The following interview is a conversation we had with Yadhu Gopalan, CEO and Founder of Esper, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $100 Million Raised to Build the Future of Android Device Management.
Yadhu Gopalan
Good to be here.
Brett
Yeah. So before begin talking about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Yadhu Gopalan
Yeah, so we I’ve been building this Esper, the company for about the last five years, but before that I spent about 20 years between Microsoft and Amazon, mostly doing engineering work. I’m running large engineering teams in my later stage of my career, but all of it is kind of around devices and building great device experiences. And that’s really kind of like my passion is like how to make device experiences better. And Esper really brings everything from my past together.
Brett
And what would you say if we put those organizations side by side? What’s the biggest difference between working at Amazon and working at Microsoft?
Yadhu Gopalan
It was kind of if you take a look at the background where they started on their DNA, Microsoft obviously from ground up software, OS, operating system, that was their main and everything else was built from there. So that shows they had a lot of knowledge about how to build systems, et cetera. And Amazon, their DNA is retail, but they’re a software company that was doing retail, not supposed to a retail company, but they had to build all their knowledge of how to build other systems like operating systems or even the cloud, which they did really well. And they do take on these endeavors and are able to succeed on this. So kind of their dna shows through a lot in how they kind of build out teams and build out processes and build out systems.
Yadhu Gopalan
One of the best examples is just even how R D in Microsoft you had separate R D, whereas in like R D is tightly integrated the product you’re building.
Brett
Interesting. And I know you were most recently at Amazon. So if you had to choose one thing that you really walked away with from Amazon and lessons learned, what would be like that top lesson or just an interesting lesson that you learned from being there.
Yadhu Gopalan
One of the key things, so one of the big projects I worked on was Amazon Go, which is the just walkout stores where I was responsible for the devices and device infrastructure in these stores. But there was a secret project and when they first introduced me, it’s like, I don’t know anything about retail. That was the kind of thing and the conference that Amazon gave me and the way they work is like, hey, you know how to build things. You’re going to learn how to build something completely outside your domain space and kind of pick that up, how to build something for a retail shop.
Yadhu Gopalan
And that was completely like, even though it was still devices that was out of my comfort zone and they really do that well, is go take people and say you’re going to do this that you’ve never done before and you’re going to use your past history and you’re going to learn more stuff and then build that out. So that was something that was really key and that was really important. That’s something that I’ve taken away when I’ve started. Esper is like I’m no longer just engineering. How do I learn about marketing and how do I learn about sales? All those things. So that gave me the confidence that I could do that.
Brett
Nice. I love that. And another question I want to ask about is just making that transition from being in a technical role at a big company like Microsoft or Amazon and then starting your own company. So the first question there is, let’s compare you today to Yadu, back when you were ten years old. Would ten year old version be surprised that you are CEO and Founder of a technology company today or is that something that you think you could have were seen happening?
Yadhu Gopalan
Absolutely would have been surprised. I am introvert by design. Had to kind of get over that, especially as I was doing more and more of the company and building the company, generating funding. I’m really comfortable if you put me in a bunch of people who know my domain, but outside of the domain, I was always very uncomfortable and had to kind of build that up, how to learn how to do it and even ten year old, I was a geek from very early on and I was doing coding. I think with fifth grade is when I started coding and working with systems and stuff. So this is something that I had to build over my career. And kind of this is like Espera is the culmination of that.
Yadhu Gopalan
It’s like how do I completely get out of that and get out of my comfort zone even more and so my ten year old Yada would be very much surprised on how I’m able to kind of learn and get better day by day.
Brett
And what was the biggest surprise as you transitioned to that CEO and Founder role, leaving behind those other titles, what was the biggest surprise?
Yadhu Gopalan
It’s the breadth of trying to know how to go deep just exactly in places because it’s not your space. So you have to kind of let the experts tell you what to do and then be able to kind of hone in on the questions you need to ask to make sure that you understand, rather than try to understand everything about it. Whereas as an engineer, I went deep all the time because I had to understand every aspect. Even as an engineering manager, I had to understand every aspect of what were trying to build.
Yadhu Gopalan
And so I had to kind of have this confidence that others that I brought into the company are going to be the experts, and then I’m going to understand in a general sense, what they are trying to accomplish and then trying to correlate and then make sure everything is attached and everything is flowing in the same strategic direction. But knowing that I am not the expert in that area was actually something I had to learn and understand how to do.
Brett
Interesting. And given the two companies you work for, I have a prediction here on how you will answer this, but let’s see how it goes. So if you had to choose one CEO that you really admire, who is the CEO and what do you admire about them?
Yadhu Gopalan
Actually, I’m going to surprise you. I’ve got actually two, but I’ll talk about I’m picking Seattle people who are not from Microsoft and Amazon, a couple of people who have done startups and more recently been successful. One of them is pace at OD zero. I know him. I’ve talked to him. Amazing guy. One person, good personality and another person. And the reason why I’m doing two is two different personalities. I take two different things from. And the other one is Manny Medina outreach. And so one is more technical, more product oriented. The other one is more sales, more outgoing, driving. Of course their product is sales related. It would have to be that. So there’s a lot to learn from there. And the other thing is, the key thing is Seattle tech scene is just growing.
Yadhu Gopalan
So there’s a lot of good examples for me to kind of borrow upon and kind of learn from others that have come before me.
Brett
And without knowing it, you are supporting my dreams and my goals. I’m trying to get Manny to come on the podcast because he talks a lot about category creation. I think they’re a good example of it. So every time a guest mentions him, I send him the episode and say, all right, come on. You ready to come on yet? So thank you for that. I have another reason to reach out to him.
Yadhu Gopalan
All right. Let him know that it’d be great to be on the show. Nice.
Brett
Sounds good. Now tell us a little bit more about the Seattle tech ecosystem. So you’ve obviously been there for a very long time, but how have you seen it evolve? Maybe just over even the last five years since you started the company?
Yadhu Gopalan
Yeah. So there’s a big difference. I think one of the key things, I think difference between the Bay Area tech scene and Seattle tech scene is you have a couple of companies, maybe three or four companies that are the big companies that have been formed. And most of the tech people originate from that. And they’ve done kind of their tour of duty. Ten years, 20 years, that’s very common. And those companies are still doing well. And then they kind of leave that company at some transition point, which is very similar to me, and say they’re going to do a startup. So if you, not all of them, but if you look at the majority of the tech companies that are here, you can kind of go back to a DNA of either it’s Amazon or it’s Microsoft.
Yadhu Gopalan
And now a little bit more are coming. But that’s the kind of core dna that many of us share. And all of them have spent some time there, a lot more time than you’d see from companies in the Bay Area. You don’t see a lot of super young ceos. You see much more what I call experienced ceos. So that’s kind of very common at Microsoft. It’s not a place where a 20 year old says, I’m going to do a startup and I’m going to base it out of Seattle. It’s more of the ones that kind of came through the system.
Brett
Yeah, we’ve had a lot of founders on from Seattle, and I would say that they all are very similar to you. Whereas they either worked for Microsoft or Amazon for at least ten years. They were technical people in those positions or in technical roles, and then now they’ve started a company based on their own experiences. That seems to be like the stereotypical Founder that I speak to from Seattle. Whereas in the Bay Area, we have the 20 year old who dropped out of Stanford and just has a dream. So there’s very different styles of starting a company.
Yadhu Gopalan
Exactly.
Brett
Now, what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder and really just as a person. This doesn’t have to be a business book. It can just be a book that really influenced how you think about and view the world.
Yadhu Gopalan
Yeah. So I know it’s a tv series now, but way before it was a tv series. And so I’m a science fiction buff. Loved the foundation series. Isaac Asimo. And there’s, like, a core, the idea that some one person could put a plan in place that lives beyond him, or even generations, and kind of is so long living, and so you’re thinking way in the future and setting things in place. That just seems like an amazing concept. So that’s kind of like a science fiction book, but if you want, like, a business book, I’m really a fan of this, like, thinking fast and slow. I’m big fan of that. And it supplies for me, like, more of a psychology business book.
Yadhu Gopalan
But I love the fact that it has the great framework for me to think about decisions that I make on a daily basis. So those are two kind of one that set me very early on in my life, impacted me then, as I’m thinking about businesses and et cetera. I really like the book by Daniel Kellman, thinking fast and slow.
Brett
And I’m looking at the foundation series now. I see there’s, like, maybe ten different books. Is there a specific one that you recommend? If I embark on this journey, you.
Yadhu Gopalan
Got to start from the first one because it sets a flow and read the books before you watch the series or anything. But it’s a similar concept. Like, what he did with the is, what is the three laws of robotics and stuff like that, and set the stage there. But Isa, Michael Asmav did an amazing job. It starts with the hero’s mathematician that starts off, and he creates a mathematic kind of process for looking and thinking about the future. And so it’s a great book. You should read it. They’re pretty meaty. Nice.
Brett
Yeah. I’m always looking for new books, and that’s why I love asking this question, especially when it’s a book that I haven’t heard of before or looked into. So I’ll definitely check this out, and I’ll circle back with some feedback when I’m finished reading it.
Yadhu Gopalan
Happy to hear that.
Brett
Perfect. Well, let’s switch gears now, and let’s dive a bit deeper into the company. So I know you touched on the background there a little bit when were doing the intro, so let’s maybe just jump straight to what the company does. So let’s just say that I’m a customer. What’s the pitch? What problem is the product solving for me, and what’s the solution do?
Yadhu Gopalan
So at its simplest form, we want to make software deployment to edge devices easier, faster, more secure. We feel that’s a space that has been long neglected, and cloud is run by it on how cloud software is deployed. And I’m not talking about, just to be kind of clear, I’m not talking about phones and stuff. I’m talking about dedicated edge devices that are very single purpose. And I can talk about lots of examples of that. But whether it’s an example, just so we have context, whether it’s point of sale or a car, the software that’s running on that is very dedicated. It does only one thing and does one thing well. And the systems and methods and infrastructure for deploying software really has not kind of been where the cloud software deployment has been.
Yadhu Gopalan
I’ll give you an example for the car Tesla has done. Exactly what we want to do is made software deployments to a car, a thing they did, like 152 deployments in 2021. That was, like, unthinkable before them. You never updated. You took your car to a server center and you got something updated. But now everybody’s like, yeah, that makes sense. Like a recall is just a software update. I can do push new features to a car. And so that’s what we want to make easier, and we want to make it easier for everyone. Tesla is amazing engineering team. They can do it, really. I think of them as a software company that’s building cars. And so how do we let everyone else that’s putting devices out there all over the place to better at it?
Yadhu Gopalan
And so we want to make that more systematic, much more easier, so they’re more comfortable, they’re more confident. This is a problem that when you have a security issue, ctos out there always have this conundrum that, should I do this update? Is that going to be worse? Am I going to be able to do this safely? Am I going to have outages? All these issues go to them because they just don’t think of that. And Esper is solving that problem for them. Esper is making that so that they can have confidence in doing that. We have gone to a world where everybody expects software changes to happen immediately. From where I started, where operating system, we used to ship an operating system every three years. That’s not the way it works anymore.
Yadhu Gopalan
If I report a problem, especially if you’re a business and you’re using a SaaS product. I need that to be fixed, like even in maybe a couple of weeks. And software teams can do that. Software teams are building products and improving the product. They just never had a way to get that deployed to their customers. And further customers can see it. And so our systems allows engineering teams that are continually innovating, fixing problems to quickly push those fixes out to those devices in a rapid and secure and a confident manner.
Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io slash podcast. Now back today’s episode, and I’d love to ask you about MDm. So the category, I feel like I see that a lot, and that’s always confused me. When I hear that mobile device management, I just assume that it’s talking about mobile phones. But that sounds like I’m wrong, right?
Brett
It’s for any devices, or am I misunderstanding the definition of the category?
Yadhu Gopalan
No, you’re absolutely correct. So MDM as a category, its dna comes from managing your enterprise phones. People are bringing in phones, and enterprises wanted a way to make sure that they’re managed using password policies, email policies, et cetera. Enterprises also do software deployment on that. So there is some shared kind of what you do. But if you think about what the purpose of it is to manage those devices and protect the enterprise from these devices. What we’re trying to do with our category of DevOps for devices is to kind of flip it around. These are products that you’re building. These are first class citizens. This is probably one of the reasons why you exist. And you need to treat them not as an afterthought, you need to treat them as first class citizens.
Yadhu Gopalan
How you approach your software development, how you do approach your software deployment, how you approach even the device management, how you approach the monitoring of these devices, and kind of turn the tables around and kind of make sure the focus is on the device, and what focuses on the product that you’re building makes.
Brett
A lot of sense. So for you, what’s that category then? I think you just said the phrase there. What is it called?
Yadhu Gopalan
It’s DevOps for devices. DevOps is something that’s been around, especially in the cloud. Any modern software company is going to say, yes, we practice DevOps. We can deploy anytime you want, we can roll back anytime you want. Every software engineering team and operations team that is deploying software to the cloud practices it. We ourselves practice it when I building my SaaS side of my product. So it’s kind of ubiquitous to any SaaS cloud software company, but that is not the same for devices. And so we’re saying this category that DevOps or devices is a thing, you need infrastructure to do it, right?
Brett
And what types of activities are you pursuing right now as you try to create that category and get the market to understand what that category is all about?
Yadhu Gopalan
A lot of that is kind of telling the story and being able to have a set of experts talking about why it’s important, why companies need systematic way to building their product, build or managing their product, monitoring their product. One of the key things that they need to be able to do is thinking about scale from the very beginning, what is going to take to deploy software to ten versus thousands to hundreds of thousands. So kind of educating them that they need to kind of think ahead, have the infrastructure in place so that they can scale without any hiccups. One of the things is we do a lot of education on why it’s important, why you have to have infrastructure, show business value.
Yadhu Gopalan
We have some of the most popular industry blogs that kind of talk about DevOps, also about Android as a class of devices that are really key. How many of these devices are Android and why do you need something like the infrastructure that we have? It’s really about educating the customer. But also, if you think about it, for the cloud, there’s this DevOps maturity curve trying to help customers. Even early on in cloud, not everybody came into DevOps. It’s like they started very early and very at the beginning of that maturity curve and how to take these customers, how to take these prospects through this maturity curve. And they can do it at their own pace. And eventually they kind of latch onto that. They kind of grow into the DevOps kind of maturity curve and add more and more automation to their systems.
Yadhu Gopalan
And it’s a formula that we kind of work with the customers and work with the industry on how to do that better. And what we’ve seen is people are adopting it, whether they’re new technology, new companies that are really into the current technology, current methodology, or even existing companies that are, you wouldn’t expect, like legacy there forever. A lot of them are starting to adopt it one of the value propositions that I like to talk about is regardless of where you are in the maturity curve, their engineers are building software in. Everybody’s adopted kind of sprints, an agile methodology. You’re always building and improving your software, but you don’t have a mechanism to get the software to your customers and get feedback. It’s not very agile. So that’s one huge value proposition that we kind of help our customers learn.
Brett
And does this replace the line item that organizations have for MDm, or is this a new line item that’s being created or how do you think about that? Because I think that’s always one of the issues when it comes to creating a category, is if you need to create a new line item around it, then that’s added cost. So is this creating a new one or is it replacing that legacy MDM line item?
Yadhu Gopalan
Yes, it replaces the legacy line item. So for dedicated, they may still an MDM to manage their enterprise phones, et cetera, but for their dedicated device product that they’re building, if you’re home automation company that’s building some home automation for that product, we replace, we’re like kind of everything you want to do with the device. We’re kind of the last mile for the device. So we take over all the jobs or any one of the features that an MDM would do as well as add on top all our value add onto that.
Brett
And from looking through the website, it seems like you’re facing the situation that many other startups face when they’re looking at categories where if you just put all these new terms that people don’t know or categories that people don’t know, then no one’s going to be able to buy. So you have to find this balance between talking about what people do know, which in your case that’s MDm, that’s the established category with what you want it to be and what that future vision and that future state is. So how have you guys navigated that? Because I do see MDm is in quite a few places on the website. It’s very prominent. So how are you balancing that? Where, okay, we’re part of this conversation around Mdm, but it’s not the conversation we want to be having.
Brett
We want to be having a conversation about this new category. How do you navigate that?
Yadhu Gopalan
Yeah, it’s really important and we have to be really kind of pay attention to what we’re doing there. And if you notice on a front page, it says not just an MDm. So we kind of have to pay homage to that, obviously, pragmatically for SEO, et cetera, you have to do it. No one’s searching when we started this, no one’s searching for DevOps, for devices. That’s not a thing. So how do we make it a thing? And I don’t think it happens overnight. I say, there’s a thing that I used to say to investors and everybody else. People come to our website looking for an MDm, they leave with DevOps. And that’s what you want to be able to kind of do, is that’s all they know. If somebody told them, hey, you got managed devices, go find an MDm.
Yadhu Gopalan
And so they search for an MDm. And hopefully early on that was the only thing they’re searching for. And now you get to people are, there’s some awareness, whether it’s DevOps, it’s more about software deployment, it’s about more monitoring, it’s more about some of the other things that we do. And so it’s a slow transition. Somebody told me creating a category is not easy, and now I know, but it’s the thing that we have to do and we want to do, and we want to be synonymous with it. And that’s the nice thing about catering a category, is if you’re successful at it, you’re the leader. And so it’s really important.
Brett
And did you have that insight from day one that this was going to be a category creation play? And if so, is that what you were talking about with investors in those early days, or did that come as you made it further into finding product market fit?
Yadhu Gopalan
Year and a half is where I would put it at after we started the company is when we started keying in on the term DevOps devices. So early on, were kind of playing with, this is security, this is this, et cetera, a lot of different things. Obviously, we knew what we wanted to build, but we didn’t really know what it is, what we’re trying to do. So you can almost call it a minor pivot. The product was pretty much the same, but pivoting on the messaging and how we wanted to do it. Since then, obviously, we’ve tried, tested, evaluated many things and continue to learn what’s going to land, what’s not going to land. And that thing also evolves. What lands now will not be what lands in about six months to a year. And it’s a continuous effort.
Yadhu Gopalan
The main thing is learning your personas, learning your icps that you want to go target. There’s a big difference for us. Many of our purchases are the chief product officer or the CTO or the engineering lead versus the it person. So usually it’s usually the product team or team involved with innovation that kind of decides that they want this infrastructure and they need the infrastructure. So our champion. So being able to talk to the right audience is really key.
Brett
And how do you navigate that? If I’m just looking at titles on the testimonials, we have director of hardware, then we have a CTO, and then we have the director of next gen restaurant technology. And that’s just the testimonials. And it looks at three very different industries. One of them is Taco Bell. So how do you navigate that? How are you speaking to the CTO of what looks like a technology company and then the director of technology at Taco Bell? It seems like very different personas with, I’m guessing, very different objectives and very different pain points.
Yadhu Gopalan
And that’s key. In the end, the problem they’re trying to solve is making sure they can deploy and scale their fleet, scale their product easily and be able to innovate at a reasonable pace. All three of those that you mentioned, they want to do that. And the key thing is to be able to kind of talk to that. And we’ve not always done it well, but that’s the important thing that we need to be able to continue to do is that pain point and that use case. And what they want to accomplish from their product is what’s important. All of them are building a product. The director of hardware is doing some purchasing, but has a mandate probably on how he’s going to scale the system, how he’s going to sell more hardware.
Yadhu Gopalan
And the director of innovation is like trying to innovate on the product, and how does he get software out to this so he can innovate faster? So it’s all the same problems and we just need to kind of talk to them. We’re not talking different things to them, we’re talking the same problem that they try to solve.
Brett
That makes sense. So at surface level, if I just look at industries, it seems like it’d be wildly different. But if you actually dig deep, it’s the same job to be done that they’re all trying to do.
Yadhu Gopalan
Yeah, exactly. Whether you’re sending software to a point of sale, to a washing machine, to a car, or to a healthcare monitoring, you’re trying to do the same thing. You’re trying to build your system, build your product, deploy software, scale your fleet and continue to innovate for the customer with all the competition that they may have. They want to be front and center into the customer experience that they have. Their customer may be an enterprise or actual customer user. Regardless of that, they want to make sure that they are providing experience that is encouraging them to use their product.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And just to talk about growth or to demonstrate the growth that you’re seeing, are there any numbers that you can share or any metrics that you can just tease our audience with? Our audience loves to hear metrics.
Yadhu Gopalan
The millions of devices is a thing. My goal is to be at billions in future years from a growth perspective, we had the best quarter this year. So despite all the macro conditions, we’re continuing to grow land deals. We have some of the biggest deals come through. We have amazing logos from all different verticals. And as you can see from our website, from Taco Bell to other, we have five of the top ten restaurant chains using Esper. And you might not think from a restaurant perspective, that’s about 15 plus devices in a restaurant, from the kitchen display to point of sale to their busing on their kiosks, et cetera. And our goal is to be able to do software deployment across all these use cases.
Yadhu Gopalan
And so that’s kind of like where the use cases we want to address and the number of devices are just growing possibilities for people to provide value is continued to grow.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And what do you attribute to that successful growth? I’m sure there’s many things that you’ve gotten right, but if you had to pick one, two, three things that you’ve just really nailed and feel really confident about, what have you gotten right?
Yadhu Gopalan
Building a product that is intuitive and easy to use I think is key. Continuing to adapt, we balance features that we want to do that move the needle on kind of the category creation along with what the customer wants and customer needs, I think that’s key, listening to our customers. And then number two is I pride ourselves in going above and beyond in supporting them. While we’re learning, we’re also teaching them their success. One of the things I instill into the company is their success means our success. The more devices they can scale and deploy without hindrance is better for us. So we’re all in. As far as like when a customer comes to us and wants to do a fleet, we don’t just like, okay, you’re going to use Esper, that’s great. No, how are you going to use Esper?
Yadhu Gopalan
Or you have an issue that has maybe even unrelated to Esper. How can we help, we will always double down because we have that philosophy that I want every one of my customers to be very successful and do have their business be successful because as long as they can scale, we can scale because we have tremendous growth opportunity. They are really good at their product.
Brett
And last question here, since I know we’re almost up on time, so let’s zoom out three to five years from today. What’s that vision? What is this company going to look like? When are you going to reach a billion devices? What’s that goal look like? And paint a picture for us through the future.
Yadhu Gopalan
So I’ll start off with, one of the joys I get is being able to walk around airport, a restaurant, a home, and see like, hey, that’s running Esper. And that’s what we want to have. More and more of those experiences that say, that’s running Esperan. Coming from Microsoft, that’s kind of common, but it’s even more like it’s satisfying to be able to say that on a company that you’ve built. And so that’s what we want to be continuing to do. We want Espea to be synonymous with amazing device experiences in these use cases that we’ve talked about on these dedicated products, we want to be the place that people think about as they’re building a product and that our customers are able to just innovate with speed with Esper.
Yadhu Gopalan
So yes, billions of devices right now, we’re more in the high value, bigger items, but the same experiences can be brought to any devices at the edge, any dedicated devices at the edge. And so we want to bring that value more and more to the ecosystem.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Well, before we wrap here, if people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go?
Yadhu Gopalan
Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter. Come to esper.io. Learn about us. We’ve got some amazing blogs, amazing content that we’re putting out to learn about the space, learn about the different technologies. So lots of places to come and learn about Esper and what we do and how you can use us.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story, talking about what you’re building, helping educate me on what the hell MDM actually means. That makes a lot more sense now and letting me know that your devices are in Taco Bell. So next time I go to Taco Bell, I’ll be trying to peek around the devices and hopefully it’s there.
Yadhu Gopalan
That’s awesome. Yes.
Brett
Perfect.
Yadhu Gopalan
Yeah. Thank you very much. It’s been great to be on here and talk about Esper. It’s been amazing.
Brett
Yeah. It’s so great chatting with you. Best of luck and let’s keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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