e27 gets up close and personal with Venu Ambati, Malaysia-based co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of ALLDOX
Venu Ambati, Chief Growth Officer and co-Founder, ALLDOX
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Kevin Systrom (Instagram), David Karp (Tumblr); what do these men have in common? They’re all young founders of world’s most valuable startups.
Tech media often worship the ground young startup founders walk on, and by young, we mean those who are barely out of their teens, or are in their 20s.
Often times, we’re reminded over and over again on why it’s better for us to be of a certain age if we were to be a startup founder. The younger the better, so they say.
However, youth superiority is a myth, according to Forbes. In a study funded by the Kauffman Foundation that surveyed 500 successful high growth founders, they found that the typical successful founder was 40 years old, with at least 6-10 years of industry experience. Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are more than 50 as under 25.
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For Venu Ambati, Chief Growth Officer and co-Founder of ALLDOX, one is never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. For many, life as an entrepreneur begins much later.
“What is important is to be able to incubate new ideas and identify user/consumer need gaps. Having experienced failures in one’s career and learnt to bounce back, in my view, is a great asset,” said Venu, who’d spent over 20 years leading high performance teams with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) across various markets prior to founding ALLDOX.
As co-founder and chief growth officer for ALLDOX, Venu is focused on identifying opportunities and driving growth initiatives including alliances.
ALLDOX is a document management platform that was developed with the aim to save people from the stress and anxiety of being unable to find, organise and access their important documents when needed.
“We wanted to create a one-stop, easy and safe application that anyone could access regardless of their age or tech abilities. Today, many of the existing cloud storage offerings focus on easily sharing heavy, non-sensitive data or collaboration, we have identified a gap for the storage and access of personal and confidential documents,” Venu explained.
“ALLDOX provides an easy and safe solution that gives users ‘peace of mind’ about confidential document management. A key priority for us is to ensure our security protocols, encryptions and decryption and privacy processes are up to date at all times so we can deliver a convenient and secure solution,” he added.
Venu, who currently lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and holds an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Bhopal, joined ALLDOX after 23 years of managing and leading teams for GSK across Indian Sub Continent, Middle East, North Africa and Asia.
His last role was Vice President and General Manager of Asia, where he led teams across 11 markets to achieve growth and profitability.
His former business school classmate, Dippankar Haider had asked Venu to join him to build ALLDOX. “I was ready for a new challenge. Joining a startup will always be a leap of faith, but I know we have the best team and a great product, so jumping in has been easy,” he said when asked about his earlier journey as a startup co-founder.
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The advantages and challenges of being a ‘mature’ startup founder
In Venu’s view, one of the advantages of founding a startup at a later age is it allows him to apply the experiences and knowledge gained, not necessarily through the business world but life itself, which gives him the edge of being more sure about building an organisation that he wants, knowing who to hire, the business direction to take, and other things.
“I am sure investors In Asia won’t discount entrepreneurs with a heavy corporate background. If anything, it takes a lot of risk out of the equation, so my experience should be an advantage,” he added.
As for the specific challenges that may have come with being an older startup founder, Venu replied “People have been starting up businesses since the beginning of time. The key challenges of any new business have remained the same. It wasn’t until recently that the terminology was coined.”
“There is a perception that startups are started by younger people, perhaps because they are the generation that ‘grew up with technology’. I don’t think we have faced any challenges because of our age, maybe we present more intrigue from the startup community,” Venu explained.
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“That said, I think the startup community is really about showing and sharing your value. In return, other startups will welcome your experience and even ask for advice.”
Venu further commented that one can’t start a business if one doesn’t believe in it. ALLDOX was started because Venu and the team identified a gap in the market, and they’re confident that ALLDOX can solve a problem for every person and every family.
“I think every founder – startup, small business alike – gets a buzz from seeing your idea develop and grow, knowing you are creating something of meaning and impact keeps me motivated to keep going, keep creating and keep building!”
Venu imparted one of the most important advices for startup founders to learn from:
As a startup founder, we learned the value of patience. One of the things that initially disappointed us was speed – we expected the market to respond immediately to ALLDOX – in the early days we needed to learn how to accept feedback and in some cases make changes to our product. I truly believe that every disappointment comes a learning point and our team and support network are focused on making sure we continue to improve our product.
In a world that is highly technologically driven, Venu knew that he’d develop something, but he also knew that he wanted to develop a product or service that is not just meaningful but is a true game changer.
“When Dippankar and I started to talk about our idea to build and grow ALLDOX, we knew we had a product that we were both totally committed to, taking the leap was easy, the process to define that, was the challenge,” he said.
ALLDOX sees market opportunities in Latin America and Asia. Recently, the startup introduced Bahasa Indonesia and Malay as feature languages, and is continuously adding more local languages for their users.
ALLDOX is also developing the app for businesses where it plans to solve the pain points of mobile entrepreneurs and their teams. This will be available by the end of September this year.
“With a mobile-first and technologically-driven world, we observe more documents going digital and a growing convergence of information to personal handheld devices. While this brings about more convenience, there is also higher vulnerability. Information security and privacy are of utmost importance and we want to take the lead in the world of digital documents,” he concluded.
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Image Credit: ALLDOX
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