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 VeloCloud.
VeloCloud Story – The First of Many
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 just transitioning out of Juniper in late 2012 and at this point in time, the market was changing drastically. Applications were moving into cloud and broadband was becoming increasingly popular. However, businesses were hesitant to standardize broadband and progress with full implementation due to its lack of consistency and applications. This brought their high-level thesis: increase reliability and expand on applications of broadband. 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. This is when they ran into Steve Woo, former Product Management VP and Marketing Director at Cisco, who had a lot of input in the discussion. He helped further refine the white space and provided a very new way of thinking: simplification via the movement of computing into the cloud. Meanwhile, Rajan and Prabakar ran into Ajit Mayya, a technologist and serial entrepreneur, and Sanjay Uppal, former VP Product Marketing at Citrix/Netscaler, at The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) event. They pitched their thesis to Ajit and Sanjay and were met with immediate interest. Knowing the complementary expertise of Steve, Ajit, and Sanjay, Rajan and Prabakar knew that they would be able to work cohesively.
Now that the white space was identified and the entrepreneurs were found, the co-creation process moved forward. Steve, Ajit, and Sanjay 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, Steve, Ajit, and Sanjay initiated the formation of their company and VeloCloud was born.