industry: Cloud Technology – Platform as a Service
Founder Name: Ishan Talati, ESADE MBA 2022
Short description of the solution: CloudJiffy simplifies deploying apps in the cloud with Platform-as-a-Service containers and disrupts expensive pay-as-you-go clouds with innovative consumption-based pricing. CloudJiffy reduces DevOps time by 60% and cloud costs by 80% compared to hyperscale clouds.
With CloudJiffy, customers can deploy new highly available apps and updates in minutes, compared to days of setup and testing on Hyperscale clouds.
Funding Dollars: $1 million pre-seed
What inspired you to launch this venture? Over the past 15 years, we have delivered cloud services to over 20,000 customers. During this experience, we found that small businesses struggled with right sizing and deploying applications in the cloud, resulting in high running costs that could make or break their business.
When I launched CloudJiffy, we tackled deployment, ongoing security and maintenance, and operational costs by moving from virtual machines to containers and from pay-as-you-go plans to consumption-based pricing.
What’s your biggest accomplishment so far in your venture? Within a year, we’ve launched Availability Regions on three major continents, grown to over 4,000 paying customers, and made operational gains.
How has the MBA program helped you further this startup venture? I’m an engineer with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering. When I launched his first two startups, I had no formal business education. I learned from trying different things and failing most of them.The startup was ultimately profitable, but not high growth.
The ESADE MBA helped me become a well-rounded entrepreneur. I used to focus on technology and operations, but after my MBA, I became good at other aspects of starting and running a startup. The MBA also gave me a very wide network, allowing me to grow my startup globally instead of being concentrated in my comfort zone in India.
During my MBA, I worked with two high-growth funded start-ups to further develop my skills and network in Spain and Germany.
Who was the founder or entrepreneur who inspired you to start your own entrepreneurial journey? How did he or she motivate you? Steve Jobs inspired my entrepreneurial journey. I was inspired by his laser-like focus, his simplicity, and his strong belief in creating products that wow customers.
Which MBA class was the most valuable in building your startup? What was the biggest lesson you learned from it? The ESADE MBA is the best entrepreneurial MBA in Europe. The whole program has been very valuable in growing my startup. From getting the basics right in Term 1 (Strategy and Finance) to building and launching a successful venture in Entrepreneurship in Term 2, this program is tailored for starting and growing a startup I felt as if Term 3 honed what I learned and his eWorks Startup Treks (Davide Rovera and team) and expanded my network by visiting startups, venture studios and startups his accelerators in Barcelona and Berlin.
Overall, Professor Ken Morse’s elective Global Sales Strategies was the most influential class for me. The Founder and CEO is the Startup’s First Key Sales Representative!
Who was the professor who contributed most to your project and why? Professor Jan Brinckmann helped lay the groundwork for conceiving, testing, and running my startup. His extensive knowledge and connections in the European and American startup world will be very useful in the years to come.
Professor Kenneth Morse’s legendary Global Sales Strategy course taught me exactly where I’ve gone wrong in the past and how to actually build a global sales machine for your business.
How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to the development and success of your venture? India has a large local startup ecosystem and my city of Pune is an IT hub with many potential users and clients. Participating in local startup communities such as Pushstart and Nasscomm helped us identify customers early on. This allowed me to validate the product with real users and confirm that the product was actually needed and that the user was willing to pay for a service that wasn’t run by one of his hypercloud providers .
What are your startup’s long-term goals? Our long-term goal is to provide products that are available worldwide, closest to where our customers live, and that help our customers end-to-end with their cloud infrastructure, software, and solution requirements. . In the next five years, he wants to be the first Indian global cloud technology company to list on the NYSE.