I first saw Sekar at Proto.in. He opened up the event with his talk ‘How to Bootstrap your business without a VC‘ that won him instant admirers. He was supposed to be the second speaker but the first speaker did not turn up and hence Sekar stepped in. And what an impression he made on the audience. He spoke out of experience. After all, he has helped bootstrap three companies and he should know.
Sekar isn’t a smooth talker. He doesn’t sway you by suave English. But what he does best is be brutally honest and speak from the heart.
After the event, we stepped off from the noisy auditorium to one of IIT class rooms to record this interview. Sekar knew the place well and helped choose a quiet room. After all, IIT was where he spent 6 years of his student life doing both his bachelors and masters.
Sekar Vembu is now the founder & CEO of Vembu Technologies, a company that focuses on the online storage backup market.
Sekar is a serial entrepreneur with over 11 years of experience in the IT industry. He was a co-founder, the CTO and a Business Unit head for AdventNet, a leading player in the network management domain, albeit better known these days for the ZOHO suite of products. He had helped AdventNet grow to a 300-person organization without raising any venture capital funding.
After AdventNet, he founded SwissSQL, a database migration solution that helps save over 90 percent of the migration effort and over 80 percent of the costs typically involved in database migration projects; SwissSQL was later acquired by AdventNet in 2004. Thereafter, Sekar founded Vembu Technologies and has played the pivotal role in growing the company to its current position.
If you are reading this via a feed reader, you can listen to the interview here.