Building a Global SaaS Unicorn from India | Monish Darda | ICERTIS | Platforms | Contract Management | Bikes

DASAR Podcast | Building a Global SaaS Unicorn from India | Monish Darda | ICERTIS | Platforms | Contract Management | BikesTranscript Welcome back to DASAR Podcast. My name is Dashan Doshi and DASAR is about insights and taking action. We intend to build a community of people who want to take that first step towards their goals – whether it’s a startup or investments or fitness! I have an amazing guest with me today – Monish Darda. I’ve known him for a while. I’ve seen him do things that really have blown my mind and I’ve invited him to the DASAR Podcast to learn and break down contract management and really get into how he thinks and makes decisions. Darshan Doshi: Monish Darda has been a part of three acquisitions. He is a serial entrepreneur and one of the best technology product creators. He’s been a founder of Websym Technologies way back in 1998 and has led R&D divisions at Storability and BladeLogic that have gone on to get acquired by Sun Microsystems (later acquired by Oracle) and BMC Software respectively. Today he’s the co-founder and CTO at ICERTIS that is one of the three unicorns – that is a billion-dollar valuation startup, right here from Pune in India.Darshan Doshi: I gave a quick introduction of you, but when someone comes up to you and asks you who is Monish Darda what do you typically say?Monish Darda: I’m the kind of person who likes to do different things. I love motorcycles. And that gives me the feeling of speed and balance. I love that in my life. So that’s, those are the two things I really focus on.Darshan Doshi: You’ve built so many enterprise-grade software applications that are being used worldwide. Not an easy task, given the fact that there’s so much competition out there. When you think about enterprise-grade software, what have you seen change over the last 20 years? And with SaaS picking up so much in the last year or so, maybe your views on building enterprise-grade software and the evolution of SaaS.Monish Darda: I think the underlying philosophy of software development has never changed. The underlying philosophy of software distribution also hasn’t changed. When I was doing my masters in Florida 30 years ago, all these big supercomputers and mainframes that you worked on, had these terminals going on across. And they were all connecting to the mothership. The Cloud is like that if you think about it. So we used to dream about daily computing in the seventies and the constraints were the hardware. Not really software constraints because there was really good software. Think about it, you know, building an enterprise software application in 64 megabytes of memory.Now, what has happened, I think the big change in the last six or seven years has been that the hardware is now available to anyone. Someone who doesn’t have a lot of money or has money with a credit card. You can spend a thousand dollars a month to actually run a thousand virtual machines – not for the whole month, but at least for four or five days. This means that the power of the cloud, the compute has now moved to a much lower cost when you come to the startup development cycle. I think that is the movement that we’re seeing as people kind of say, ‘Hey, I want to build a company that really wants to target 5 million people’.Startup founders don’t have to think about a $15 million fundraise. They can do it with a small fund and they can do it as they need it and the cloud expense can grow with them. I think that has fundamentally changed things. The second movement I’ve seen is in the space that we are in — Contract Management — is that people are tired of thinking about enterprise software and consumer software differently.We’ve really thought about this and asked how can the enterprise customer/user actually get the same experience on Monday morning in the office as I have on a Sunday evening. I want to see the same maps, the