Crisis-Proof GTM: How Sedai Turned Pandemic Timing into a Competitive Advantage

Most startup advisors would tell you that leaving a stable job at PayPal to launch a company just before a global pandemic is terrible timing. But for Sedai founder Suresh Mathew, this apparent misfortune became an unexpected strength. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he revealed how crisis conditions shaped their go-to-market strategy and built resilience into their company’s DNA.

The Counterintuitive Advantage

“In fact, that was the right time and in fact, it was a favorable time to start a company,” Suresh explained, challenging conventional wisdom. “You learn a lot of things being alone. You learn a lot of things being in not so favorable situation. But the good thing is the company is so much more stable and can handle some of these adverse situations since it’s born at that time.”

Building in Isolation

The initial leap wasn’t easy. “You almost jump off the cliff, assuming there will be water by the time you land,” Suresh described. “That’s always the assumption any founder would take.” But the isolation of the pandemic period forced a level of focus and resilience that would prove valuable.

Finding Market Fit in Crisis

The pandemic accelerated the need for autonomous cloud management as companies struggled with remote operations. Sedai recognized that Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) faced increasing challenges. “You’re not managing tens of services anymore. You have hundreds of services to manage as an SRE,” Suresh noted. “Now if you look at the whole thing, it has become a risky job now and many a times it becomes boring as well.”

Reframing Cost Optimization

While many companies were focused on survival and cost-cutting during the crisis, Sedai positioned their solution differently. “With autonomous systems it becomes a modernization initiative,” Suresh explained. “The good thing here is you’re not just optimizing for that day, you are now optimized forever.”

This positioning helped transform what could be seen as a reactive cost-cutting tool into a strategic investment in the future. Even in crisis conditions, companies were willing to invest in solutions that promised long-term transformation.

Building Trust Remotely

The pandemic created unique challenges for building trust with enterprise customers. Sedai’s response was to embrace transparency and community. “Community plays a key role in our success,” Suresh shared. “The good thing about this community is everybody is trying to build the system or make this safer… We take it very seriously and we are actively meeting that community.”

Their approach to building trust extended to product adoption. “We are an autonomous system. At the same time, we don’t let you run autonomous in the first two weeks,” Suresh explained. “The first two weeks is for the system to learn and recommend certain things. Those are the things that your teams will evaluate.”

From Crisis to Category Creation

What started as a challenging period became an opportunity to define a new category. “Autonomy was considered risky at one point. Now that’s safer than being automated,” Suresh observed. “Being autonomous and autonomous is not cool or new anymore. It is becoming the norm now.”

The crisis period helped Sedai refine their message around safety and reliability. “The most important thing is you will take your operators out of harm’s way,” Suresh emphasized. “When an SRE sits there, looks at your application, and has to take an action, most of the risky actions are then taken by the platform itself.”

Building for the Future

The resilience built during the crisis has positioned Sedai for broader adoption. Starting with serverless and expanding to “ECS, Kubernetes, and storage,” they’re working toward their vision of being “the autonomous company for everything that is on Cloud.”

For founders launching during uncertain times, Sedai’s journey offers valuable lessons. Crisis conditions can force a level of focus and resilience that becomes a long-term advantage. Sometimes, the worst time to start a company can actually be the best time—if you’re willing to embrace the constraints and let them shape your approach to the market.

The key is not just surviving the crisis, but using it to build something that’s inherently more resilient. In Sedai’s case, being “born at that time” created a company that was built to handle adversity from day one.