The Last9 Story: Scaling Engineering, GTM Strategy, and the Reality of "Overnight Success"

Transcript

Host: Hi Nishant, welcome to ScaleToZero. I have been meaning to talk to you. I have been meaning to invite you on Scale2Zero for our audience. I am speaking today with Nishant Modak. He is founder and CEO of Last9. It is a coincidence where I did not know about him that he is from the same hometown I grew up in India.

And we went to the same undergrad college. Although he's few years junior to me, but still wasn't aware until I ran into him when we both started and started to build our own startups. And I always felt that from my hometown to that college and a startup, I'm the last one. I'm the only one. And then I was like, my God, there's more folks, right? Who's doing some good stuff and we have kept in touch. We have seen each other's journey. We bother each other with some difficult questions.

And I felt that on ScaleToZero, where we have been talking just security or go to market for security companies, we felt we should open it up to talk to founders who can share their wisdom, who can share their journey and inspire others to start their own journey.

So Nishant, Welcome, Happy New Year and I can't kick off this year with a conversation with a better thing to do than to speak to you.

Nishant: Thanks, Sujay, for such a lovely welcome. Obviously, great to chat with you and a happy new year to you. And everybody was a regular listener. Thanks for the invite. Looking forward to chat and discuss.

Host: You are in California right now and you moved from India and have been a traveler. know we know your journey. How did this thing of last 9? I want to set the context and we will go back and forth. We will go to your childhood if you are open to talk about it. will talk about lot of stuff.

Let's start with last9, and to the audience something happened we were about to start recording and the mic did not work something did not work and we will all try to figure out what happened something was not possible through the software. So few retakes I want to connect that to last9 I think somewhere at the core what last 9 is solving is this like where is the problem how do we figure it out and you help figure out that problem I guess.

I am too simplifying, I over simplifying it but I thought about that and I am like what a coincidence. It can't get any better than something is going wrong and last nine is there to help. So yeah, go ahead Nishant.

Nishant: Yeah, no, I think super interesting, right? That failures are such an important part of our lived experiences, whether they are through whatever journeys. But at the same time, it's never 100 % in anything. But what matters is being able to push those boundaries of last nights to achieve that perfection and aim for that 1 % more every day.

Honestly, the journey of last night began… I say this a lot, right? Engineers coming from an engineering background and at heart still being an engineer first more than anything else. Founders are just people who, engineers who stick with a problem long enough and don't decide to give up end up being founders, right? Because they really want to see that problem being solved in a big way. And I think that's very crucial to have that perspective.

And in the case of Last 9, what that translates into is you all deal with this failures constantly. But the core problem is, at scale and with complex systems, how do people reason and resolve those is a very fascinating thing to think about and reason about across different situations. And honestly, the crux of it, Last9 started because of that, through my own engineering and leadership experiences over the years of building systems at high scale and things like that.

But really about what does failure mean? What does it mean to be able to push the boundary of reliability? And not too different from security, right? It's just that security is a reliability problem that also involves legal. That's the big difference.

Host: Oh yes, I tell my team, I tell my customers we are not in the business of security, we are in the business of trust. I feel the same way about Last9. Your users, your customers rely on you that when things go wrong you would hold their hand guide their way into the problem where the problem is and bring them back to life, bring them back to the business. What inspired you to start this company? You mentioned that you wanted to solve this problem in the way which engineers but what transpired beyond that a pretty long journey, it's a pretty tough journey. So tell us a little more like what the tools were not good out there, they were not helping in the right way and you had this aha moment. What was that like?

Nishant: I think. It's not necessarily one single moment that transpires you to say, wait, I'm going to spend 10 years of my journey on, or more probably for a life to solve that, solving the problem. I think it was an accumulation of years to understand what was really going on, what the struggles were, cetera. But there were a few moments in particular that shift how you think about the world.

I remember 2014, I visited California probably for the first or second time, visiting the… computer history museum and right in front in the center was Tesla as a showcase. And that threw me down a very different world in terms of what did it mean for running systems at scale. You always thought that running systems at scale and traffic being one of the ones that we all encounter in a physical system to be so onerous, to be the hardest one to automate.

But turns out… It wasn't that difficult a problem because of how you approach it and how we solve for it.

Now, the way I'm using that as a reference point is because it's interesting in terms of what does it translate into for what I do or what I think about obsessively. It was almost to the degree is that what was the underlying moment for self-driving cars to be possible, right? And I'm going to use that as an example.

It's interesting because unless you have high fidelity cameras, you can't really build a self-driving car, right? can you build it from a common question I have to ask is, can you build a self-driving car with a 140 pixel camera? And you rely on it and give it control. Now that's a fascinating parallel because what I look at when engineers run their complex systems, not too different than traffic patterns of different kinds in the… in a virtual world and struggle with auto-cleaning to a degree that at least sounds like the true north given the world of AI that we live in.

Given that as a parallel, we are like, okay, wait, the high fidelity camera has to exist as a first thing before you can even have the feedback loops going in. Every engineer fundamentally knows that observability and feedback loops are the two crucial pieces that makes something work, take or the classical OODA loop if you want to call it, which is observer, decide and act.

What did it mean for our software system? What did an auto healing system look like? What does self-driving car in production look like for a software engineer? Was honestly the big picture to say, is that even possible? And if it's not possible, it's a big enough problem that we all deal with and are very close to. What are the intermediate steps to go and take a stab at it that you can actually make commercially viable.

So one thing led to another and on that path led us to starting the company to be able to see is autonomous operations in the world of software really possible. And we're still on the journey, a long way to go.

But it's an interesting parallel to think about in terms of how do you think about systems in general and what does it mean to sort of go along that path. Obviously a lot of more intermediate steps.

It's a longer answer at this point, I'll give a clear articulation of it in terms of the way I learned from the world of self-driving cars to be able to say, there's honestly four stages, right? There is hands-off. You had first cruise control, then you had adaptive cruise control. But it was limited to that. And then nothing else happened for a long time until only the sensors kept improving and things like that. but if you took...

Vick it down into stages. It went from cruise control, adaptive cruise control, to hands off, legs off, eyes off, and off the seat. That is level four driving, which is completely autonomous in that regard. Now it's fascinating to think about that because I almost think cloud was the first cruise control in some ways for operations. Or at least elastic load balancing was an adaptive cruise control, if you will.

But again, you've been stuck there. And then what is the parallel for us to really push forward on the journey continues to fascinate me in terms of just systems and as a problem solving. Obviously, rise of AI over the last few years has given a big boost to it. So it remains a very exciting space to operate in.

But a longer answer to be able to give you a perspective in terms of what just where the world is going and what the parallels look like.

Host: It's a fascinating answer. tell you why. The more you are talking about the analogy and I like the analogy. Little I could have thought that somebody is looking at a Tesla and thinking about something like last9. So kudos to that.

Have you read this book, Thinking in Systems? Have you ever heard about this book, Thinking in Systems?

Nishant: I have not, but would love to know.

Host: I would highly recommend you pick a copy of that. I love that book. At the very beginning of that book the author talks about 2 plus 2 equal to 4 and most of the time our emphasis on the 2 and the 4. We do not spend a lot of time on that plus. What does this plus mean? How does this transpires into bringing everything together sort of thing. When you were talking about the cameras I think that was that plus. Because maybe a lot of time was spent on all the other things of an autonomous car. Maybe that missing piece Tesla figured it out. Tell us what did you figure out? What was your high resolution camera like what is last 9 high resolution camera? How is it different?

And I am not asking this question from why your product is cool but when we establish few things I want to take our conversation further into as a founder what was that like initial days and stuff like that. I am just setting the ground right now.

Nishant: Yeah, no, that's a very interesting parallel, right? Because fundamentally, when you observe something, the core reason is if you step back and when you're talking about failures in the software system, right? We're talking about the most usual colloquial way to be able to think about it is incidents. And when you think about incidents, especially before the AI world, when

software is supposed to be deterministic, right?

So the code you write will work the way it is written. It's not going to just change completely because it's in production or it's in a different temperature. I mean, in extreme cases, but especially in a different environment. Right?

Now the fundamental difference there is, so what does it mean when an incident happens? Does it mean that the code has behaved? Never actually. The code never misbehaves because it's a way to be able to determine a signal and formally prove it already. What's more often than not is the human understanding of what the code was supposed to do has diverged from where it is today.

So if you imagine somebody to draw on a whiteboard, let's say, what does the production system look like? They'll draw and design it. I call them, systems as designed. And when you run into production and are looking through all the telemetry, you will look at it and say, wait, I didn't even know this work this way, which is systems as discovered. Now systems as imagined and systems as discovered on production are, there's a massive Delta in that always. So the real problem is the human mental model of what actually should exist versus what exists is constantly diverging.

And this happens for a lot of reasons because obviously there are hundreds of people contributing to production. It's in a constant flux, especially in cloud, the problem becomes even 100x because the ephemeral nature of it makes it so. Things are constantly changing. In a constantly changing world, then the problem of observability or the high fidelity camera becomes, can in real time you can infer relationships across these wide properties or instances or in a technical perspective, services or API and all kinds of this virtual nodes that exist in the conceptual mind of a human. And can you relate it back in a human way to understand, to be able to debug it quickly? Can you reason about it in a human way because the data exists? And more often, it's not just always that more data solves the problem.

What solves for it is, is it under a telescope or is it under a regular camera? That fidelity allows you to look at it with different aspects. The way it translates into slightly going more on the, because the question relates to the fidelity of data.

Fidelity of data, what happens is in the context of production systems, deals with two kinds of problems. There are different dimensions of data, and there are different values for the data. And both create different challenges around underlying time series databases. That is the crux of the problem that just cascades further downstream because it means everything that you are capturing has to be stored correctly and be able to use not just necessarily correlated across the stack.

Imagine a configuration changing, which sits completely outside of a system related to the code, but affects the performance of the code and also how users experience it in terms of the relevant. These are completely disparate changes, or AWS changing or throttling something, or completely different, or your external party that you're dependent on as a third party API, making changes that are not affecting your endpoints. This is almost a graph, if you will, in some ways.

So how you sort of maintain that context graph and infer information so that humans can quickly react and respond to it is the part of the fascinating challenge.

Cardinality or fidelity, I was mentioning, is only the part where a LIDAR can help solve for it, right? Or a 360 camera can help visualize everything in a way that the response time is more important. I think there's a combination of… bunch of these things where the fundamental problem is making it human solvable, explainable or humanly reasoned across all that massive data set and then being able to make sense of it and then act on it in real time, not something to avert the problem in the first place.

Host: So if you go back to the first principles. Like the problem we are talking about, the solution you are putting together, there's a few building blocks. And I want you to expand on that and help me understand what you have learned over time. And then we'll switch gears. So you have been building last nine, what, like now four, five years? Yes.

Nishant: Yeah, almost six years, yes.

Host: Close to six years. I'm sure your understanding, product understanding has evolved immensely. You knew how to approach a problem, maybe directionally, but now you are so much into it.

So high-fidelity data is one building block. Able to correlate almost in real time is another building block. What else is there? What comes together where the user is like my god last9 saved me and maybe if you can take name of any one of your customers. know some of your customers I don't want to name any because I don't want to put you on spot but I know for a fact that your proudest moment is supporting a streaming company if I can call them just that. Or any other example like with this building blocks and how it all comes together and as engineers, as operators, as SREs, how should we think about it?

Nishant: I'm usually a big one rather than just technical on some of the story part of it, right? Because I think it helps put pieces and as you might have already realized, put pieces in perspective. know, air traffic controller deals with radar, right? In real time has to avert a mishap in the first place. They cannot go have an incident. But if an incident ends up happening, there's a black box out there to allow you to sort of go debug and understand what went wrong.

And what went wrong necessarily is not always just technical in that case, right? It could be process. It could be so many other miscommunications and other cases within the compiler, completely uncontrollable beyond the point of the machine, so to say. And I think if you think about that ATC or almost an SRE, if you will, right, an ATC operator in this case, they're dealing with high pressure situations in real time to go to figure out. What can they avoid completely right now?

So being able to have the right piece of information with them right then and there makes a big difference in terms of what they're dealing with and how they respond to it. In Factuals, what does it translate into is you have a massive deployment supporting millions of users globally. The time it takes to recover if something goes wrong cannot be in hours, it has to be in second job vendors and to be able to that effectively in a constant battle of newer edge cases being found is the real problem to solve.

We do that through not just leveraging context graphs that we have, but also leveraging today the AI elements to come together to fundamentally drop how do their end users experience less and less of issues with the software and the services that they provide to make sure it becomes a very amazing experience. That really comes down to it.

So platform teams, engineering teams love us because today the way to solve that problem is just the lack of fidelity, you will, but also the fact that this data sits across 10 different tools and being able to correlate that all together is a nuisance.

Now this is telemetry data, Fundamentally, if you think that a rather than an abstract at a specific technical level. The problems you're dealing with, big data is to be called as if you have two V's out of the three V's, it's a big data problem. The three V's were volume, variety and velocity.

If you think about telemetry, it's dealing with all three kinds of data. It has volume problem because it's being generated at TBS per day in terms of logs or traces and things like that.

It has a velocity problem because of the rate of ingestion, the faster analysis that you have to do with it is even more higher. And variety because of the constant nature and the fidelity of the data. This is not just a fascinating problem that engineers deal with day in day out as their systems start to grow. And the second big thing they're worried about is the cost of doing it.

So combination of all of these forces creates a perfect storm for them to think about and constantly obsess about what does it mean to understand your own systems because of the earlier mental model by discovered versus imagined so that you keep reducing the delta every day.

Host: Awesome. Yeah, three V's. When you were talking about it, was remembering some past readings I've had. I do want to go into a little more of detail, but I want to take a step back where you mentioned and want to focus more of your founder's journey now, a little bit about what happened. And it's not a, as they say, right, it's a 15 years of overnight success or whatever that number is. Overnight success is never like a one day but I am sure you may remember that day, that week, that month where you were like I am ready and you were doing great at the work you were. I am done, I have a team, have been talking, mulling over this maybe sometime. I finally have a plan. I quit my job and I start. What were you thinking then? Were you focusing on team? Were you focusing on GTM? I want to talk a little bit of GTM Nishant on this. Trying to figure out myself a lot of things around it and you have figured few things out. We both are engineers. GTM generally doesn't come natural to engineers. not talking about you or me but most of us think more of engineering product user. When you said I am ready to start last9, what was sorted in your mind and what were you still struggling back then?

Nishant: Yeah, so I think I had a slight advantage of being able to do a couple, at least a couple more companies before last nine, failing at it, succeeding at one, failing at the other. So I'll sort of go back even before last night to start, because by last night I had enough of a understanding of, okay, here's what I'm going to do and here's what will work.

But the first time, the first company actually failed miserably because I was terrible at GTM. I completely, it was a company that actually crowdfunded because so there's been one thing, at least I don't know where it came from. Maybe reading a lot before I actually started, but I wanted to make sure that the demand for what I'm doing exists before I actually go in full time. So the first company I did in the product I did was actually crowdfunded to make sure that there's enough demand around it that I can actually continue to do things.

And that was a very different journey though. I picked a hardware product to do in 2012, complete curveball overestimating obviously what does it mean to take the product to market and things like that. And I had this funny experience already shared with a lot of other founders to say, first time founders are a sacrifice to the God of entrepreneurship, right?

So that was pretty much my experience. was burnt alive in that experience doing it for three years and being sacrificed to it, to able to come out on the other side and still survive, say, wait, can actually, I actually like doing this enough to spend my time doing it. But.

Host: So you rose from the ashes. So what was the Phoenix like? were those tears from the Phoenix? What happened there? Sorry to interrupt. I just didn't know what you were talking about.

Nishant: No, no, that is true. That is absolutely the experience. What it does is in times of crisis and constraints, the clarity that emerges, I don't think it emerges at any other time. When you are pushed to the back, are times when you just realize what is important and what is just good and not urgent.

I think there's a big difference to that in terms of... Yes. from a perspective of prioritizing, but from a clarity of thought to say, no, no, I found who I am. I don't know, it sounds a bit philosophical, but entrepreneurship, think is as much a internal journey as much people think about it as an outside, which is very less talked about at least publicly, I know, because there's nothing like it in terms of being able to, not necessarily from being able to put it on a pedestal to say it's the best thing that can happen, obviously to each their own.

But in terms of being able to understand your primary motives for doing something, what your value systems are, they're really tested to the core. And I think there are certain things through that journey. Sorry. Yes.

Yeah. And I think in the journey, what happens is that moment of clarity gives you either a renewed purpose or enough to understand yourself as they know this is who you are and this is what you like and this is what you don't like. Not just in terms of being a founder as a title, but in terms of the nature of problems you want to take on and be able to build something that's ideally lasting long enough to be able to go through it.

And the biggest parallel… I will continue by the way, Sujay, until you stop me, because there are a lot of stories to share around this.

Host: No, that's why I'm here. But I'll tell you one thing I want to add to what you were saying. When you were sharing this, it reminded me of last year, oh, it's 2026. So in 2024, I was visiting a college. It's not our college, PICT. it was some other college. Somebody had invited me and they were running a startup. And they had invited few founders. It was all kinds of like conversations, fireside kind of thing.

One question somebody asked from the audience what should you expect or what should you prepare in your startup journey? And there were many good answers and when the mic was handed to me I said two things.

First, Startup journey and founders journey is about handling a rejection. You will get rejections more than you can think of. It is one of those ways velocity. will come so fast at you and in so many different ways variety.

Nishant: And in volume as well.

Host: You should prepare for that. Some rejections even if you think you can handle rejections they will hurt you. Your co-founder is rejecting you on something: your family, your friends, your customers. The intern you invested and you wanted so badly to hire her or him, and this person is like I got a better offer I am rejecting you. WTH..

The other thing I shared is not to sound dramatic or cool but said a founders journey is a very inside looking journey, it's a very lonely journey. You have to deal with yourself, have to carry yourself because maybe your best friend may not be able to understand what you are going through. It's not sad actually it's just what you chose. And if you can handle that journey, you are golden. So when you are saying this, am like, my God, yeah, it's so much resonates. the

Nishant: Yeah. Equivalent to that, in addition to that, I give as an example, especially to young folks is, have you ever flown a kite? Do you know, especially in the hometown that we come from, there's no wind, there's no enough space to go run around and you want to fly a kite. It's just an, PMF is not a blessing that everybody gets.

Flying a kite is like PMF. It has to have that pull. The kite pulls the thread together to actually run away from you in some ways. And I think along that journey, being able to get the kite to fly is one of the closest experiences without a wind that I can explain somebody to what does finding PMF.

Host: Yeah. And it's so funny you're talking, we are talking about this where it is, there's a festival in India, we'll all celebrate in a day, which is Makar Sankranti and that's the kite flying festival, the biggest light fire. So you couldn't have timed it better Nishant.

Let's talk about, you spoke about GTM, all the past learnings. So when you started last9, were you absolutely clear about your GTM? Like, or at least you had some building blocks on your GTM?

Again, I'm not trying to influence what you're going to say, assuming you still code a little, or at least get into design, knowing you as an engineer and such a brilliant engineer, what struggles you have, if you can share one, as an engineer founder?

Did GTM came to you naturally or you have to work hard for it? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Nishant: I think for the longest time, I did not even know what GTM meant to be honest, right? Because what I meant is, what I knew is, being able to, if you are building a business, being able to get customers is what matters. as much as GTM sounds like a structured playbook that everybody has figured out, I want to be honest. I don't think anybody has it figured out until the flywheel starts kicking in, in some ways for it to actually grow on its own.

But fundamentally, if it meant, I approach it honestly as much uh, as a problem to say, I need to be to get customers consistently to make this grow. Uh, what does it mean for me to be able to do it? Right. That was honestly my approach more than being a good market and marketing sales and which you should do at the right point and is the right way to do it, but not coming from that background and engineering background. meant I had to, how would I say vibe in a few initial aspects of being able to make vibe sales, if you will. Uh, for a few initial aspects to see what sticks, what doesn't, to understand what are the only people trying to look for that I'm not saying or don't have in the product.

What helped in the journey, having done it a few times earlier, is that, as I mentioned earlier, I really like people starting to pay before I even code. That's something because I knew the hard problem has never been engineering. The hard problem has been how do you make sure that somebody actually buys what you're building?

Whether the first company was a crowdfunding problem or in the subsequent companies. In fact, I remember the second company that I did, we had a customer calling me to say, what's the company's name? Because they wanted to send us money and we don't even have a company registered because amazing. Because that's something that I thought you could always solve for. It's a paperwork problem. It's not something that I have to go into. Right. just need people to be ready to pay before that. We didn't even have a company named them. Yeah.

And things like that anchored me when we started last time to go along a similar journey where I went and spoke excessively to a lot of CTOs, CXOs, VPs around what I was even thinking about the problem to say, is this even real? Or am I, is this just my problem I don't know how to solve? Or this is a problem that's common to everyone that you are willing to solve as well, right? If I solve it for you.

And I think along the journey, were the early steps that anchored me enough to be very close to people who are buying and using products from day zero to see what does it really mean. I think the formation of go to market as we continue to build and not solve the solved problem. think go to market and PMF are related in some ways to say what works at one stage, you have to constantly keep iterating as the world changes around you.

And also what competitive landscape and everything else and how customer preferences change, especially in the last 18 months when every week there's something new coming along. Anything to answer that briefly?

Host: No, no, go ahead, I'm listening.

Nishant: Yeah, I think to answer that go-to-market question briefly is as much the only way to answer it and also disservice at the same time, because it cannot be encapsulated in a few words, but at the same time, the core struggles and the core focus, as long as I think we keep talking to people who are running into these problems day in, day out.

I think the systemic effort to structure it gets stalled downstream because you see common patterns that emerge to be able to solve that and sort of structure it around that, whether it's marketing, whether it's demand generated, brand marketing or product marketing. I think it just happens as a coincidence of what stage and what journey you are on and looking into those common problems to be able to solve for becomes a big boost to that.

Host: I think it was covid 2020 yes I remember moving back yeah 2019 I moved back from the US and I remember 2020 the whole year almost most of the year we all used to love to get on a zoom call or a virtual call and we're like wow okay yeah so I have may have spammed the hell out of people just talking to them that hey this is what we think the problem is and we want to build Cloudanix and this is what we want to do. Some of the conversations I used to have I would say good 20-30 % was with channel partners, with MSSP's. As to schedule a meeting I have this company and then I have to present to them this is what I going to build. Some of those initial reactions were hilarious.

They were like, you are wasting your time, you have nothing. I'm like no but I will have something you know I'm trying to figure out the GTM will you work with me will you adopt a product like this will you build services on top of this and Nishant, I can tell you those conversations have helped me more than the product conversations because again as engineers as practitioners who have been in the industry.

We know some of the engineering problems, user problems, not everything but we have some sense. Coming from a non-sales background, non-alliance background, you always want to validate, am I thinking right? Is this something we could do potentially? We are actually working with those partners now. We do lot of channel work and some of them still remember me reaching out and talking some crap and they felt it was a complete waste of time and they were no, no, it was good you reached out and that actually helped build relationship over time because they have seen the journey.

They saw that a team which had nothing and now they are doing all of this work and making sure they are part of that work kind of thing.

Nishant: It's an amazing tidbit. think something for most people to follow. I didn't do enough of and wish I have done enough of in that point. To your point, think not just beyond users as well, in terms of people who actually are going out and selling and what are they seeing becomes a huge win for people to have that data.

Host: Yeah, I think it was just out of my insecurity or inability to sell. I knew that again a failed startup, first startup. I have seen living in the US what it feels like seeing your bank balance to have $20 and I was like that hurts. Then I was like I think need to spend more time on selling. That helped.

I want to understand you were in India, the company was doing well but you moved back to your bags. Now it's what three years or two years you are in the US? It's been that long? You are in the Bay area. I wouldn't share your home address in the podcast but what does your day or week looks like you are on the road all the time looking at pure sales or you spend a lot of time with existing customers. I am trying to learn myself because I have this problem I end up sometimes go too deep into some things which I should not be spending time.

Sometimes I am at such a high level and I felt I may have set up my team for failure. How do you go through this? What is your mental model these days? Educate me please. Help me learn.

Nishant: Yeah, I mean, I think we're all in a similar boat, right? The core challenge is always, it helps to have an amazing team around you, which does the heavy lifting in so many ways, right? I think so. It's a bit of a privilege to go to work with people alongside you who go in hard every day, trying to make not just existing customers have the delight of an experience in whatever ways, small, big they can. But also being able to work with a team that will take a bullet for each other to go out and work with these new initiatives, new customers and new leads and all kinds of marketing efforts.

The exciting part is keeping some fun included in it, which is either coding in spare time to keep the being able to still be yourself at the end of the day in terms of what you really enjoy doing while going out and most of them make week though ends up being about third person product marketing and sales divided around that roughly at the scale that we are. We're deciding customers or new opportunities being able to do that remains key. But it's such a pretty standard looking at a macro level, it all looks same, but I think the fun is in the details where you're actually going and working on something more deeply.

So to your point, I actually enjoy being able to go down rabbit holes and being able to solve certain things because that's the only way to keep sane honestly in such a world of rapidly changing.

Host: Thanks for sharing that Nishant. I will tell you why it is a validation because I do that and sometimes I feel guilty. like did I waste time figuring this out. I know it is important, I know it made me happy. I used to tell this in the college days. I used to write a lot and program a lot in college days. There were all these assignments available which we could copy but I still used to write stuff. I like why do you do this and I used to say

I felt coding is like poetry, helps you think, you can rhyme things, you can make it fit in you know what you will call a meter, like in a rhythm, in a pattern. I used to love that shit, I still love that. And you can see what you are saying.

Nishant: Yeah. In addition to that is going from an engineering background to a go-to-market background. I'll you the hardest thing I felt is the feedback loop. is so insanely hard to know what works and what doesn't. Such a big challenge where code feels an easy comfort food, if you will, because the dopamine or the feedback loops so rapid that it changes how excited and how deep you can go, how quickly. Just because of feedback, you know you did something, it works. So it's a bit of a reward effect in action as a human, right? To say, it works, it works, it works.

And so you keep going down that road, which is the amazing part about being able to solve problems as engineering or anything else. But the go-to market side, world is a harsh place. You say something, there's nobody out there listening to you or nobody cares, so why should they listen to you? So being able to have that level of either discipline or an understanding to say, wait, it's doing it every day still matters. Because you're going to play out in the long run. think it's a very different rewiring that I went through over the years. And so just understanding what the feedback looks like and just trying to make sense of them honestly.

Host: I should admit this and I don't know everything I say how politically right this is or am I putting myself to look like an idiot. When I was an engineer we both have worked at multiple places we had amazing sales team. I used to always wonder what do these sales guys do? Why are they not selling? They make us work so hard on this feature and why is the revenue not growing? All that stuff. Right.

And now when I'm on sales, like, and I use this, I share this with my team also that guys listen, you're talking to your computer and your computer is listening to you and they are, it's behaving exactly the way you want it to behave more or less. But when we are talking to the customers, the potential prospect, they may say yes, but they may not mean yes.

They may say yes because maybe they are figuring things out. It's not they are lying. Nobody has an agenda. Everybody is trying to do the right thing for their team, their organization. Maybe they said yes but the other boss or maybe they went through merger and the other company said no let's not go ahead and they are still figuring it out. Which I don't know as a sales guy I need to just believe I need to keep working.

I try to generate this empathy with these two teams that have that respect for and I wish I had that perspective when I was growing up professionally. It is a very difficult job when you are dealing with people. Dealing with people is extremely difficult.

Nishant: I'll tell you a funny, my co-founder, Kuldeep has a very interesting framing for this problem, right? When we talk about engineering and selling, know, engineers have perfectly defined inputs. But very nebulous outputs. can't really know if it's done. Versus sales, they have very nebulous inputs. They don't know what's going to happen. But they have perfectly measurable outputs.

Host: Perfect. Yes.

Nishant: And that reflects in incentive systems, the way you sort of structure teams, how somebody gets measured, what does progress look like? And honestly, that's such a fascinating way to look in terms of just building systems is that to your point, Promising an outcome before you know inputs is what sales deals with. As you can imagine exactly why it is harder or go to market deals with is exactly harder because the world's changing, they have to commit to a number before anything starts and they don't know how they're going to go to do it and now figure it out. Yeah. And still commit to that number. Yeah. This is a completely different problem.

You ask engineers to do that, they will reward saying, how can you measure my output? yeah.

Host: Yeah, mean sometimes it is even difficult to understand the story points, know on yeah, can you commit this sprint? You know, sometimes it is difficult to commit to a sprint.

Nishant: Yeah, these folks go out and commit a year or a quarter way ahead and then have to go find ways for a product that's still being built has buggy probably at times and all of that make it. So that itself for a lot of audience should say why those two worlds are very different and what goes into one versus other in terms of being the unpredictable and harder one.

Host: 100 percent. Nishant I want to be respectful of your time. do have many things to ask but more importantly I wanted to know few things.

You may have done few things initially which could have gone wrong. can share at least one and I am sure you did something which may be seems unconventional or may be didn't make sense then but you kept doing it which is really paying off right now. Whatever you feel comfortable sharing in your style anecdotes or some numbers examples.

Nishant: Yeah, I think, doing wrong a launderless, I'll have to pick something that happens. I think that we start with doing right. think after having done a few of the earlier companies and sort of working with them and lots of people over the years, deciding who you work with takes far more precedence for me than anything else in the journey.

I know it sounds sort of typically, but I think that affects so much more in terms of what, not just the outcome, but what does the journey look like and what is possible versus what is not possible. That I think it's one of those elements that you have to obsess about and really think hard about day in day out.

Because that you're not as a founder going to be there everywhere, all places. So what does it really mean to be able to work with a team that shares that value system and continues making progress where you can take a bullet for them? I think is very, very crucial, especially in early stages and obviously continues to compound because that becomes the core of who you are as a company.

Host: I think what I gathered is, over time what is right is happening and it's a learning as you said is, rather than the outcome is always about the journey. had always been about the journey and on the journey who you work with. Who do you want? What cassette, what music you want in that journey? What people who are… besides you. Like all of those details matter right you know what snack and you know what's the route you are going to take because you land you land somewhere but the memories is never about the destination it's always about things which went wrong which went right but you figured it out with your with your team with people around you people with you.

Nishant: Yeah amazing! I think the things we could have done better in my experience over the years and have failed miserably at is iteration speeds matters so much more that even though you as an individual and this is more than just as a person but as a founder leading when you believe in something and you can't sort of have the change happen soon enough and it stays on the whole purpose gets defeated. Right. So,

Host: with that please I very this very close to my heart how do you deal with that

Nishant: Yeah, which why said it's been a failure. I've been through it numerous times that it's not easy. But so the will that you can muster up every day to go in and make it happen. The learnings initially, which was being a lot of these learnings are at a personal level rather than something prophetic. Yeah. Because it's as much a leadership journey in terms of what does it mean to continue leading organizations through growth, through founding and other places to be able to push it ahead.

There are days when you are not your best. You still need to get out and you don't get a chance to be able to say, oh, today's day off, right? So there are a lot of the journeys with a period of time in terms of not that you want them, but there are just sometimes you need to be able to take those time away. But being able to lead and sort of have that intensity going and day out where you are the chief intensity bearer.

Yeah. On the organization. I think it's a very different mental shift you have to go through to actually act that way and get the team to realize that. think it's very easy as humans fall into a comfort zone, no matter how harsh, live through it and still be comfortable and just not ignore everything around in terms of what's happening for survival. And I being able to have that intensity across going in day in day out and getting everybody to realize is being a harsher learning.

Not something that came naturally to me, but over a period of time, I've been very aware, so to say, to be able to make that happen and make sure I come on the right track, not just for the sake of intensity, for the sake of outcome again.

Host: Right. Switching gears, it's 2026 if we don't talk about GenAI I feel we will be shot in the square or burnt down to death. How come we don't have GenAI? I don't want to stretch a lot on this but somebody in your position who has seen a world that is like 20-25 years ago, know, very different world and now.

What are you looking forward in 2026? could be GenAI for last 9 or using GenAI which is big 10 into last9 for the customers. What is one expectation you are looking forward to in 2026 from this so called GenAI?

Nishant: I think more than specifically, I'll sort of at the abstraction to say, you know, for the longest time, data was programmable, you you always had databases, code to sort of tamper around with data. Then along came web2 or standard APIs and things like that. And certainly information was programmable, right? In terms of what you could exchange.

Today, the most fascinating thing is that knowledge is programmable. And I think that's a very different sort of arc in terms of very early in that arc to just figure out what does it even mean to be able to program knowledge and have systems take over that knowledge and build that knowledge on their own.

And I think that excites me fascinating, right? Not just as markets change in terms of how we move upward on the abstraction from data information knowledge. But what does it mean for not just product, but companies for end users to translate that into something that's so that I think it's a very exciting time to not just be building, but we're building for a world where it's a completely new paradigm, whether it's GenAI or not. Right. I think the fundamental aspect I'm excited about is that knowledge becomes programmable and what can you do with it? I think it's such an open statement that should excite all of us to go build along that path.

Host: Dude, you should write a post on this. I love this thing. It's amazing. I'm going to use it a lot. But you should also elaborate on that. It deserves a post of its own, a conversation of its own. I know you have a hard stop.

I want to ask about a few things on how do you… Going back to some metrics, some GTM around some GTM around some sales around some engineering we all have North Stars. I understand revenue and they have so many of them but for you personally not for last9, but you.

what are some of the metrics have helped you to come this far and you look forward to using these metrics in this year also.

Nishant: I think very interesting, obviously revenue remains a lagging in so many ways. But I think there are too many conversations along the way where people talk to you not just about the product, but what you're doing, you're building. Why it's an important thing to them personally, where it's not about you anymore, but it's about them.

I think is a very fascinating moment for them dealing with this in their own ways using what you have probably had nurtured. But now it is theirs. And that's a very different experience to sort of go through where as much as they are using this day in, they are probably more now than you ever would. And they come back with things where it's their own, they deal with that identity in a very different way and very fascinating ways that you feel proud that you've done something along the way.

But from a go-to-markets perspective, I think it is this resonance to some of the problems that comes through in terms of practitioners willing to go about, things out. In terms of key metrics, it could be as simple as time to value, if you will, in terms of how quickly they were not able to have the aha experience and recognize that it was an aha experience.

I think it's a very product centric part because today I think while building has become easier, building products still remains a key part of it where you're to go solve a problem for a customer in the fastest way. I think that still excites me being a primary engineering and product building systems. That's where my love for building, I think company becomes an expression of that. And I think it comes from there.

Host: I was talking to another founder and we were talking about few things how simple things have become and all. Remember the time when used to code in C? malloc was such a pain. There were so many file handles and all. Then came C++ and then came Java and all. We felt that my god this has completely changed things and it is so easy.

Not really, you still have to think, you have to still design right, you have to still go through understanding users pain, you have to understand so many things even after, even in the GenAI, would. Sure, there's faster way to do few things, but what you just mentioned building product is still a craft, you have to be patient, you have to learn, you have to be observant, all of those things which have been there in the past.

Nishant few questions and I want to give you a break before your next assignment work meeting starts. Maybe we will get into some rapid fire. I asked this question I have been told by one of my friends. I don't think you should ask that question but I don't know somewhere I like this question. What would be your persona animal? What represents you? Who do you relate to as a personal animal?

Nishant: Man, sounds… I think an eagle. I am not from an animal, but from a bird perspective, but still I sort of come come the whole spectrum of.

Host: Yeah, no, totally. Totally. I don't know how much you read and for the audience, this is completely unscripted. Nishant didn't even know what we are going to talk about. None of this actually. Do you read and if you read anything you want to share, you read recently or might have read in the past which has greatly influenced you, your thinking?

Nishant: I think I read quite a lot, but these days, I mean, not these days, but I actually don't read a lot of technical stuff, at least in books. I read a lot of other random stuff. I recently completed just last week as part of book around ancient DNA and the new science of the human past. I just completed that a couple of days ago. That was fascinating read to me because how DNA has shaped unearthing and looking at anthropology in terms of human origins.

I think it's kind of shifted in terms of how I and felt like it's something should be taught in schools to the degree where they no longer talk about social studies, but they talk about how we evolved to that degree is what it has influenced me. So it's been fascinating. It's called Who We Are. It's called Who We Are and How We Got Here.

There's lot of such books that I read. Last year I read a couple of books. One book is called Endurance. think that's a book that almost every founder should read is in my opinion. It's a book people should generally read about doing hard things and a fantastic book.

There's another completely random book around writing, being able to express. I read a book called Bird by Bird last year and draft number four. Both books deal with the subject of writing and expressing, more writing than expressing. And they have so many parallels in terms of just understanding human life. I've loved the prose and I just love those books. So those are last three books from last year that really stood out to me. Endurance, Bird by Bird and draft number four.

This year I've already won and I loved it.

Host: Amazing thanks for sharing I am going to pick up some of those for sure What does a vacation look like for you these days last few years If ever you took one Even half a day off

Nishant: Yeah, no, think spending time as much with the family, honestly, especially after the move to this area, being able to spend time and how different the American life is. think spending time with them as much because they've made the journey with me as much as I have. And I think being able to do that and spend time with them, I think is as important to make sure I still get the liberty of doing what I want to do on the other days and make sure things are all right.

That remains key. think that's the biggest best on my wherever I am with the family. I think the location doesn't matter as much. think I can spend time and be with them. think it's fantastic.

Host: Do you carry your laptop on your back?

Nishant: Yes, absolutely.

Host: Dude, that's not a vacation. Your work is with you somewhere.

Nishant: I don't think by the way, I think the boundaries of work life are too stretched today. don't think in a world where... Especially folks like us who love what we do. The parallel I give a lot to my team as well is to say, if Sachin Tendulkar was practicing on a Sunday night, what do you think of it? It's normal, right? It's nothing. It's alright. It's what they are.

It's just not, that's how we are. This is the life we have chosen. It's not for everyone. That's okay. It's the life we have chosen and we are okay with it. So not that we are such a temple, but at least if we aspire to be, then that's the right path to be on. Practice comes before perfection.

Host: I don't think any founder thought that he would or she would be the next jobs or Musk or anything. They just love

Nishant: Doing what they do.

Host: I don't think most of the founders think about the end goal. It's just the journey that learning. I get asked this a lot. You had such a comfy life and everything was going great and you can still get a good high-paying job. Why are you going through this pain?

I say this that honestly I just like to live life in a non-predictable, in a non-linear way. There are many ways to do that but this is one of the non-linear ways to live life.

Nishant: Along similar lines, I used to say, if you had to invest in something, why would you not invest in yourself?

Host: Mmm, nice. I'm investing in me and what better investments can I make? If I don't believe in that, what else am I supposed to believe in?

Host: Yeah, and these investments are mostly about learning about knowing who you are and your inner journey is what we have been talking about.

Absolutely. I could not have started 2026 on a better note. I mean it. I remember our first conversation which we had. I remember our JW conversation sitting in Pune at JW Marriott. All those coffee talks. I remember your first pitch Google Maps analogy which you took and I thought it was brilliant analogy, brilliant way to help the other person understand. You are amazing. You are on an amazing journey. Thanks for taking time. I know you are very busy. thanks for taking time talking to me, educating me and hopefully folks who are listening to this, they would love this conversation between us.

Nishant: I hope so too. Thank you so much today. was fun to be able to chat and to kick off 26 with you on this.

Sujay: Finally, we ended up talking after a long time. We both have been busy. But next time I am in US or you are visiting India, our calendars will definitely meet up in person. All right, brother. You have a day ahead. Talk to you soon. Bye.

Nishant:  Absolutely. all right. Thank you so much. Take care.