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Sanjiv Gupta is the founder of OpsVeda, a cloud operations software company. He is originally from India and moved all over India because his Father was in the Indian Air Force. He studied engineering in India, and came to the US as an SAP engineer.

Sanjiv has been in Silicon Valley for about 20 years now and he also started another company about 12 years ago. It wasn’t successful, so he cut his losses. He says his job at SAP was the easiest job he ever had. “When things are going well, that’s the time to change things!” He always wanted to start something the whole time he was working at SAP. So he decided to leave SAP and be an entrepreneur.

Sanjiv earned his executive MBA in 2003, and realized he was too smart to work for anyone else. He was lucky enough to have family support this move.

• How long it took to incubate his idea for his start up
• What caused him to make the decision to take the leap away from his job
• What the hardest part of getting his startup off the ground
• Why he chose to bootstrap the company after taking an initial round of Angel funding
• How he convinced the first customer, SanDisk to use their company.
• The length of time it took to get his first customer
• How his users helped him expand the company
• Ways you benefit from showing your users all the ways you can use your product
• How the SAP incubator program worked
• Why sales people are critical, but hard to train early on
• What he would change if he had to go it all over again
• Why he isn’t focused on raising venture capital at this time

Advice for others on the immigrant entrepreneurial journey:

1. Don’t do it for the money

2. Do what you do because you believe it.

3. Believe that you are the best person to solve the problem.

4. Give yourself plenty of runway to make it a success.

5. It takes 2x longer and costs at least 2x more than you think.

Links:

www.opsveda.com

https://www.linkedin.com/company/1158050

www.twitter.com/opsveda (@OpsVeda)