The Fabric’s co-creation process is unique as it focuses on the two most important parts of a start-up: the market and the founding team. With the help of The Fabric advisors and staff, Rajan Raghavan and Prabakar Sundarrajan, co-founders of The Fabric, have identified the white space and found the entrepreneurs for every co-created company. This is the co-creation of Spanugo.
Spanugo Story – Compliance and Security in the Cloud
The first step of the co-creation process is the identification of white space in the cloud and IoT infrastructure market. Rajan Raghavan and Prabakar Sundarrajan were discussing the major trends in the cloud industry and found that many companies were beginning to use multiple clouds in early 2017. With this trend, it is expected that applications and infrastructures would need to be transported and kept consistent across multiple clouds in order to keep steady performance. This was their high-level thesis. It was broad enough that a company would have the opportunity to grow but specific enough to allow for innovation.
The second step of the formation process is the search for entrepreneurs with enough expertise and interest to help build the company. Immediately they were introduced to Doss Karan, former General Manager at Hitachi Data, by Vic Mahadevan, an advisor at The Fabric. There was immediate interest and Doss was brought on as an EIR in order to conduct customer research. His findings concluded that security and compliance assurance was being neglected in the current market, so they went out to validate this more focused white space. While in a validation meeting with a MetricStream executive at a Starbucks in Mountain View, Prabakar’s former co-worker Doc Vaidhyanathan, an expert in the cloud industry and former VP of Product Management at CA Technologies (via Arcot Systems), walked by purely by chance. He was pulled into their discussion, expressed interest in the white space, and met Doss. It became obvious that Doss’s and Doc’s experiences in the industry complemented each other and that they would work very well together.
Now that the white space was identified and the entrepreneurs were found, the co-creation process moved forward. Doss and Doc were brought on as co-founders with The Fabric and began to solidify the solution that would fit into the white space identified. With the help and support from The Fabric Doss and Doc initiated the formation of their company; thus Spanugo was born.