time there. He has also been an early member of three startups, with one IPO and two acquisitions.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Shoreline is the product I wish I’d had when overseeing production incidents at AWS. When I joined AWS, they gave me the charter to go disrupt OLAP and OLTP. That resulted in services like Redshift and Aurora. What I learned over my time there was that no one cares about features or performance if your service isn’t up. Operations and keeping my services healthy was over half the job.
Shoreline makes it easy to automate repairs to the commonplace incidents that burn operator hours and kill availability. It also makes it possible to quickly diagnose and repair new issues on your fleet as though it were a single box. There’s a lot of deep distributed systems tech under the covers, but it is surfaced as a simple, easy to use system that feels just like shell. We look for the “moments of joy” when our customers realize all the things they can do and the time they get back. That’s really fulfilling.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
I’ve been lucky enough to get “one of everything” I’ve wanted. In part, maybe I want less than other people do because I grew up poor. I believe it is as important to do good as to do well. It gives life purpose once you’ve climbed enough of the hierarchy of needs.
For a long time, my wife and I have given away at least 20% of what we make each year. Over the past decade, that’s been focused on trying to improve the quality of life of children and adults on the autism spectrum, with focus on those considered severe. We do this in three ways. First, we fund basic science and translational research such as support for the Suramin Phase I clinical trial at UCSD, the MTT Phase I clinical trial at ASU, pre-clinical research on mitochondria and metabolism in autism at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, and basic science research at Stanford on the pathophysiology of neurobehavioral exacerbations. Second, we believe children should be able to achieve based on their abilities, not their disabilities. We fund initiatives that help individuals with ASD who cannot speak fluently or handwrite access an age-appropriate education, such as support for the Autism and Communication Center at California Lutheran University. Third, through support for Communication First, we help educate the public, advocate for policy reform, and engage the judicial system to advance the rights, autonomy, opportunity, and dignity of people with speech-related communication disabilities and conditions.
Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard? What strategies or techniques did you use to help overcome those challenges?
When I’m going through a hard time, I think about my father. He studied as an architect and always wanted to emigrate from India and do big things. He had the opportunity to go to Frankfurt and his elder brother refused. A few years later, he had the opportunity to go to London and his brother again refused. Yet later, he was able to come to New York and his brother finally relented. By then, he had a wife and three little kids. He came anyway. Every week, Monday through Saturday, he’d take the subway to a job, spend 8 hours there, and then take the subway to a second job for another 8 hours. 96 hours a week, every week, for more than a year, doing whatever work was available. At the end of it, he’d made enough money to bring his family over and cover a few months of rent.
I’ve never had to work that hard for that long. I’ve never been that isolated from the folks who believe in me. I’ve always been able to work at things I know how to do well. If he could get through his large challenges, I can certainly get through my small ones. What I learned from him is that I may never be the smartest or most talented guy in a room, but if there’s someone there who’s outworking me, well, that’s a choice I’m making.
The journey of an entrepreneur is never easy, and is filled with challenges, failures, setbacks, as well as joys, thrills and celebrations. Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder”?
An Israeli founder taught me the Arabic saying ‘Yom asal, yom basal’ — ‘one day honey, one day onions.’ In a startup, there are days that are sweet and days where you want to cry. That’s the way it is. But, that’s part of why we do it — to live a life in technicolor where everything is experienced vividly, not one where even our biggest successes and failures are muted sepia tones. I found it helps to make your startup team a second family to celebrate and commiserate together — no one outside will understand why seemingly little things matter so much.
Let’s imagine that a young founder comes to you and asks your advice about whether venture capital or bootstrapping is best for them? What would you advise them? Can you kindly share a few things a founder should look at to determine if fundraising or bootstrapping is the right choice?
I’d start by asking them how much money they think they need and for how long. I’d then ask them to adjust it to see what happens if it takes twice as long to get the product built and twice as long to break even. If they can reduce burn and still make the numbers work out, they should certainly consider bootstrapping — or at least delay fundraising. Nowadays, capital is plentiful and terms aren’t as onerous as they once were for seed rounds. Even if you raise, you can put the money in the bank and run your business tightly, as though you’d bootstrapped. You do have to be disciplined.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Many startups are not successful, and some are very successful. From your experience or perspective, what are the main factors that distinguish successful startups from unsuccessful ones? What are your “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
A real space — Founders often think that they’ll succeed because they’re solving a problem they care about a lot where they have unique experience or understanding. But, what matters is whether there are enough other people who care about it enough. Even at AWS, which is sort of a conglomeration of lots of startups, there are services that became huge and others that didn’t go anywhere. In most cases, it came down to whether there was a large existing market to go disrupt.
A different approach — Different is better than better. There’s a lot of activation energy required to buy something new. When I started Aurora, my big challenge was that Oracle had a 30 year head start and added 5,000 person-years of development each year. The solution wasn’t to try to catch up to them — that would have been hopeless — it was to find customers who wanted something different and were being left behind.
Magic — We all entered tech because what could be done seemed magical. We can all think of amazing products that recreated that sense of wonder and opportunity. I’ve had the opportunity to be part of a few of those that just exploded.
The humility to pivot — While you have money, you have time. It’s important to listen to your customers and see if there is even a small piece of what you’ve built with which they resonate. Some really big successes such as Uber, YouTube, and Slack pivoted from their initial concept. The intuition of when to persevere and when to pivot is the mark of a great founder.
Luck — Finally, a lot of whether you’ll be successful does come down to luck. We’ve all seen better products lose to seemingly worse ones or a company get a 100x outcome of what seems like an identical one. Despite all the money, effort, and talent put in, most startups fail. It is something of a lottery. But, as they say, “you’ve got to be in it to win it!”
Startup founders often work extremely long hours and it’s easy to burn the candle at both ends. What would you recommend to founders about how to best take care of their physical and mental wellness when starting a company?
It is easy to fall into the habit of obsessing about your startup every minute of the day. That’s not healthy. I found it useful to set aside fixed time and not let work intrude. I take Saturday off from work to spend taking care of my son as well as at least an hour each day to catch up with my wife and put my son to bed. I have found it doesn’t matter how much time I spend, but I do need to be fully present however much time that is. My family is making sacrifices just as I am. And, honestly, it recharges me more than anything else I could be doing!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can learn more about Shoreline at https://shoreline.io. I’m accessible as @awgupta on LinkedIn — your readers can reach out to me there and ask me anything.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!
