# Founder10x - Cybersecurity Engineer Turned Fashion-Tech Founder - Harish Chandramowli, Co-founder, Flaire

An episode of [VC10X - Investing, Venture Capital, Asset Management, Family Office, Wealth Management](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1632806986), 7 Oct 2025, 35 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/a453ddd4/podcast/play/109331601/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-9-7%2F408816564-44100-2-d3f589344d9c4.mp3

Harish Chandramowli, Co-Founder of Flaire, he transitioned from Lead Engineer at MongoDB to building fashion ERP software despite having zero industry background. We dive into his journey from cybersecurity engineer to fashion-tech founder, the bold decisions that shaped his company's growth, and his contrarian views on the future of enterprise software in the AI era. ⭐ Sponsored by Podcast10x - Podcasting agency for VCs - https://podcast10x.com Flaire - https://www.flairesoftware.com/ Harish Chandramowli - https://www.linkedin.com/in/scharish 🎙️ Hosted by Prashant Choubey Follow Prashant on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/choubeysahab Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:11) Validating the Flaire idea without a fashion background (04:53) Operating in stealth mode with design partners (06:00) Challenges in getting demos and converting customers (08:14) Using AI to solve real workflow problem (10:11) Learning curve of transitioning from tech to sales (11:25) Approach to product-market fit and go-to-market strategy (13:08) Building a product that adapts to macro changes in fashion workflows (16:15) Dealing with the urge to radically pivot (17:22) Unique metrics for fashion ERP (18:18) Approach to fundraising as a technical founder (19:26) Building defensibility and moats in the age of AI (21:38) Most vulnerable moment building the startup (22:22) Pivotal decision that changed Flaire's growth trajectory (25:17) Transition from employee to founder and impact on lifestyle (27:01) Contrarian view on the future of fashion tech and ERP (29:04) Strategic decision to complement Shopify (31:16) Biggest learning as a founder (33:34) Closing remarks and where to follow Harish's journey For sponsorship or guest appearance requests, write to prashantchoubey3@gmail.com Subscribe to VC10X on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.

## Transcript

[0:00] If I can't close $1,000,000 revenue a month consistently
[0:03] month over month, then I'm not building the right product.
[0:08] How do you think about modes, especially in the age of AI, you
[0:11] know, how do you build defensibility into the product?
[0:14] I have shown my entire product to my competitors.
[0:17] If they can copy and they can produce it, good for them and
[0:21] then whatever I have done is not good enough.
[0:23] What's been your biggest learning as a founder?
[0:26] Biggest learning one Whether you like it or not, you're going to
[0:29] be a little more cutthroat. Hey everyone, this is Prashant
[0:35] and I'll be your host for the VC10X podcast.
[0:37] And today we have Harish Chandra morning with us.
[0:39] Harish is the Co founder of Flair who has transitioned from
[0:43] being the lead engineer at Mongo DB to building fashion ERP
[0:47] software despite not having a background in the industry.
[0:50] We dive into his journey from cybersecurity engineer to
[0:53] fashion tech founder, the bold decisions that shaped his
[0:57] company's growth, and his contrarian views on the future
[1:00] of enterprise software in the AI era.
[1:02] So without wasting any time, let's dive straight in.
[1:05] This episode is sponsored by my own podcasting agency called
[1:08] Podcast NX where I help venture capitalists, asset managers,
[1:12] allocators and family offices and starting their own podcast
[1:15] and building a strong brand. Podcast NX is designed in a way
[1:19] to work well with the busy schedule of investors, where we
[1:23] handle every aspect of podcast production so you can focus on
[1:26] investing. If you're looking to build a
[1:28] strong investor brand, starting a podcast should be right up
[1:32] your priority list. It's the only form of marketing
[1:35] where you can showcase your strong network.
[1:37] In other words, access to limited partners and founders
[1:41] and grow that network further. And contrary to what most people
[1:45] here, it's still very early to start a podcast.
[1:48] There are at least 10X more newsletters and thousand X more
[1:51] blogs than there are podcast in this world.
[1:54] You can learn more about our podcasting services at Podcast
[1:58] ten-x.com. I'll make sure to add the link
[2:00] in the description below. Enjoy this episode.
[2:04] Hey Harris, so good to have you on the VC10X podcast.
[2:06] How are you doing? Good.
[2:08] And thanks for having me. I'm excited for the chat.
[2:12] Yeah. Likewise, to start things off,
[2:14] can we first talk about your transition from Cybersecurity
[2:18] engineer at Mongo DB to building an ERP for fashion bands?
[2:23] What sparked the Spirit? So I think usually, typically I
[2:27] like building things. So even when I was at Hopkins, I
[2:31] took cybersecurity in masters. I did not want to go into
[2:35] consultancy because I didn't feel like that's something I
[2:37] would enjoy compared to building.
[2:39] So I joined Bloomberg and as a software engineer and that's
[2:43] when I discovered this field of like, hey, you can be a engineer
[2:47] who builds security related products.
[2:49] I mean, now yeah, Okta, everything came, everyone is
[2:52] Allah off that field. 10 years back.
[2:54] I was surprised when the team came and called me for my new
[2:57] grad batch at Bloomberg. But that led to me joining
[3:00] MongoDB again. There I was building things and
[3:04] especially as I was there first cloud security engineers, I was
[3:07] kind of like trying to move between teams.
[3:10] So every quarter it's like look at teams that has interesting
[3:14] project that needs security inputs and I was just going and
[3:16] building things. Even that I think that one like
[3:21] 2 year mark, I ended up taking over core Atlas, Mongo DB
[3:25] clouting. So as a lead, it was not really
[3:28] a security team. So it's generally it's like the
[3:30] tie the knot is always like, I love building things, solving
[3:34] problems. I don't really like care about
[3:36] the in the special specific specific things around that.
[3:40] But yeah, while on call, I have seen how people use Mongo DB and
[3:46] how much retail companies use the database and it made me
[3:49] curious, right, why they are spending so much on a database.
[3:54] So I always had the curiosity. But then like around 2 years
[3:58] back, I was sitting in this shop called ONS in Soho, New York.
[4:03] And I've I sat in their team meetings, I spoke to their
[4:06] founder. The thing that showed out to me
[4:08] is like fashion in the back office of fashion especially,
[4:12] it's fundamentally a data and workflow problem.
[4:16] It's like we always think fashion and associate always
[4:19] with designs, material, some like compositions, but that's
[4:23] not just it. If you're running a business,
[4:25] then that is a operations is a huge part.
[4:28] When are you planning to order, when your items are receiving?
[4:32] And the fact that it's a data and workflow problem drew me to
[4:35] the field and that's how Flash started.
[4:38] Absolutely. That's quite an interesting
[4:40] story. Fashion as we know it is a
[4:43] relationship driven kind of business and skeptical of
[4:47] outsiders more often than not, right.
[4:49] So how did you validate Fair's idea without a fashion
[4:53] background? So our initial outreaches were
[4:56] just called emails and people hate their ERP.
[5:00] They hate it enough that they are replying to random people at
[5:03] a time. So our initial cohort of
[5:06] customers, we pretty much like go through cold outreach.
[5:12] Again, I'm very thankful for our initial cohort of customers
[5:15] because at the point, I haven't written a single line of code.
[5:18] It's just a vision. It's just like, hey, I get your
[5:21] pain. So let me think through how to
[5:24] solve your pain point. So yes, it's industry is
[5:28] relationship driven. It's important to put your
[5:31] presence out there, but to get your first initial 1020
[5:35] customers, you can go under the radar if you can't find 10
[5:38] customers who are replying to you.
[5:40] But then probably that field is not like, it's not like a big
[5:44] enough pain point that people are looking for an innovative
[5:46] solution. Absolutely.
[5:48] Yeah, that makes sense. And you operated in sales mode
[5:52] for about 1.5 years with design partners.
[5:54] So how did you know it was the right time to emerge publicly?
[6:00] One, we all like all our design partners are happy, they are
[6:05] live, they are using the product every day and now we need to
[6:09] scale up. Then after we have VC back
[6:10] startups, that basically means like that is an inflection point
[6:14] to either you scale or you die. That is no like middle ground
[6:18] with VC back startups and it's a time.
[6:20] Absolutely. For marketing efforts.
[6:23] Right, Yeah, I completely agree with VC back startup.
[6:27] It's binary. Either you have to go all out or
[6:31] you have to die trying. I was.
[6:32] There's no in between as such. OK to the next one, what's
[6:37] what's been your biggest challenge in getting demos and
[6:40] converting them? What's your systematic approach
[6:43] if you'd like to share to solving the top of the final
[6:46] problem? So some of the, I would say
[6:50] mistakes I have done if I look back is not having ACRM from day
[6:54] one. It's like we have been doing
[6:56] gold outreaches for two to and of years, but the last six
[7:00] months I have a CRM, I kind of track people whom they
[7:04] disqualify as well. So one of the main thing with
[7:07] startup sales is not just getting people or getting
[7:11] customers, it's also disqualifying the customers.
[7:14] If you don't disqualify, you end up with the wrong customers and
[7:17] it messes up your whole product, your whole life cycle.
[7:22] Cold calls is one of the most uncomfortable thing I have ever
[7:27] done, but it works because I hate when people cold called me.
[7:31] So in my mind it's like that is this friction of like I
[7:35] absolutely hate when people cold call me and I shouldn't be doing
[7:38] it, but it works. Now we have started doing the
[7:42] cold calls otherwise for top of the funnel 1, something I did
[7:48] not lean on initially until like recently is my customers.
[7:52] I know my customers were happy. I think six months back, I
[7:56] literally went to them and be like, hey, I need more
[7:59] customers, I need to scale up or we are going to die in next 6
[8:03] months. And I got so much referrals from
[8:05] them. And it is more powerful because
[8:07] when people say that I use this product, I'm recommending it.
[8:11] That's like one of the most powerful way to get customers.
[8:15] Absolutely. I completely agree to that.
[8:18] And with AI all around us, and I think AI is also core to your
[8:23] value prop as well. So replacing expensive
[8:27] implementation consultants, you know, how do you build AI
[8:30] features that solve real work for problems?
[8:33] Yes. And actually that's an important
[8:35] part, right? Even from sales perspective, you
[8:38] talk about being an outsider and AI has helped a lot in making
[8:43] sure I am prepped for my sales meeting.
[8:46] The first thing I do in my discovery calls is like not show
[8:49] the product, not talk about Flash.
[8:51] I literally want to learn about their business, how each one
[8:54] operates. Because a business, fashion
[8:57] business can have four employees or 20 employees or 100
[9:00] employees. And based on the size, each
[9:02] one's responsibility is different, the software needs
[9:05] and what each one does is very different.
[9:07] So all I do in my sales call at the beginning is like, let them
[9:11] explain their business, let them explain the actors or like the
[9:14] people in their company and each one's functionality.
[9:18] Then I go back, feed it into chat, GPD or Anthropic and
[9:21] stuff, have like a nice chart that pops up the next call.
[9:24] I literally walk me walk them through the business, right?
[9:27] Hey, let me walk you through in your very visual way of how your
[9:31] business right now is operating. And then let's dive into like
[9:36] what software can do to make you more efficient.
[9:39] And the process like that exercise builds the trust.
[9:44] Sometimes you would be like, Oh my God, I never thought this is
[9:47] how my business runs because they never thought about
[9:49] visualizing org chart and each one's responsibility.
[9:54] So it builds the trust and it goes both ways.
[9:56] Right now I know their business. I know exactly how to solve
[9:59] their pain. And from the business owners
[10:02] perspective, OK, they have the trust that OK, yes, he's not
[10:05] from the industry, but he has put in effort to understand what
[10:09] is needed for me. I don't.
[10:11] I don't know how easy that is to do.
[10:14] Absolutely. I see that.
[10:16] And being a tech person yourself, and I've seen that in
[10:19] general that when tech people you know who are software
[10:23] engineers or leads or team leads, head of departments in
[10:26] technology and then later transition into being a founder
[10:29] and then later they have to do things like sales and get on
[10:31] calls, score calls and stuff. I think that's that's a bit of a
[10:34] learning curve for them. So give me an experience on how
[10:37] that learning curve mapped out for you.
[10:40] I would say it was very scary to even think about sales at the
[10:44] beginning. So even in tech I have never
[10:47] been in consultant or like more user facing roles.
[10:52] I have always been like a core R&D like literally filing
[10:56] patterns and like building something crazy and my customers
[11:00] are developers throughout my life cycle.
[11:03] It has never been outside people.
[11:05] The challenges goes both is yes, it was very uncomfortable, but
[11:09] the truth is as a founder, if you are not ready to be in that
[11:12] uncomfortable position, that's not for you.
[11:15] So I know I had to face this and it's I don't know there was any
[11:19] secret recipe other than like mentally being prepared to be in
[11:23] an uncomfortable situation. Absolutely.
[11:27] And how do, how do you guys think about go to market and
[11:31] approaching PMF and what's that kind of milestone for you and
[11:35] how do you see that in terms of metrics or engagement that
[11:37] you're seeing? Product market fit and go to
[11:42] market strategies needs to go hand in hand.
[11:44] So one of the first thing, like I said, the reason I was calling
[11:47] out CRM is because I want to understand why I disqualify
[11:50] customers. If I'm disqualifying 10
[11:52] customers for one missing features, then I know I need to
[11:56] build it. And if we can't get $1,000,000
[12:00] revenue with my current product, that means I built the wrong
[12:04] features at the beginning. I need to rework on it.
[12:08] That's one part of product market fit.
[12:09] The other part is evolving technology, right?
[12:12] A is changing day by day. It's not even like month to
[12:15] month basis at this point. How do you make sure your
[12:19] product is on top of the technology curve for the future?
[12:24] It doesn't have to be right now. There is no right answer.
[12:28] I don't know whether I have a process to do it, but being a
[12:31] technical founder, it's kind of makes it a little more easy
[12:34] because you have the knowledge of both the worlds to make the
[12:37] decision. I talk to customers everyday.
[12:41] I know their pinpoint, all my friends, my whole network talks
[12:45] about AA, talks about the future everyone is building.
[12:49] And that means I know what are the next things that coming up.
[12:52] So now it's a matter of like thinking through what the
[12:55] product should be. Yeah, absolutely.
[12:58] And you've said that of changes are creating permanent shifts in
[13:02] fashion workflows. How do you build a product that
[13:05] adapts to these macro changes? So I think last month or so, my
[13:10] thought has radically changed. So one of the no one lessons
[13:16] that people always say with tech start-ups is that don't build
[13:18] for one customer. You need to build a product that
[13:21] 100 customers can use. But I, if you have seen ChatGPT
[13:25] file launch, one of the thing Sam Hartman called out was like
[13:28] software on demand. Now maybe that's a way, that's a
[13:33] feature. Every company should be able to
[13:35] build an ERP or a workflow automation software that's just
[13:40] specific to them. Before the ChatGPT era, that's
[13:43] not possible, but now that's absolutely possible.
[13:46] But then that's a radical thinking because I need to take
[13:49] a step back and be like, if I want to do this radical change,
[13:52] should I need to inform my VCs, I need to have everyone sign
[13:57] off. I need to figure out if it needs
[13:58] to be flat or if it needs to be a totally new a year driven
[14:01] startup or a pivot. That's that's a different part
[14:05] of the business is more like as a founder, it's not just about
[14:08] making decisions. It's about communicating to
[14:10] stakeholders. And it used to be very easy
[14:15] because most of them it's a small changes product market
[14:18] fate and everything is like you're not radically changing
[14:20] your product. You are not radically changing
[14:22] what you pitched. But with AA now I am like my
[14:25] thought process evolves so fast. Sometimes I want a radically
[14:28] pivot and it's good for customers in a sense.
[14:33] Like I was talking to this medical scrub wear company, they
[14:37] have one bralette and one underwear in one colour, but
[14:42] five different sizes. So literally they just have 10
[14:45] different items that they sell. But it's a part of post
[14:49] maternity thing. That means you sell these
[14:50] garments with the eyes are called back because of the
[14:53] childbirth. You need that eyes are called
[14:55] back to cool. Now you need to do inventory
[14:57] allocations because you sell it as a kit, you sell couple of
[15:01] underwear plus like a highs are called pack and stuff.
[15:04] Inventory management is a pain and they are paying like $15,000
[15:08] per year for a ERP call sensor. And what they do is like try to
[15:15] rebalance inventories, allocate this highs and called back to
[15:18] different size things and if something gets sold out
[15:21] reallocated. It's still a human doing all
[15:23] those math, but what they really need is just a bundle bundling
[15:28] logic for their website. That's it.
[15:30] Do not try to allocate inventories, keep those 15 items
[15:33] as separate inventory tracker. But for your website just bundle
[15:37] and show it in a different way with discounts.
[15:40] Now you are not paying $15,000 a simple app development which
[15:44] used to cost 100,000 plus dollars.
[15:47] A software engineer is now cheaper with charge GPTS.
[15:50] So can your kind of like does ERP really is needed in this
[15:54] situation and how many customers out there could benefit from a
[15:59] simple custom point solution? So it's kind of like, yeah, I
[16:05] product market fair, technology changes, evolution, it's all
[16:08] like very interesting. We are in one of the craziest
[16:12] and a nice time to disturb some of the workflow industries.
[16:17] Absolutely. That's quite interesting.
[16:19] And I totally get the urge to, you know, radically pivot,
[16:22] especially in the current environment where things are so
[16:25] rapidly changing. How do you deal with that urge
[16:28] to radically pivot? Because at times that might also
[16:32] seem like the right thing to do, right?
[16:33] So how do you make the decision that, OK, should we do it or
[16:36] should we just keep doing what we're already doing?
[16:39] Again, some of the times being VC bad helps a lot because if
[16:44] you are not doing the growth, you are anyway going to die.
[16:48] So at that point it's like do the bold decisions, figure out
[16:51] what you want to do. I think there is a lot of back
[16:54] and forth things that has happened when I first did the
[16:56] fundraise or like have like VCs and everything.
[16:59] People usually say like that's a lot of pressure and stuff.
[17:02] The last ways, if I look back, I feel like that's a good thing.
[17:04] It forces me to make these bold decisions.
[17:09] So it comes from the revenue, right?
[17:11] If I can't close $1,000,000 revenue a month consistently
[17:15] month over month, then I'm not building the right product.
[17:19] At that point, what? What do I have to lose?
[17:22] Absolutely makes sense. What metrics do you obsess over
[17:27] that are unique to fashion ERP versus traditional SAS metrics?
[17:33] Goal posts are changing because when I first started two years
[17:36] back if I have 200 K live ARR you are killing it.
[17:43] Like you can do CDC but now you need 2,000,000 live ARR.
[17:48] So at the end of it all comes down to live revenue and how
[17:52] much bookings you are and to certain extent you need to when
[17:56] you talk about growth you cannot close a 100K deal and the next
[18:00] month go and like close the 30K deal.
[18:02] The consistency is really important, so putting together
[18:05] the infrastructure where you feel it is consistent as you
[18:07] start hiring AES, making sure account executives have the
[18:12] right targets so that the growth is shown in terms of bookings,
[18:16] both are very important. Yeah, absolutely.
[18:19] And as as a technical founder in a relationship heavy industry,
[18:24] how do you approach fundraising, the tech story and market or or
[18:28] market opportunity first? So fundraising, it's typically
[18:31] like industry doesn't matter because VC is like you just need
[18:34] to convince VC. You really just need to put them
[18:37] in the shoes of your customer, make them feel the problems your
[18:41] customers are facing. And then like market size and
[18:45] all those things are just numbers you can throw.
[18:48] But in terms of sales, it has been a challenge and going on
[18:53] this podcast or going to conferences, it's to put the
[18:57] credibility out there, right? Because there are so many
[18:59] startups who are doing your ERP. I get customers perspective when
[19:03] you do a cold outreach, like how can I trust you?
[19:05] Yes, you have a website, but what could you do?
[19:09] But when we talk openly about how we think about AA, how we
[19:13] think about pivoting, how we think about solutions,
[19:17] automatically that increases the trust.
[19:18] Because when you do cold outreach, people typically check
[19:20] your LinkedIn, they check your social presence, and the number
[19:24] of calls you get increases. Absolutely.
[19:27] Yeah, that makes sense. And how do you think about
[19:30] modes, especially in the age of AI?
[19:33] And how do you build defensibility into the product?
[19:36] I am someone who believes that technology can be shared with,
[19:41] like with people. That's how you keep innovating.
[19:44] I have shown my entire product to my competitors.
[19:48] If they can copy and they can produce it, good for them.
[19:51] And then what I have done is not good enough.
[19:54] That's not innovative enough. So my attitude towards this is
[19:59] like not have secrets and everything.
[20:00] If you want me to do a YouTube video of my entire product, I
[20:03] would do it. That's interesting.
[20:06] But how do you do that? Because in the age of AI, you
[20:09] know, you can give it a demo or a video that OK, this is how a
[20:12] product looks. You know they say these are some
[20:14] screenshots. So there are new options to it
[20:17] because that from technical perspective, I was at Mongo DB,
[20:20] I was building some parts of like our side wireless platform.
[20:24] One of the things with the database is that the primitives
[20:26] that you act on are text numbers are true or false and that's it.
[20:32] Whereas when you talk of fashion industries, it's like the
[20:35] primitives changes, they have colour as a how we talk about
[20:39] numbers, fashion industry talks about colour, talks, talks about
[20:42] barcode. So what I ended up doing is like
[20:45] I extended the Mongo DB's core functionality to support more
[20:49] types. That's very specific to
[20:51] industries. So we came up with something
[20:53] called schema less ERP, and that means a customer, one of our
[20:57] swimwear customers like 3TA3 Swim, they look at their product
[21:01] as cup size, regular size, color and then torso length.
[21:09] Whereas our menswear company looks at their T-shirt as just
[21:12] color and size. And everyone's ERP looks very
[21:15] different because we developed a schema less ERP.
[21:18] And my challenge is usually like, hey, the only reason we
[21:21] are able to do it is because of my mongo DB background.
[21:24] Someone can copy it? Well, they can try to do it.
[21:28] Got it. So that experience seems to be
[21:30] the mode here, right? Awesome.
[21:33] What's been your most vulnerable moment?
[21:36] Building the starter. I would say there are a lot of
[21:40] challenges. The fastest confidence every
[21:43] time something goes wrong, which pretty much happens every hour
[21:46] in startup founders life. I always question if I am good
[21:52] enough for this. But having said that, I am like
[21:57] executives at Mongo DB, C suites at Mongo DB still mentor me, C
[22:00] suites at other big companies mentor you and they all bring
[22:05] you the confidence. The other part is also being an
[22:08] immigrant. It was a little bit of challenge
[22:10] because people ask you questions like hey, you are from India,
[22:14] you are not from here, can I really trust you with the
[22:16] software? It's it's sad, but at the end of
[22:20] day you have to navigate those situations.
[22:23] Absolutely. That's interesting.
[22:26] And looking back, what was the most pivotal decision that you
[22:30] made that changed Flares code trajectory?
[22:34] I didn't say it's a single decision, but one of the major
[22:37] thing that I took from Mongo DB and we followed here in flat is
[22:41] that we did not build a product. We built Figma screens, we built
[22:45] clickable prototypes. We even today when I go on sales
[22:49] call, I build mocks and until someone signs and pens the deal,
[22:55] we don't like spend engineering effort.
[22:57] It's very important to validate the market before you start
[23:02] jumping into solution and building things.
[23:04] Especially coming from tech background, the intuition is
[23:06] like, OK, I can build this, it looks cool.
[23:09] Things that look cool does not matter.
[23:11] That's the industry needs. This is what matters the most.
[23:15] Absolutely. Yeah, that was what I was going
[23:18] to say, that it's good to see that it's coming from someone
[23:21] from the tech background because they usually have the other
[23:25] approach that, OK, build for us and then try to send.
[23:27] But is that a learned thing for you that, OK, you've learned
[23:31] that, OK, you need to sell for see if there's interest or not
[23:34] and then build Or did you see that, OK, this is the right way
[23:37] to do things? I think it just comes from
[23:40] experience or like I saw Bloomberg being successful with
[23:43] that methodology, I saw Mongo DB being successful with that
[23:47] methodology. So it's when you work in bigger
[23:50] companies or small mid sized companies, one of the best thing
[23:52] you could do is not just do your work, observe everything around
[23:56] you, which is something I like doing.
[23:58] And this is what I observed in those two companies and I just
[24:01] took it with me. Absolutely.
[24:03] Are there any other things that you took from those two
[24:06] companies? You know learnings, inspirations
[24:08] and apply to Flare. There are things which I there
[24:13] are not. I don't know whether it's the
[24:15] best thing. So one of the thing that Mongo
[24:17] DB is like only leads plus goes on call.
[24:20] There are like literally the core management would be the one
[24:23] including EVP of cloud are going on call even when the company
[24:27] was $30 billion. So at Flare, I am hands on only
[24:31] on call person for the last two years.
[24:34] I don't know whether it's a good or bad thing because the
[24:37] leadership at Mongo DB has kind of thought that like every IC is
[24:40] protected and leadership team do not have a life and they work a
[24:44] lot. And I did the same thing here.
[24:49] I'm like, yeah. Yeah.
[24:51] I built most of the things. I won't hire until I feel like,
[24:55] OK, I physically do not have any more time.
[24:58] Physically, my team do not have any more time to build and then
[25:02] I would hire a headcount. Absolutely and would love an
[25:05] insight from you the transition from being an employee at these
[25:09] companies versus now being a founder.
[25:12] How much has they that changed your lifestyle in in your mental
[25:16] health, physical health, if at all?
[25:18] Mental health I'm pretty sure it's not me alone.
[25:22] Everyone goes through. Especially if you are a first
[25:24] time founder. You go through ups and downs,
[25:27] you have no idea how to deal with it and you burn yourself
[25:30] down. It's like I work for like 20
[25:32] hours a day. I literally work 100 hour weeks
[25:36] for months together. That's not sustainable.
[25:39] At the end of the day everyone says to you that hey it's a long
[25:43] game, you are going to burnout. But sometimes people just do and
[25:48] have 11 experience. Otherwise, I would say that the
[25:54] one of the most important thing which I underestimated is like
[25:58] mentors you take away from all the previous companies like CISO
[26:02] of MongoDB till date. Even yesterday I was speaking to
[26:05] her and she was talking me through some of the difficult
[26:09] management decisions I need to do.
[26:13] Having those C-Suite executives from these kind of big companies
[26:16] as your mentor helps a lot. So sometimes when you are
[26:20] working in these mid size companies, I feel like one of
[26:23] the best thing you can do is network, make an impression big
[26:28] enough that all these people would follow you.
[26:31] It's like you don't. I don't even have to pay to get
[26:33] mentorship. All these people are doing it
[26:35] because they know you, they like you.
[26:37] It's a relationship you have built and that's needed when you
[26:41] need that switch to be a founder.
[26:43] Handle the pressure. I had the number of things I
[26:48] need to handle as a lead was overwhelming, but it's nowhere
[26:51] close to being a founder. Absolutely, yeah.
[26:55] What's your contrarian view about where fashion tech is
[26:58] heading that most people in the industry are probably don't get?
[27:02] I think the most of The thing is not just the fashion tech.
[27:05] ERP as a whole is bound to change.
[27:08] So think of it this way, why people use ERP is because you
[27:13] run reports technically throughout this last 10 to 20
[27:17] years, Oracle is the biggest player.
[27:20] And the thing that the reason why database company is the
[27:23] biggest player is because every tech company, whether it's a
[27:25] fashion or any E com company has at least six to seven software
[27:30] they use within their company to be more efficient.
[27:33] And ERP is set in the middle. They integrate with every other
[27:36] tooling that is inside the company, bring the data over to
[27:40] a single data source, allows the executives to run report, look
[27:43] at the sales report, look at the profit report or look at what is
[27:47] incoming, how much cash is committed, whatever it is right
[27:49] at the end of the day, you get a big report from an ERP.
[27:53] But now think of the last two months, what Anthropic and Chat
[27:56] GPTS done with MCP layer. You can connect your Google
[27:59] Drive. You can connect your Gmail query
[28:02] across it and get your report. And these people are not copying
[28:06] over every data from Gmail or every data from your Google
[28:09] Drive, right? That's because AI as technology
[28:13] evolves, allows you to do it. And I think that's the, that's
[28:16] going to be the future of ERP because now think of it in an
[28:19] enterprise scale. Now you can use 10 different
[28:22] tools. You don't need to integrate and
[28:24] bring the data over, but you can just write the query and ERP
[28:26] could produce the report. So being from a data source, you
[28:31] are going to an archestation layer where you just archestate
[28:34] with all the tools and get the reports out of it.
[28:38] So that's, I feel like it's going to be a big, swift, big
[28:40] shift. One of the thing I notice with
[28:43] startups of people I speak with, when people think about AA, they
[28:46] just think of it as like an agent needs to run, this is my
[28:49] database, I need to be able to query.
[28:51] But AA is going to be way beyond that.
[28:53] Every time I see Chargeability and Anthropic do something,
[28:56] there are nuances that happens under the hood that is going to
[29:00] have a very big impact on enterprise level as well.
[29:04] Absolutely. Yeah.
[29:05] That's very interesting. And your position flare to
[29:08] complement Shopify rather than compete with it, right?
[29:11] How does this strategic decision influence your product road map
[29:14] and partnership approach? So again, it's kind of to
[29:18] certain extent forced there are if you ask about the mistakes
[29:22] out. And one of the thing I noticed
[29:23] is that initially when we signed our first cohort of customers, I
[29:27] had people who are in Shopify and I had people who were not in
[29:30] Shopify. For people who were in Shopify,
[29:33] I built, I had to build very less things because Shopify
[29:35] takes care of 80% of your work flows And I was still charging
[29:39] them like 30,000 to $50,000 ACV. But As for people who were not
[29:44] in Shopify plus, they are pretty small place at this point.
[29:48] It's a $5000 ACV. But I had to build a tonne of
[29:51] features. That means I don't have the
[29:54] money. I'm not going to increase the
[29:56] revenue at the rate I would do for a Shopify customers.
[29:59] That's, that's kind of like the marketing part of it, like the
[30:02] revenue part of it, which we discussed from the technology
[30:05] part of it, it also made sense because when you are not in
[30:09] Shopify, I need to be an inventory management system.
[30:11] Then you need to understand like the sales is coming in, do a
[30:15] plus add, add like the count or reduce the count.
[30:19] And it's not as simple as that. People do barrels count and then
[30:22] see someone something is damaged.
[30:23] So even manually, you kind of have to reduce your like
[30:26] inventories becomes a big thing. But with Shopify, Shopify has a
[30:30] good inventory management system.
[30:32] They have a good Apas for it. So when people add damages, when
[30:37] people get more items, I just use Shopify's Apas and bring it
[30:40] back to Shopify. That means they do the harder
[30:44] part of inventory management system behind the hood and I'm
[30:47] not doing it. That means I don't need a 10
[30:49] people engineering team. And I'm not talking about
[30:52] another 100K spin per month. So there are two parts to it.
[30:57] Like technology wise it made more sense because I can build
[30:59] less, piggyback on lot of things Shopify does well.
[31:03] And from marketing perspective, anyone who pays me more than 30
[31:07] KR in Shopify Plus. So it's kind of finding your
[31:09] right initial customer profile. Who would take you to seed?
[31:14] Who would take you to CDSC? Absolutely.
[31:17] Yeah, that's very sound thinking there.
[31:19] With that, we move to the last question before we try to close
[31:21] this out. What's been your biggest
[31:24] learning as a founder? Biggest learning one, whether
[31:30] you like it or not, you need to be a little more cutthroat.
[31:33] You can't be too nice in every situation and it's not it's not
[31:38] one of my comfort zone to be like confrontational, but you
[31:42] have to be. And confidence.
[31:45] I am someone who never projects confidence because even as a
[31:50] lead, even as ACDO, I never had to do that.
[31:52] It's like people follow me. My profile earns the respect.
[31:56] So it was so easy in that life. But then as a founder, when you
[31:59] talk to VCs, you need to be confident because you have to
[32:03] make that first impression. So those kind of soft skills are
[32:06] something I kind of struggled initially, but had to like grow.
[32:11] Everyone who says this before I started the company was that
[32:13] like being a founder is not about growth in terms of
[32:17] technical skills or work skills. It's literally a personal growth
[32:21] because you sacrifice so much on top of that, you are pushed to
[32:26] your limits every single day that you will grow personally,
[32:29] you will discover your strengths and weakness.
[32:33] And that's so true. Absolutely.
[32:35] Would you like to give an example of what being cut throat
[32:39] is? Letting go of people as soon as
[32:43] possible is very important and when things are not working,
[32:47] like at MongoDB, if someone is good and not the best, I would I
[32:51] can live with it. It doesn't matter.
[32:52] It's a big company, you have performance all over the place.
[32:55] But in startup we are talking about 5 to 6 people.
[32:58] That means everyone needs to be absolutely at their peak,
[33:03] otherwise you can't move forward.
[33:05] And the second part of is firing customers.
[33:09] I don't think I was good at firing customers when you know
[33:13] your customer is taking so much time than needed and they are
[33:15] taking away the time needed to onboard another customer onboard
[33:19] another 10 customers. You should be bold enough to go
[33:22] and say that like I'm drawing this line.
[33:25] If you need more inputs from me, it's OK.
[33:28] I will give you back the money. You can find a different
[33:31] situation. Got it.
[33:32] Absolutely. Profound learnings there.
[33:35] With that, we come to the close to let our listeners know where
[33:38] they can learn more about flair and where they can follow a
[33:41] journey so they can. Follow me in LinkedIn, I am.
[33:45] I usually post everything in LinkedIn, even about flat or my
[33:48] own dots. And honestly, I'm excited to see
[33:53] that flat goes out. Pretty much even the product
[33:55] goes right with AA and everything.
[33:57] So next three months, if you follow me, it's going to be a
[34:01] pretty interesting twist. Absolutely.
[34:04] I'll make sure to put those links in the show notes below.
[34:06] Thanks so much for doing this with us Harish, and sharing your
[34:09] learnings from being a first time founder and entering an
[34:13] industry where you don't have a previous background in.
[34:15] So thank you and I wish you all the best.
[34:18] Thank you.

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