Captain Kirk, a Rugged Trek & Game of Inches

After over fifteen months of a heady journey, Captain Kirk’s maiden ship gets wrecked by treacherous rogue waves. Inch by inch, over the next few years, the rookie founder salvages his identity, life and passion. And finally, Kirk finds his partner Spock. That’s the story of Arvind Parthiban, who is now building his second venture SuperOps with Jayakumar Karambasalam

December 1999

“…We’re gonna crumble. Inch by inch, play by play…” Tony D’Amato outlined the scary prospects to his wards in ‘Any Given Sunday,’ an American blockbuster which was released in 1999. Al Pacino, who plays the role of an aging head coach D’Amato, is trying hard to motivate a bunch of deflated folks at Miami Sharks. The team desperately needs a win to stay in the hunt. “I don’t know what to say, really,” the coach confessed. “Three minutes till the biggest battle of our professional lives…all comes down to today,” he stressed, making a passionate and emotional pitch. “We’re in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me,” he underlined the gravity of the situation.

Fast forward to July 2017

Eighteen years later in India, Arvind Parthiban found himself in a hell. The rookie founder’s dream was crumbling. Inch by inch, play by play, his life was coming apart. ”I could feel the stress on my shoulders,” recounts the techie who dreaded maths, hated coding, had an inborn flair for writing and marketing, and emulated his father to become an entrepreneur.

As a child, Parthiban always looked up to his father. In fact, he was awe-struck with the achievements of the man who happened to be the first graduate in his family and village in Tamil Nadu, and dabbled into myriad ventures such as granite business, a farming enterprise and finally into the business of making wires which were used in the manufacturing of bulbs. “He was a very smart guy, and was rock solid in technical know-how,” says Parthiban. Unfortunately, most of the ventures failed. “He didn’t know how to run a business,” explains the son who joined Zoho (back then it was Adventnet) in 2006, and after a long stint of eight years did something which he always wanted to do: become an entrepreneur.

In December 2014, Parthiban cofounded Zarget, which had a humble beginning from an apartment in Adambakkam, Chennai. It was a fairytale start. “We were lucky,” he explains how luck worked. Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks emerged as ‘guardian angel’ and cut the first cheque even before the company got registered. “I had six term sheets,” says Parthiban who quickly got Matrix, Accel and Sequoia as backers. After two years, in January 2017, Zarget graduated from an apartment to a corporate office, and the team size swelled to 100. The rookie founder was excited.

In spite of a surreal start, the fledgling startup had to navigate the unpredictability of entrepreneurship. From being unsure about the product, unresolved questions about business strategies, doubtful hires, debatable campaigns, and customer drop-offs…uncertainties were the only certain things in the first two years. The anxiety was natural. When you leave a well-paying job to pursue your dreams, no matter how strong your conviction is, the negativity from everyone around does seep in. “It sows the seed of uncertainty in your mind even if you put up a confident face for others to see,” he says.

Calm Ahead Of The Storm

Now with a new Zarget office, Parthiban was confidently starting a new chapter. “As we stepped into the new office, I got this sense of calmness,” he says. “There was no adrenaline rush or butterflies in the stomach,” he adds. Suddenly, the uncertainties looked like a thing of the past. Zarget had raised $7.5 million, $6 million was parked in the bank, and after over eight months of the product launch, the startup had briskly earned half a million in revenue. The present looked perfect.

The future, though, seemed uncertain. Early in 2017, Parthiban saw the ominous writing on the wall. The first product by Zarget was a blockbuster but unfortunately was fast turning out to be a lifestyle product for SMBs. “It was a ‘use and throw’ software, it was not a necessity and there was no user stickiness,” he says. The churn was high. The founder candidly shared the problem with his board. “Though the revenue numbers are high, over the next few months at least 80 percent of users will no longer be using it,” he predicted.

Parthiban wanted to pivot, roll out another product and move into the enterprise segment, but there were irreconcilable issues among the founding team. With no resolution in sight, the pressure kept mounting with every passing day. There were many who quit Zoho to join Zarget. Now, their future was also at stake. “My dream of starting a company was getting shattered,” he says. To make matters worse, the founder painfully discovered that he was alone in the journey. “When shit hits the roof, you get to see the true colour of people around you,” he adds.

Parthiban found himself alone. The captain was stranded. The scene from Any Given Sunday started playing in front of his eyes. “When you start losing stuff, you find out that life is a game of inches…” the jangling words of D’Amato started banging inside his head. “In life or football, the margin for error is so small…one-half a step too late, or too early, and you don’t quite make it. One-half second too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it”…Parthiban was trying hard to figure out whether he was too early, too late, too slow or too fast.

The chaos also took him back to his childhood days. His father was brilliant at building products but lacked operational skills to run a business. Parthiban, in contrast, understood financial management, procurement, supply, demand and had technical knowhow…but still he had a truncated first innings. What went wrong, he wondered. What didn’t work, he introspected. Was he betrayed, he asked himself. There were no simple answers. The young founder had no choice but to sell his company. In August 2017, Freshworks bought marketing software startup Zarget. The $14-million deal got converted into a $300-million exit during the IPO of Freshworks in September 2021. “All stakeholders, including employees and investors made a lot of money,” he says. “Lots of money,” he mumbles.

Rs 20 Chaat, Rs 5,000 As Comission!

Money, interestingly, was never the reason why Parthiban became an entrepreneur. Money, in fact, was never the pull in his life. The reason lies somewhere in his tumultuous upbringing. As a child, he closely saw the highs and lows of entrepreneurship through the lens of his father. “I had lots of friends because we used to have a lot of money,” he recalls, adding that he also saw what happened when his father lost all money. “There was nobody around. No friends. Nobody,” he says. “That’s why I want things which money can’t buy in life,” he says.

Back during his school days, there was something that only money could buy: chaat (a savoury snack). Parthiban’s family was going through a rough patch, his father was struggling with his venture and the family was coping with financial uncertainties. One of the weekends, Parthiban got Rs 20 from his mother. The directive was simple. Take a bus, go to the tuition and come back. The young boy, though, wanted to have chaat. He yielded to his temptation, and then boarded a bus. After a few minutes, he realized he didn’t have money to pay for the ticket. So when he saw the conductor approaching him, the young boy jumped out of the moving bus. He survived.

The survival instinct came to Parthiban’s rescue during his college days as well. “I can get you students if you give me Rs 5,000 that the college gives to the agents,” the young man pitched his audacious and outrageous business idea to the chairman of his college during the second year of engineering. Parthiban was thinking out of the box to make ends meet as he couldn’t take money from his family. His dad met with an accident in the first year of college, and the young boy didn’t want to add burden. “I don’t need anything extra,” he told the chairman, making one small request. “Please let me write exams even if I don’t meet the attendance cutoff,” he pleaded.

Parthiban wish was granted. He subsequently took a small room on rent, built his network among students and made them his business partners. “Get me one student from your family, relatives or village and I will give you Rs 2,500,” was the tempting business plan. It worked. “I was able to pay my fees and finish my college,” he says. “That’s how my marketing skills started in college,” he smiles, though he quickly adds that he is not proud of what he did. “But that was survival,” he says.

Cut to August 2017. Zarget was acquired, the young founder’s dream was in tatters, and Parthiban now had to make a transition from an entrepreneur to an employee. In fact, the day he sold his company he got a tattoo on his forearms which read — ‘die with memories, not dreams.’ ”I just wanted to remind myself that I should not slip into the comfort zone,” he says. In August, Parthiban joined Freshworks as director of marketing, and now he was getting into a zone which was not familiar territory. At Zarget, he was calling the shots and was steering his ship and destiny. Now the captain had to unlearn a lot to make a new beginning. “It was not easy for the first three months,” he says, adding that the pressure was always from within, and not outside.

Inch by inch, play by play, Parthiban remolded himself. Whatever the rookie founder lacked in his maiden stint at Zarget — people management was one of the glaring holes in his armoury — was acquired at Freshworks. “I shadowed Girish and started learning,” he says. After two and a half years at Freshworks, the captain decided to go on his new voyage, a new trek. This time, though, he needed a partner who would ‘think from the head.’ The reason was simple. Parthiban’s strength has always been ‘thinking from the heart.’ This time, therefore, he wanted the missing piece.

Looking For Spock

Parthiban’s wishlist in hunting for a partner was clear. The two cofounders must have the same amount of passion, determination, grit, and qualities required of an entrepreneur. The partner, though, must also differ on certain aspects. “Both need to challenge and push each other to solve problems,” he says. Both should be able to voice their disagreements, but should respect each other enough to know that when one takes the final call, it is in the best interest of both of them and the company on the whole. “One must use his heart and the other must use his head,” he says, adding that he wanted a cofounder who puts logic ahead of gut.

In short, Parthiban — who mirrors the qualities exemplified by Captain Kirk in the American science fiction Star Trek which was released in 1960s — was looking for Spock, a fictional character who happens to be the partner of Captain Kirk in the same series. Spock, in stark contrast to Captain Kirk, was stoic, calm, logical, level-headed and seldom shaken by emotions.

In May 2020, the Indian Captain Kirk found his Spock in Jayakumar Karambasalam, and rolled out SuperOps, a disruptive AI-driven software that helps managed service providers (MSPs) and internal IT teams to help them automate processes, drive revenue, and scale their businesses. “I’m lucky to have found my Spock,” says Parthiban, who found the backing of one of his earlier investors, Matrix.

Tarun Davda explains why he backed Parthiban for the second time. “As an investor in Zarget, I worked closely with Arvind and saw how he handled tough times,” says the partner and managing director at Matrix. What impressed Davda most was Parthiban’s transparency and honesty. “Zarget was a profitable investment for Matrix, but that wasn’t the only reason why we invested in SuperOps,” he says. Arvind (Parthiban) has seen the complete lifecycle of a startup, can attract fantastic talent and the experience at Freshworks has unlocked his ambition to build an even larger company. “I am thrilled to be partnering with him again on his second entrepreneurial stint,” he says.

Meanwhile, Parthiban is equally excited about his second entrepreneurial journey. With the new team and new start, he has set out for a new adventure. In true Star Trek style, he wants to explore uncharted space, and seek out new milestones.

To him, I say, “Live long and prosper.”

Disclaimer: The writer has partnered with Silly Point Communications to bring out The Grit Stories