paradime.io — ciao 2020

As 2020 comes to a close I thought of reflecting a bit on what has been a really strange year.

I have long believed black swan events are rare windows of opportunity — it's a time to think out of the box because life in the box is untenable.

By mid-2020, locked in our respective flats, Fabio and myself started having long conversations about how broken the world of data is and the frustration we as practitioners faced daily and that ultimately data is about people. It quickly became clear speaking within our network that we were not dreaming in a hyperbole — this shit is real!

We started working on paradime.io!

Fast forward to end-2020, a few things happened:

• we raised our pre-seed round — as first time founders, we had no idea what fundraising looked like, but thanks to a friend (you know who you are if you are reading this :-P ) we learnt. Advice to founders — avoid the noise in online media, speak to real people who have done it.
  We also raised during a pandemic, over zoom, facebook messenger and google meet - we did the entire transaction online, which I think is incredible!
• and we spoke with plenty of VCs — analysts and partners alike and we learnt what bad vs good VCs look like — some analysts were just filling a CRM while others took a genuine interest and we learnt how to spot both very quickly.
• the next decade is about data —the last decade has been about SaaS, cloud and massive unbundling of every aspect of a business's processes. And this means an average SME/mid-market organisation has more than 200 data sources and growing — so data production is not stopping anywhere. Similarly, pretty much every venture backed business is now analytics driven (as opposed to data driven) and that trend is also not going anywhere. Hence, it's the perfect storm where analytics teams will become critical in maintaining the balance between the supply side (data producing systems) and demand side(data consuming teams) — it's an exciting time!
• we hired some incredible engineers — hiring is tough, especially when you are in stealth and you are competing with other well-capitalised startups in the eco-system. We are incredibly fortunate that we can be 100% remote so we could search the length and breadth of the world and we created our own process to find the right person. Big shout out to the team at Deel for taking the pain out of remote payroll.
• we laid out our values — I think this is huge, because without the right cultural underpinnings you can't hire incredible talent, and without incredible talent you can't build an incredible product or team or company.
  The short version is we care about commitment, pragma over dogma, "we" before "I", quant+qual = data.
  More on it here: https://www.notion.so/paradime/Our-Mission-Vision-and-Values-18c35bb6b1164c47840daca5af9a0375

Many people ask me "so tell me what you are building" — unfortunately we are not yet ready to share yet and that's for 2021 🥳.

But if you are a developer, engineer, designer who is not afraid of risk, does not want to simply do a job but build something, is excited by uncertainty rather than a straight-line life hit me up! It's easy to make life boring, building paradime.io will be definitely worth more than that 😂.

Final words — massive thanks to our team, investors, friends, and family — 2020 would have been much worse without all of you!

— Kaustav

co-founder, paradime.io 🚀