What we talked about
Prashanth Kumar Duggishetti went from shipping Dycap’s “Perfect Track” camera tech (InfoComm’s Most Innovative Product) to co-founding Ellenox, a Hyderabad-based venture studio that lets founders “sell while we build” across product, engineering, GTM, and ops. We dig into burnout and bootstrapping, filtering 1,800 applicants without lowering the bar, giving rejected candidates useful feedback, and why India’s talent gap is about access:not ability.
Show notes
Meet Prashanth Kumar Duggishetti:award-winning engineer turned venture-studio founder. You should listen to Prashanth because He has taken hardware from lab to market and earned global awards, showing he understands the full product journey: from code and control systems to customer Success.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:01.196) Welcome back to the Prevetted Podcast, where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Our guest today is Prashant Kumar Dugicheti. He’s an award winner, engineer, turning to venture studio founder. You should listen to Prashant because he has taken hard work from lab to market and earned global awards.
showing he understands the full product journey from code and control systems to customer success. How are you doing Prashant?
Prashanth (00:38.97) Doing great. How about you, Federico?
Federico Ramallo (00:41.95) I am doing great. Plus it’s Friday, so we have a weekend ahead to enjoy.
Prashanth (00:46.984) It’s 4th of July so it’s already, you know, happy 4th of July though.
Federico Ramallo (00:55.266) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not American. I’m Argentinian, moved to Mexico. I’m doing business in the US. I spent a lot of my time in the Bay Area. But thank you, thank you. So today is great because it’s quiet on that side. People are having fun. So it’s been a good week for that.
Prashanth (00:59.238) Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (01:12.37) Yeah, mean, absolutely.
Ha ha ha!
Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (01:23.556) Absolutely,
Federico Ramallo (01:29.278) Something funny about that is that in the US, people celebrate Cinco de Mayo, May 5th. And in Mexico, they celebrate the same thing, but it’s May 4th. So I think it’s like lost in translation, and they miss a day, and I still don’t understand why.
Prashanth (01:38.758) Yes.
Prashanth (01:45.899) Prashanth (01:52.899) Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (01:58.482) That’s funny.
Federico Ramallo (02:01.996) Yeah, because they celebrate the same. It was a battle, right? So they celebrate the same battle, right? So anyway, it’s funny that that that’s how it happened. So, you know, with my friends, I call that the Mexican Independence Day, right? Yeah.
Prashanth (02:06.44) Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Prashanth (02:17.894) Mmm. True.
Federico Ramallo (02:24.064) Awesome. So I wanted to ask you first about, you know, what convinced you to leave Silicon Valley and start Elanox in Heberabad? Hyderabad.
Prashanth (02:37.096) Hyderabad, it’s Hyderabad, India. Okay. So I moved to the US in 2014, right? On day one, actually, my brother stays there. He’s a, what do you call? He’s in the electronic space. He’s in the Silicon Valley, Silicon side of things, to be exact, right? The real Silicon side of things. So like, I actually landed in…
Federico Ramallo (02:57.25) the real silicon.
Prashanth (03:04.796) San Francisco back in August 12th, believe August 10th or August 12 2014. Right. And I was there for 15 days. I had conversations with my brother mainly about what my future plans were. I was just out of I just completed my undergrad. I moved to the US. I had no job experience. I had a eight month stint of an internship sort of thing. Apprenticeship internship at a friend’s family startup.
He was building, he was manufacturing laser print. He was trying to do laser, CNC laser cutting and stuff out here in India. Right. And then my conversations then were, I’m going to go back as soon as I’m done with my masters and a little bit of a couple of years of job experience. And I’m going to go do my own thing. This was my conversation. Right. And I stuck to that. Right. Like I basically was like, okay, let me.
Federico Ramallo (03:44.067) Right.
Prashanth (04:05.491) Go Did my two years at University of Florida. That’s where I met my co-founder by the way. I did a minor in entrepreneurship that’s where a lot of my thought process about entrepreneurship and a lot of my Feelings about how to run a business dev lab like that’s where the foundation was laid and there I met some amazing people who founded die cap
Federico Ramallo (04:11.838) nice.
Prashanth (04:31.228) That was a camera, automated camera manufacturing, know, software firm. We pivoted four times before we hit our market fit, right? And then that’s where we won the award, like the best award, know, most innovative technology of the year award at a couple of trade shows back to back. And the product was doing well, but we were right out of college. Everyone was like undergrad or just in grad school. I was like, I was there.
working in my last two semesters, Like was like last two semesters plus another eight months after that I worked there. But at the end of the day, we all burnt out. I mean, it was like two years of grind to be exact. were literally living on the grind life. The CEO was sleeping under the table. I was just bunking in another friend’s apartment and we were grinding heavily.
Federico Ramallo (05:15.416) Y-yes.
Prashanth (05:29.864) And that was a fun time to be exact. Now that I think back, I’m like, no, I don’t know if I can do that again ever again. Right. It was super fun. But we were signing a lease to move out of our what do you call we were in an incubator program at the University of Florida. Very grateful for it. They provided us with office space, a lot of area and like a lot of mentorship back then and and opened a lot of
Federico Ramallo (05:37.794) Yeah.
Prashanth (05:59.688) tried to open a lot of doors. Entrepreneurship on the East Coast was not that developed back then as much as it was in West Coast. Now, University of Florida is closer to Miami, Orlando, so there’s a little bit more of what do you call money and venture things happening there. But back then it was in the case, 2015, 2016-ish. So that’s when…
We were about to sign a lease. had a huge pipeline of deals coming in over the year because we were selling into ed tech sector. We were selling into universities whose sales pipelines are anywhere between six months to one year at least. They’re usually shopping for the next summer, next academic year. So we have to wait till then to get stuff done. And we were
Federico Ramallo (06:47.095) wow, was a very long, you know, cycle.
Prashanth (06:49.756) sales cycle. that basically burned us out. We had a huge pipeline of things that were at the bottom of the, you know, they were literally at the bottom of our pipeline, not even at the top of the funnel. We had a couple of million dollars in the bottom of our pipeline, which were ready to sign. We took those and we decided that it’s not going to, we were not in a position where we can continue doing that. So we sold the whole technology out.
to another company, we got acquired by another company and they still are selling that product, right? Like it’s been 10 years and they’re still selling the same exact product. They come out and reach out to me asking me to do some changes to introduce new products or something, but it’s very minimal changes. And that shows us that like, basically showed me that, you know, that’s a product we built and it was through passion and like hard work and that’s still being used out there in the world, right? And that’s something that
Federico Ramallo (07:28.022) Yeah.
Prashanth (07:47.72) keeps me happy, right? And also something that gave me a lot of motivation to do what I’m doing today, right? Like continue on my entrepreneurial journey. So after that, I moved to Bay Area. That’s where, you know, the 360 in like, you know, or 180, whatever we call it, in terms of culture, in terms of money, in terms of how to move fast, break fast, and how to network and what to think about, how to think about problems.
And like that mindset came from there, right? There’s like two different mindsets that I carry. One is like the early entrepreneurship journey on bootstrapping side and then the Bay area side of stuff. And there I joined another, I think series A startup that was doing 3D printers. They were manufacturing 3D printers out in US back in 2017 before this whole, you know, we need to build things here in US, right? Like they were ahead of that whole thing.
They were trying to solve a very interesting problem and they were solving it in a very unique way with a lot of patents, a lot of very, very, very smart people. And like they were PhDs, people with a lot of experience, like they were professors and stuff and they were like extremely talented, what do call, material scientists. So like I worked with them and that gave me the whole mindset of
Federico Ramallo (08:59.907) Right.
Prashanth (09:17.02) what a team player looks like, right? Like you might never have met a real team player until you meet these group of people, how dedicated they were to the problem, how dedicated they were towards solving that particular, looking for perfection in the problem, like solving the problem perfectly. And at a scale that sometimes you wouldn’t even imagine, right? Like they can think 12 steps ahead. And then they think about all the future problems, especially in…
Federico Ramallo (09:40.653) I see.
Prashanth (09:44.806) manufacturing, that’s very important. My background is mechanical engineering robotics, but I realized that I was like six levels under, right? That’s what I felt like you get the whole feeling of what do you call feeling out of place, right? When you meet these people, like, you you meet these extremely smart people and then they were really nice people. So I speak to them even today, my manager from them has become a great mentor of mine. He’s been one of those.
Federico Ramallo (10:02.424) Right.
Prashanth (10:14.556) pillars was being like guiding me and pushing me towards doing the right thing for my own future and what I want to do. And I decided like five years I wanted to get out of US, build my own thing out here. I had an exit already so I knew what to do, how to do it. That’s like the one-on-one, the most important thing.
Federico Ramallo (10:37.71) Yeah, once you do the first, then the second becomes easier because now you know what path you need to do.
Prashanth (10:41.916) Yes. I’ve made some mistakes in the process. Getting a little cocky in this process. I’ve done one, I can do another one. Failed miserably on the second one. That’s where I learned a lot of today’s lessons. What I’m doing now. Also, it’s about one pretty important thing I haven’t really still come to terms with is actually getting outside capital.
Federico Ramallo (10:52.206) you
Prashanth (11:11.464) I try my level best to bootstrap stuff. This is mainly because I’ve learned it from my first startup, right? The moment you start getting money from other places, now you’re behold it to someone else. You need to make sure that your vision is aligned with the investor’s vision, not your vision for the product or not your vision for the people that are going to use this product. Right? Your vision should be aligned to making money first rather than
solving the problem in the most optimal or what you think is the right way. And that’s been one of the most important lessons for me and that’s what I’ve been trying my level best to build this whole venture studio model around. So those were like major things I learned and like I’m building this venture studio around that basic model. Back in 2022, end of 2022 we started this. My co-founder Ankur
Federico Ramallo (11:45.685) Right.
Prashanth (12:09.572) another person who’s had a couple of exits and he moved back to India too. We decided that it’s right time to build something that’s going to be mainly for hackers and bootstrappers and people who want to build it without having to take a lot of outside capital who can make revenue out of their own ideas and that’s what matters the most to our venture studio.
Federico Ramallo (12:34.424) Right, right. I’ve seen that what you’re talking about that investors are mostly looking for the next unicorn, right? And that means that, you know, you have to a thousand eggs, 10,000 eggs, whatever, you know. So they’re looking more for maybe not even the revenue, right? You know, because as a founder, you look for solving a problem.
And then you’re saying, I want to solve a problem, it also has to be sustainable. So the revenue becomes a part of it, but it’s a mean to an end, because you’re trying to solve the problem. If you do it for free, then you cannot scale. So if you’re losing money, then you cannot scale. So it has to be sustainable. That doesn’t mean you know.
Prashanth (13:17.234) Yes.
Prashanth (13:29.031) Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (13:32.282) That means making some money, but not necessarily killing. Usually the investors that I talked to are looking for the unicorns. That means you have to scale this as fast as possible. That means you don’t have enough time to experiment and test. That leads to the founder to be burnt out.
Prashanth (13:47.208) Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (14:01.71) The investor can do 10, 20, 50, whatever number it is of startups like this. And then if you take into consideration, and then you have each founder of these companies investing five, 10 years in the startup. And then if they count how much money they make in that period of time, they make below the minimum.
Prashanth (14:29.51) market hours. Yeah. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (14:31.084) minimum market hour. Yeah, yeah, And they wasted time, they wasted effort. So the investor knows that, well, if I have 50 companies that fail but one unicorn, then I can make it up for all of the others, right? So that becomes an issue, yeah.
Prashanth (14:45.68) Absolutely. I think, yeah. And that’s something I’ve seen a lot, right? Like a lot of founders think that investors are there to help them or at least secure their capital.
or least open doors and do a difference or make a difference to the world. Most of the times investors are there just for returns. They have their, you know, LPs that they have to take care of, right? At the end of the day. That’s what they work around.
Federico Ramallo (15:16.524) Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I also met investors that don’t think like that. They are more interested on supporting the founders. Right. But most are as we’re describing them. Yeah.
Prashanth (15:18.952) you
Prashanth (15:34.054) Yeah, the ones that you’re talking are usually ex-founders. Like they are usually the people who have built staff. They are the people who want to make a difference through because they’ve already done it. Now they try to mentor and get a few more of these out. Those are the kind of investors that, you those are the best kind of people, right?
Federico Ramallo (15:52.814) Yes, yes, because they are like, I struggle, I went through hell and came back, and now I want to be in the game again, helping other founders to avoid the mistakes that I made. And that’s a complete different mindset. So what does Venture Studio does or mean?
Prashanth (16:05.678) Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s usually… Yep.
Federico Ramallo (16:22.062) Why did you call it, what are you calling it, Adventure Studio?
Prashanth (16:22.151) So.
Alright, so there are like a couple of kinds of things that a venture studio does like at the core of it, venture studio is a complete end to end startup augmentation for an individual or a corporation. That’s what it is. Let’s say you have an idea, you already have capital or you know the market. Like you are someone who has a voice in the market. So you go and connect
What you then do usually is you go raise capital, get a few, what do you call, you build your own team, you build your own sales team, you do all this and then you spend a lot of money on this backend side of stuff that is not the visible stuff, given that you’re already a personality in that space. You go and do the stuff and then at the end of the day, you end up spending a lot of money on that instead of and putting a lot of brain effort on that instead of going and selling.
right as an individual. So what a venture studio does is it flips this whole thing where we are like, hey, you sell, we build, we do everything else. You just concentrate on one thing that you’re very good at. That’s what a venture studio brings in, right? We augment everything end to end. Like whether you want your marketing, sales, social, everything, product, everything, right? Like R &D, you need a…
to out, make cold calls, you need to, we do everything in house. So we don’t, you know, bring in external contractors or anything, we just do this in house. The usual model is if someone has a good say in the market, it usually is going to be a little bit of an equity play where we take some equity and they go and sell it and both of us together make money at the end of the day. That’s one side. The second side is,
Prashanth (18:20.176) some people are not very happy with giving up that much equity. They’ll be like, Hey, you know what? We’ll give you some equity and also will bear the burden of paying these individuals. Right. Like I’ll pay you at market values, not the Bay Area market values wherever I am. I’m out here in Hyderabad, India. Our team is located throughout India and they’ll be like, all right, let’s get this group of individuals on our, you know, you pay them, but we’ll run the real
cost basis stuff. It can be anywhere between 25, 50, 60 dollars depending on the scale of personalities needed. Like a poor abhor, mean. There could be someone who’s just a QA engineer who could be earning a little lower on the market side. But then you’re like, need an AI engineer or a robotics person. Then your payments are on the higher end because you’re paying for the demand at the end of the day.
you be like, all right, let’s get them on payroll. them, know, Elanox, that is my team manages them. We keep them not just for this project, but they will be there for the long term for your company. And they, we figure out a payment structure and an equity breakdown. And that works out that way. That’s one side. And then there’s the corporate venture studio model. That is you’re a corporation and you want to lean in mean team to get something done very quickly without thinking about the
hierarchy or bureaucracy within the foundation. Like you’re a big company for you to move from A to B, you have to go through so many hoops that it’s better not to do that. Like you can’t move as fast as a startup. So we become your tiny little startup that is funded by your, you know, your experience, your expertise. You could be doing something experimental from figuring out a new data pipeline.
in your overall workflow and you can’t rely on your internal team because that’s how the bureaucracy works. You need to set up a new business unit, need to set up a new vice president, you need to set up a new director under them and you have this whole structure that you have to come up with and then you have your hundred meetings before that and you have your scrum masters coming up with stuff. Instead, they work with us, we manage all that, take away all the bullshit, remove all the guide rails. You only give us your input and the output you expect.
Prashanth (20:44.304) and can experiment all we can experiment and then go live in a very short span. can be anywhere between three to six months if needed, right? In corporate, you can’t do stuff in three to six months. You know this. You know how.
Federico Ramallo (20:57.858) Yeah, yeah, becomes so much slower, right? You have so many layers of control. It’s more about liability than speed, right? Yeah, yeah.
Prashanth (21:03.045) Exactly.
Prashanth (21:14.212) Exactly. And we handle most of that and then the lawyers come in. Obviously, once the lawyers come in, it just gets a little slower. But that’s the general idea with a venture studio. Like you have three different pieces we work with. One with founders directly, the other with someone who’s like past their early founding stage, but they do not want to have everything or manage everything in house.
They want someone reliable, someone with the same experience as they do. Given that we’ve been in Bay Area for like five to six years, we have been in startups, we have done this thing before, we have sold a startup. We give that confidence to people that we are the right people. Instead of us being just a dev shop or a marketing team or a digital agency, we are actually someone who’s done it. And we saw this as a problem. Like when I said I had a…
mess up by becoming a little cocky, that’s what it was. I believed I could do everything, I believed the world is at my fingertips now. it was a fintech startup which we were trying to do and a lot of staff burn through happened early on because of me thinking wrongly about how it can be done at that point.
Federico Ramallo (22:13.815) Yeah.
Prashanth (22:34.758) Right? Like, that’s what, like, you know, we had a few CTO level people that were working, but then they were all part-time. They didn’t want to commit. You know, that happens heavily because at that stage you’re still pre-market, pre-revenue, pre-product. You’re at a stage where either someone needs to commit or walk away. And most of the times they were trying their level best to commit, but then they had their own work. They didn’t want to moonlight fully. They were just doing it on the weekends. It was like a very big mess that
Federico Ramallo (22:35.886) I see.
Prashanth (23:04.648) I just wanted to move away from, right? The overall timelines were getting extended and I realized that’s something a lot of people experience too. And I spoke to a few dev shops in this process, right? Because I was like, I’m a developer, but I still wanted to run different pieces of the business, not just developing stuff. I needed to sell. That’s the most important thing. Me and my co-founder, our main goal was I take care, I oversee the technology and sell 60 % of the times.
40 % I oversee technology. He sells 80 % of the time, 20 % he’s doing marketing or what do you call the overall, what we call like, other duties, right? Like other office affairs. So that’s what we wanted to spend our time in, but because of this constant churn of people who were not ready to commit, obviously you’re an early stage startup, you didn’t raise capital, so you still have to…
people need to be passionate about it. And during COVID, it was hard to go out and meet people and get this passion thing going on. And that’s when I realized that when I spoke to these dev shops and stuff, they were there just to build whatever they want, what you tell them to not think about the product, give us feedback, talk to us about how not to build stuff. They were there just to throw out some code at me and be like, hey, this is it, right?
Federico Ramallo (24:31.682) Right, right. Yeah, I mean, am. Yes, yes, I understand that. Yeah, my experience with startups has been that they expect the developer to do more than the role. So they expect the developer to be a product owner, the project manager, the developer, QA, and designer, right? All of it together, right? So what eventually…
Prashanth (24:33.084) they didn’t have skin in the game.
Federico Ramallo (25:00.91) being able to do is to work with the developer team to understand the why are they building this because building stuff without understanding the, you know, like the chain of whys, right? And what is the impact to the user, right? The way I explain it is in spite of the product owner because the product owner is telling you something. So he’s relaying the message that, you know,
Prashanth (25:16.68) Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Federico Ramallo (25:31.0) they collected from the users, right? But we need to understand what is the value for the user, right? So work towards that, right? So that was a game changer for me with the development team because then their contributions have a much more significant impact, right? But then when you’re working with startups,
Prashanth (25:32.559) Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (25:36.741) Absolutely.
Prashanth (25:54.716) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (25:57.516) and you’re working with this founder that is a product owner, that is a project manager, that is wearing multiple hats, they kind of expect that level of understanding of, know, just figure it out, right? Because they don’t have the time to actually give you the requirements, right? And in that translation, you know, because I build the teams in Mexico and the company’s startups are in the US, right?
Prashanth (26:16.114) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (26:25.678) in that, you know, the cultural difference, you know, the different cultures, you know, miscommunication that there’s a lot of friction with that, right? And frustration from the founder, right? So I can understand that, right? So we built teams that were doing a little bit more, right? But there were still some gaps.
Prashanth (26:41.288) Absolutely.
you
Prashanth (26:52.114) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (26:54.67) that having a technical founder that could do the work was better for the startup founder, right? So yeah, I can understand what you’re saying. Yeah. And it’s very interesting what you were talking about on the Venture Studio approach, because what you’re doing is you are providing not only the development, but the whole operation, right? I don’t know if you read the book E-Myth, The Entrepreneur Myth.
Prashanth (27:02.64) Yes.
Prashanth (27:18.717) Yes.
Prashanth (27:25.234) No, I haven’t. I’d love to pick it up.
Federico Ramallo (27:27.674) I recommend it because it’s exactly what you’re talking about, And basically what they say is, and I’m paraphrasing here, I’m probably butchering the book, but the idea is, know, if you have a small restaurant, right? And the founder is cooking and he’s serving the customers and it’s everything. How much can the business grow as much as the founder can stretch their arms, right?
Prashanth (27:30.226) Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (27:54.67) Exactly. Exactly.
Federico Ramallo (27:57.336) But the day the founder is sick, right, or cannot work, then the business generates zero revenue, right? Everything is connected to the founder, right? Which when it’s a startup, it kind of makes sense, But going from there to, you know, if you go to a 7-Eleven, right, you don’t meet the founder, you know, your process is set up. So, you know, the…
Prashanth (28:06.48) Absolutely.
Prashanth (28:18.312) Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (28:26.146) the business doesn’t depend on the CEO, Or the founders, right? So getting there, right, is basically building, you know, being able to delegate the operation, right? In order to delegate the operation, you need to understand the business processes, right? And, you know, from what you’re, you know, sharing with me that, you know, you’re taking care of the operation and you have the experience of running multiple startups before,
Prashanth (28:27.832) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (28:44.551) Yep.
Federico Ramallo (28:56.3) you know, the value that you’re adding to the founder is huge, right? Because you’re solving all of those problems, right? Sometimes a startup can get dead on the water because the operation gets stuck for whatever reason, right? And mostly it’s immaturity on the founder, right? Or lack of experience of running a business, right? Yeah, and that’s kind of what the book is about, right?
Prashanth (28:57.029) Absolutely.
Prashanth (29:20.22) Yes.
Prashanth (29:25.125) Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (29:25.204) explain the founder that, you know, if you’re working on the company, then you have a job, right? If the company stopped billing when you don’t work, then you have a job, right? A glorified job through a corporation, wherever, but you you still have a job, right? So yeah, yeah.
Prashanth (29:40.9) Yeah, it’s basically that.
and need to hire people that can take care of stuff in your absence. then like, know, basically you shouldn’t be the bottleneck for stuff. Even today, I’m a bottleneck for a few of the things, but it’s way better than before, right? Like on day one, when you started something off, you are the bottleneck for majority of the stuff. But as you go, you being the bottleneck for different things on your company level should just keep reducing at a point where things should run on auto.
Federico Ramallo (29:59.629) Yes.
Prashanth (30:13.938) You should just be guiding things. That’s about it. You should just be adjusting the direction if there is ever a need.
Federico Ramallo (30:23.352) Yeah, I mean, it took me 10 years to be able to detach myself from the operation of my company, right? So I see the value of what you’re doing with your venture story, right? Because you can go from 10 years as my experience to less than one, right? Or, you know, I would say immediately, but you know, it’s not immediate, they’re moving parts, but you know.
Prashanth (30:32.178) Absolutely.
Prashanth (30:48.772) it’s never immediate. Yes and also there’s a lot of friction from the founder’s side to let go of some stuff. It takes a little while.
Federico Ramallo (30:58.958) Yes, yes. And the issue is control and ego. Right. And as you said before, you know, a little bit of cockiness, know, like we felt like, you know, yeah, yeah. I, but also on the other hand, as a founder, you can do things so much faster than any,
Prashanth (31:13.082) yeah.
Federico Ramallo (31:27.938) non-founder employee, right? Because you’re more committed to the project, right? Yeah. But then on the other hand, if you don’t delegate, then everything depends on you, right, as a founder. So eventually it took me, as I said, took me 10 years to learn that when you’re delegating, you’re
Prashanth (31:30.952) Exactly, Absolutely. Yeah, are absolutely right.
Prashanth (31:51.624) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (31:57.962) exchanging your bandwidth, your more efficient bandwidth, if you like, for a less efficient resource or process, whatever it’s going to be. But that allows you to detach yourself from the operation.
Prashanth (32:23.024) and also it lets you spend more time on higher value stuff like you can do something that can do 10x but there’s like a problem like you need to spend your time on doing things that will increase your long-term value versus spending time on the minute things that are going to affect things right now right that’s the major thing and we learn that as we go. saying that okay i don’t need to sit down and what do you call
Federico Ramallo (32:29.378) Yes.
Prashanth (32:54.12) file paperwork, I can delegate it to someone else. I can talk to a lawyer. Yes, he’s not going to be doing exactly why. That filing might not be 100 % perfectly done as I thought it would be, but then you realize they might do a better job because they are professionals in that space. It might be better. Initially, when you’re a founder, you’ll be like, I need to do everything. I need to do my filing paperwork. I need to file my taxes. I want to do my accounts. I want to do everything by myself.
Federico Ramallo (33:12.76) Yes, yes.
Prashanth (33:23.728) That’s your usual, I want to write the code, I want to make social media posts, I want to become a social media influencer, because that’s how you build, right? Like want to build a community and where there’s like hundreds of people that I have to interact with. And when you do all these, you just get burnt out faster. And you might not even do anything. right?
Federico Ramallo (33:41.804) Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And eventually what I learned is that my people, and to be fair, the reason we as founder can do things much faster, there is this component of commitment, right, which is part of it. But there’s also that we have a lot of knowledge of how everything should work or what we want to do, right?
Prashanth (34:01.256) .
Federico Ramallo (34:14.19) that we don’t have to explain it to somebody else. That’s kind of the first thing. So the other person is going to understand it differently than you are explaining it. Then the second thing is, in your brain, you have the interdepartmental communication. So if I’m running the social networks and building the software, then while I’m coding,
Prashanth (34:25.968) See you.
Prashanth (34:34.662) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (34:44.45) I’m having an all hands meeting with marketing, with developers and the product owners involved and everybody’s there because it’s you, yourself and your mind. So you can move much, much faster. But then when you have a team, you have more complexity because you a, if you study system theory, you have the complexity of the notes.
Prashanth (34:55.012) Exactly. Exactly.
Loads of
Prashanth (35:09.67) Yes, yes.
Federico Ramallo (35:13.198) adds more complexity, more delays, and more things that could go wrong.
Prashanth (35:17.648) Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And one of the interesting books that I or at least people that I look up to or at least try to get inspiration or follow through with is
think it’s called Basecamp, don’t know 36 signals it’s a company it’s based out of they were in the US, Europe, everywhere right they have a very good philosophy when it comes to keeping team sizes small, keeping communication what do you call very asynchronous, trying to make things as hands-off as possible without having to sit down and you know take care of everything that’s one of the key things that I try to at least
Federico Ramallo (35:37.164) Yes.
Prashanth (36:01.756) you know, get inspiration from heavily.
Federico Ramallo (36:04.802) Right, right. Yeah, I know 37 signals. One of the founders is DHH.
Prashanth (36:12.988) Yeah, DHH. Yeah. He’s pretty vocal on the internet. He’s pretty popular on the internet for both good and bad race. Like, you know, some people really like him. Some people are like not that he’s not their style, but if you listen to him, it’s very pragmatic approach to stuff. And that’s really cool in general. Like it’s.
Federico Ramallo (36:20.216) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (36:33.346) Yes, yes. And he created Ruby on Rails, which is one of the frameworks that I used for building my apps and my products, right? It’s one of my favorite frameworks, because how minimalistic it is, how well versed it is. But eventually, you know,
Prashanth (36:39.154) Yes.
Prashanth (36:46.525) that’s great.
Prashanth (36:52.068) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (37:02.35) when you’re working on projects that has different requirements or a client that has a specific preference, you know, or, you know, doesn’t, this framework doesn’t apply to everything. So eventually I, you know, I work with other frameworks, you know, so as a, you know, as a businessman, as a businessman or as, you know, as a project manager or a technical leader,
Prashanth (37:19.004) Mm-hmm
Federico Ramallo (37:31.572) I’ve tried to find what is the best solution to solve that specific problem, right? But my technical heart, if you like, it’s on Rubin Redd, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Prashanth (37:33.894) Yes, absolutely.
Prashanth (37:41.32) You
with Ruby. that’s really cool. I get that. get that. I heard a lot. I haven’t tried Ruby on Rails even though huge, you know, I’ve been following their overall systems for a long time and like we use Basecamp internally too because it helps our, like, you know, project management very, very well. But it’s one of those platforms that I think I should use at some point, but never got to use it. More of Python, JavaScript, Go.
These are our standard platforms. use Flutter, but like, you know, it’s again, as you said, what tools do you use for what use cases and what kind of requirements the clients or startups you are working with have, right? And that’s what the partner wants or what actually solves the problem for the partner is what we work. I decide, we make the decisions on that. And then from there, the team…
who specialize in that particular side of things, when it comes to the technical sides, they take care of it. Like the non-technical stuff, it’s mostly, know, socials are four, right? Like you have LinkedIn, you have Reddit, you have YouTube, you have Instagram, you have TikTok. That’s where you are. You make content in different ways and you post it in different places. Obviously, this podcast for you is one of those things to which you have a little bit of social say, right? Like that’s one.
like podcasts, but at end of the day, they go onto one of these platforms, right? It’s a podcast we’re having with this conversation, but then it ends up on Instagram or LinkedIn or on TikTok or on YouTube shorts, right? Like that’s where we end up.
Federico Ramallo (39:15.582) Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (39:26.51) Yeah, yeah, I mean the I have a friend he doesn’t like to use You know YouTube Facebook, you know and the list goes on and on right and I understand you know because he’s concerned about privacy He doesn’t like the policies of these companies, you know, there’s so many reasons which I agree to to most of his reasons but but then again, you know like
Prashanth (39:51.176) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (39:56.3) when we’re recruiting, Facebook is a great platform for us, right? So I still have my Facebook account because of that, because we need to have, you know, we have to be visible on Facebook, right? And so we have to manage our Facebook page and I have to pay for ads, but you know, but other than that, I don’t post anything there anymore, right? I don’t…
Prashanth (40:00.487) Yeah.
Prashanth (40:24.752) Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (40:25.902) I would prefer to delete that account, right? But I still have that need, so you know.
Prashanth (40:28.711) Yeah, but
It’s more that these platforms have taken over our lives. These platforms have taken over our lives and I have this feeling too. I have been a high privacy advocate forever. Like basically block a lot of stuff.
uninstalled stuff. I was not on social media for like almost from 2014 until 2023. I had to get back onto Twitter. I had to get back onto Instagram. I had to get back on LinkedIn. Why? Because my business needs visibility and I need to be there. Right. I’ve only been on Reddit heavily. I’ve been an old internet user. I’ve been on the internet since like, again, I’m in my 30s now. So I’ve been on the internet since I was like three, when I was in third grade.
Federico Ramallo (41:06.178) Yes.
Prashanth (41:16.712) So like in India, that’s a very old internet user. Technically I’ve been on the internet since I was a kid. Not so for let’s say United States or other places where internet started and there was like a lot of popularity, right? I was from, I’ve been on the internet since 2000, 2001. you know, we, had a tiny little dial-up modem back then. Been there, right? Like I had my own computer. had like, I’ve seen floppy disks, I’ve seen CDs. Obviously I didn’t see anything before that.
Federico Ramallo (41:21.667) You
Prashanth (41:46.694) But yes, I’m.
Federico Ramallo (41:47.554) Right. Right. was going to ask you something, but go ahead.
Prashanth (41:53.104) No, no, go ahead, go ahead, please.
Federico Ramallo (41:55.438) Yeah, mean, my first startup was in the 2000s, right? I’m in my 40s, right? So I’m a little bit older than you, right? So I done the same thing. I learned to type before to write. Because of a unique situation, my dad was working at IBM, so I had access to keyboards, right?
Prashanth (42:00.23) I… Yeah, you… you… you… yeah.
Prashanth (42:19.133) Mmm.
Prashanth (42:22.792) That’s really cool.
Federico Ramallo (42:23.81) which was very unusual for people at my age. That’s why my writing is horrible. I had to do a conscious effort to improve it. But anyway, and I’ve been through the same thing, but what I notice is that in those 2000s, in Argentina, the technology gap, and that’s kind of what I’m…
Prashanth (42:28.328) Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (42:36.584) Mm.
Federico Ramallo (42:53.326) going with the question, is it was much bigger and then throughout the years has been getting smaller and smaller, right? I’m thinking that maybe in India there was a similar situation, right?
Prashanth (43:02.258) Yes.
Prashanth (43:08.346) Absolutely, absolutely. So the overall technology gap has significantly reduced, but the skill gap still exists in terms of, I mean, I wouldn’t say skill gap, I would say more in the lines of infrastructure and capital availability gap still exists. Right. If I wanted to build OpenAI right now in India, it’s
possible, I mean you will see if you go and open OpenAI’s team you will see a few maybe 20 % Indians right 20 % of the team might be from Indian background. You go look at Facebook’s you know Meta’s AI team look at any of these teams you’ll find a group of Indians who have been working on this you’ll find a lot of Asian, Chinese, Taiwanese and then Indian. You’re going to see a mix of these people you’ll see European, different European nationals, you’ll have a lot of South American.
A lot of talent from around the world has just migrated there if you think about it. Especially when it comes to, I wouldn’t call it, it’s the talent but I would rather say people who’ve used resources to develop their skills have migrated there.
Federico Ramallo (44:25.93) Yes, yes, but I I think of that as the What I used to say the Pele effect or the Maradona effect, but you know That means that shows that I’m getting older right now. It’s the messy effect, right? Yeah, yeah, I’m I’m getting older right but what I’m trying to say is that you see this You know this one rock star right this one, you know amazing
Prashanth (44:40.001) Messi is retired too, right? Like now you’re out of… Yes, he’s no longer Messi. It’s no longer Messi.
Federico Ramallo (44:55.31) football player, engineer, right? But for that one guy, there is so many people that didn’t make it or was not left behind, but they couldn’t make the cut, right? And that ratio, if you compare it to engineers in the US, that ratio is…
smaller, right? You have more, you know, successful engineers per 100, per 1000, whatever, right? Compared to Latin America or China or Asia or India, right? That’s how, you know, what happens is when I recruit in Latin America, that’s where most of my experience is. The nose, signal nose,
Prashanth (45:38.781) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (45:53.202) noise ratio is much higher and when I recruit in the US, I find better candidates overall. So I have to scream better to find good talent.
Prashanth (45:55.932) very high.
Prashanth (46:05.328) Absolutely.
Get up.
One thing I’ve noticed here is mainly it’s mainly because lack of resources. It’s not that these people didn’t want to try. It’s more like they didn’t have guidance or what I call as resources to get where they are. There are scenarios in India where people complete their bachelor’s in computer science, but they do not own a computer or a laptop. Now get think of that in your mind, right? Like how do you complete your bachelor’s or your bachelor’s degree in computer
science engineering and not on a laptop or a computer. How do you get out of that? And that’s insane.
Federico Ramallo (46:46.742) Right, right. mean, some schools when I grew up had boxes instead of computers, right? Because in the teacher’s mind, the box, the physical hardware was the thing, right? They would teach them to type in a drawn keyboard, right? And yeah, mean, that worked for…
Prashanth (47:07.516) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (47:16.238) to learn the mechanics, but that doesn’t tell you about the depth of programming. You can learn about the theory of programming without a computer, because there’s ways to do that. Because it used to be the case where access to physical computer was very limited with IBM central computers in the 80s. So they kind of developed that in the US.
Prashanth (47:23.836) Yeah.
Prashanth (47:33.126) Yes.
Prashanth (47:38.172) was in the eighties, seventies and sixties, yes.
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (47:45.516) But as you said, that knowledge never came through other countries, right? Yeah.
Prashanth (47:57.256) And the people who did that back then were extremely passionate about doing just that thing.
But right now it’s not that at all. Right now it’s more in the lines of there’s money visible. There’s these FAANG jobs that show that they’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year a few times a million dollars a year and they want to get those. And that’s why they’ve joined computer science rather than someone who was just into the theory of computer science. They were mathematicians, they were scientists, or kids who were very passionate about doing certain stuff. And that’s how you get companies like IBM or you
Federico Ramallo (48:02.52) Yes.
Prashanth (48:31.994) Microsoft like how did Bill Gates do what he did or Steve Jobs do what he did right like they were passionate about that stuff and that’s how they came out rather than the theory of it also they learned the theory and all these stuff but that was because they were extremely passionate these people are I mean they’re not shown that vision they’re not shown that direction the whole notion of you can be something more than just a programming
person for a FAANG job is not in their hands. They don’t have people guiding them in that.
Federico Ramallo (49:06.604) Right, right. And what you were talking about before is what I think is lack of vision and knowledge, right? It’s not that these people are, they don’t have the skills, right? Well, they don’t have the skills, but it’s not that they lack, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Prashanth (49:26.898) They can’t develop them. It’s that they can’t develop them. It’s just that they have not been given an opportunity to develop them.
Federico Ramallo (49:34.06) Yes, yes. How can I know that I have to learn about Python or Ruby or whatever language if I don’t even know that they exist?
Prashanth (49:48.486) or what opens up once you learn those. How can you do new stuff? How do you develop new stuff? You don’t even know that, right? And that’s the major thing. Like when you spoke about this noise to what do you call quality ratio, there’s a lot of noise. call this, like we’ve developed a small tool internally, right? Like we’ve developed something called as a higher.blue. It’s a simple plug into bigger ATSS that.
Federico Ramallo (49:52.19) Right.
Prashanth (50:15.336) lets you parse through resumes also gets you access to a few AI generated questions based on your job requirements. It’s going to be a three or four minute form. I’m not going to be making sure that it’s not a long 30 minutes pre interviewing stuff, right? It’s about quickly removing the noise. People don’t understand noise. If I have a job opening, had a job opening for one day on LinkedIn, I spent one and a half day. I got 1,800 applicants. How do I
filter out 1800 applicants. Is there some way to do that? There’s no way. Like none of the solutions out there are clean enough or easy enough to just filter out these 1800 and give you your top 50, top 100 candidates. I can, as a HR, like if you have a HR person, you can get them to talk to like at least like 50, 60 people to figure out some requirements and like get down with only last five or seven people that you would want to interview. But you can’t get…
Federico Ramallo (50:46.06) Right.
Federico Ramallo (51:13.506) Right.
Prashanth (51:13.736) to interview and talk to 1,800 people.
Federico Ramallo (51:18.05) Yes, yes. So that’s kind of what we’re doing in Prevent it, which is the name of the podcast, right? We’re doing that with, right now we’re doing it with humans, human recruiters, right? Where we screen the best 2 % of software engineers in Latin America. But one of things that we do and we make the commitment to every candidate that goes through our program is we give them feedback on, you know, we’re talking about
Prashanth (51:23.803) Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Prashanth (51:28.818) Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (51:33.629) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (51:47.854) lack of vision, right? So we give them feedback on what are the things that they need to learn in order to become the best 2%, right? Depending on where we detect on which part of the journey they are, right? If they’re in the first steps, the recommendation is going to be more basic because what is the point of giving them
Prashanth (51:49.17) Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (51:56.923) Absolutely.
Prashanth (52:05.458) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (52:15.278) the longer vision, right? If they don’t quite understand the basics first, right? So we try to give them as much as possible and we invite them to apply again in the future, right? And we try to follow up with that. So the idea is we give them something of value, right? So they have better opportunities with us or other companies, right? And that has been very, very, you know, a very good thing.
Prashanth (52:38.66) Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (52:44.684) because we help these people to, because we cannot lower the bar saying, you know, this is what is required, right? But because, you know, we find so many candidates that don’t fit, we want to lower the bar. We cannot lower the bar, but we can give them the tools to increase their knowledge to get to that level, right?
Prashanth (53:09.096) Absolutely. think that that actually is something that makes a lot of sense, know You’ve actually given me an idea during this thing, but which could be a very very good overall process improvement for our hiring methodology or also to the product that we’ve built right as a feedback solution at the end of your resume when we reject or when you do not cross through your exam like, know, the initial brief pre-candidate screening system We need to give them some feedback and in a very positive way
way. Right? Like that’s pretty critical. That’s actually amazing. That’s like something I should be looking into implementing next, I guess.
Federico Ramallo (53:41.528) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (53:49.698) Yeah, I think it’s good because we’re helping the people, right? I mean, we’re helping them to get there, right? Yeah, I don’t think it’s the best solution because I find that there’s so many things to improve on that, right? But I think it’s better than what I’ve seen on other hiring processes where you get zero responses, right?
Prashanth (53:55.25) Yeah.
Prashanth (54:06.418) Yeah.
Prashanth (54:18.17) or just a rejection email.
Federico Ramallo (54:19.47) Yeah, sometimes you get a rejection email and that’s it. And what I’ve seen on candidates is they understand silence as rejection. Which is, I mean, as candidate, that’s a very demeaning thing. It’s like, well, know, I haven’t heard back, so I’m assuming you’re not interested. So yeah. And then the other thing we’re doing is we built
Prashanth (54:21.938) Sometimes you don’t, yeah.
Prashanth (54:31.334) Yes, at this point, yeah.
Prashanth (54:37.03) Yeah.
Prashanth (54:42.8) Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (54:49.07) I wanted to help, well, we wanted with, you know, me and my wife are the founders of the company. We wanted to help women in the tech industry. So we built a community called ITGERS. And what we do is we talk to women. By we, I mean, she and our female recruiter. You know, I try to support it as much as possible, but, know, keep, you know,
Prashanth (54:59.656) Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (55:19.288) give them their space, right? But the idea is we show them like, this is a way, you know, we bring people, you know, we bring women with, you know, senior women that has been through, you know, different roles or whatever, so they can share their experience. And at the very least, at a minimum is a motivation boost, you know, like you can get there, right?
Prashanth (55:21.64) Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (55:27.801) Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (55:47.193) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (55:49.068) And then the second thing is you can get there. This is how these people made it, right? And these are things that we recommend you to do, right? And then, you know, again, the same thing, we’re not lowering the bar. What we’re doing is we’re helping them get where they need to be.
Prashanth (56:06.77) get, yeah, I think you’re basically, you’re not lowering the bar, you’re making sure that everyone else at least gets to the bar. Right? Like you’re just uplifting them to the bare minimum requirement level. And after that, it’s up to them, right? Like they need to get the joy of stuff at that point.
Federico Ramallo (56:16.493) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (56:25.102) Yes, yes. And one thing that I notice is that, well, know, during the research of how to improve this, right, is that women usually apply to a job when they have 100 % of the job description. They meet 100 % of the job description, where men usually they apply when they have 50, 30 % of the job description, you know.
Prashanth (56:42.12) Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (56:51.782) Yeah, I mean I’ve applied to jobs where at a point where I was like I barely maybe I don’t know I’ll just apply and maybe the recruiter will like yeah, let’s try Yeah, I’ve done those
Federico Ramallo (56:59.726) But I’ll try, you know.
Federico Ramallo (57:05.166) Yeah, mean, men tend to swing more on that, right? So we try to use language that will invite women to apply, But then eventually I realized, we need to change this approach, right? That’s how we started IT Girls, you know, because it’s like, you can be there. You can apply to this job, right? Even if you don’t have 100%, right? And that’s…
Prashanth (57:09.319) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (57:33.934) You know, like when you hear the stories of success stories of these women that go through our community and participate. And I think that’s great, right? That’s kind of what we’re hoping for, right? To give them that boost of confidence to apply, to improve, and then eventually get another job or whatever. You know, yeah, that’s kind of what we’re doing.
Prashanth (57:39.656) Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (57:50.777) Mm-hmm.
Prashanth (57:59.08) Absolutely, that’s really cool. Giving back to the community through different things is very important, not just for business, but also if everyone is good, that’s when your business is good. I believe in that too.
Federico Ramallo (58:01.836) Yes, yes.
Federico Ramallo (58:17.058) Right.
Prashanth (58:18.276) And that’s really awesome of you, Frederico. And I mean, I’m really happy on this podcast too, if you think about it. I think this is a great initiative from your side to get this. And it really helps getting voices out.
Federico Ramallo (58:36.12) Yes, yes, and having meaningful conversations because, you know, like the attention span has been greatly reduced through the years, right, for everybody, right? So having this long format conversation allow us to actually develop interesting ideas and insights. yeah, and you know, as you mentioned, now you have a…
Prashanth (58:59.56) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (59:04.474) You’re leaving this meeting with a new idea, which I think is great.
Prashanth (59:09.702) Absolutely and again let me know if there’s anything I can help with Frederico like you’ve spoken to me you asked me a lot of questions now it’s my turn to ask you how can I help you Frederico at the end of this right I’ve had a wonderful time talking to you now the next thing is how can I help you
Federico Ramallo (59:31.608) Great, great. I’m glad to hear that you’re having a great time. Yeah, mean, for me mostly what I’m trying to achieve with this is to build these relationships, right? And that’s kind of, you know, that’s my goal, right? Yeah. And, you know,
Prashanth (59:54.568) Yeah, absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (59:59.79) go from there, help each other throughout our journeys. So yeah, right now I don’t have anything that I need help or that I can think of, but I would love to stay connected and yeah.
Prashanth (01:00:14.222) me.
absolutely, I’d love to do more of these. I’d be more than happy to do more of these. It doesn’t need to be a podcast, we can just get on a call and talk. I really enjoyed talking to you.
Federico Ramallo (01:00:31.234) Great, great, yeah, sounds lovely. Yeah, and I’m looking forward to talk again, whether on the podcast or on a call, for sure. Awesome. Thank you very much for being on the podcast.
Prashanth (01:00:36.424) Absolutely.
Absolutely, Federico. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Fridrico, for having me here. Have a good day. I’m gonna head back to bed now. It’s exactly midnight. Now it’s like midnight, eight minutes past midnight. All right. no, it’s all right. Thank you so much. Have a good one. Bye-bye.
Federico Ramallo (01:00:53.646) Alright, for you it’s late.
Federico Ramallo (01:01:00.28) Wow. Yeah. Thank you for staying late to talk with me. Yeah. I appreciate it.
Federico Ramallo (01:01:08.558) Have a good one.