A 5-point formula for winning the North American market

Balaji Sreenivasan founded Aurigo Software in 2003, and today, $300 billion of US and Canadian government spends on infrastructure are running on his cloud-based business process automation software.

Sreenivasan, who grew up in Bengaluru, studied at NIT Trichy and the University of Florida, briefly tried to focus on the India market, but soon realised that the bigger opportunity lay in North America, and shifted base to Austin, Texas.

Today, Sreenivasan's customers include a number of government ministries and city councils. He has never taken VC money, and the company is now so profitable that he says he has no need for them. TOI requested him to write about what it takes to be successful globally.




1 Solve a real problem that makes a dent in the uni verse. Google founder Larry Page said a solution isn't considered worthy unless it can solve a problem for a billion people. Don't get caught up in the hype fuelled by VCs and PEs.

North America is investing nearly a trillion dollars on capital infrastructure programmes, including upgrading their roads, bridges, water and sewer, rail and airport infrastructure.

The US and Canada are replacing antiquated legacy systems and point solutions. Aurigo solves a real problem for this trillion dollar market place. We found ourselves in the news over the past few years for being the top software choice for the largest capital programme owners in North America, and consistently chosen over Oracle Unifier and others. Aurigo is not built on paper valuations; I can proudly say that we are among the rare breed of fully profitable enterprise software businesses with zero debt, and growing in triple digits.

2 The cloud is not an option anymore. It is a necessity . The future of enterprise software is in delivering business automation over the cloud, and in an environment that allows dynamic changes.

Oracle and SAP are laggards in this space and making heavy investments through acquisitions only now to embrace this strategy . Take Salesforce, with a powerful cloud platform that is configurable, and the ability to build business productivity apps on top of it. Imagine that with vertical focus. That's Aurigo.

3 Be close to the market and customer base. People buy from people. When you want to build a successful product, it is imperative that the senior management team be located closest to the customer to understand their needs first hand. Not just the product management team. Trying to launch products in a different geography and then applying it to the North American market place just does not work.

4 Hire the best talent possible, and remember, hiring is an art.

Everyone wants to work for a fast-growing tech company, so we are very fortunate that we have plenty of great talent to choose from. However, how do we hire the right talent? There is no formula.Hiring is an art form, not a science.We have eliminated the middleman (no recruiters), we focus on hiring the position, and not the person.Steve Jobs is quoted as saying, “The difference between the average and the best is 50 to one. Maybe 100 to one.“ That's a huge difference in productivity . We firmly believe that if we hire A level people, they hire A level people as well. If we hire B and C level people, the ones who follow will be the same and most likely even lower.

5 Evaluate a cultural fit, and remember, there's no substitute for hard work. There's an unrealistic romance surrounding the Q idea of working at a technology startup. Some think it's all happy hours, foosball tables, and constant Instagram moments.

At Aurigo, while we throw back a few beers when appropriate, most of it is about long hours (and strange hours, considering we have development centres in Austin, Texas, and Bengaluru with a 10.5 hour time difference), heavy workloads, and emotions that can run high (remember, we hire passionate people). Sometimes, at the end of a work day, our people look like Matt Damon's character from The Martian! How else do we build a world-class product, if not with plenty of blood, sweat and tears, knowing we've made a difference each day we've come to work.That... and the fact that we reward our employees with great salaries, benefits and stock options.