The following interview is a conversation we had with Suresh Mathew, Founder and CEO of Sedai, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Suresh Mathew, Founder and CEO of Sedai: $18 Million Raised to Automate Cloud Management for Critical Decisions

Suresh Mathew
Sure Brett. Thanks for having me here. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So, before begin talking about what you’re building there, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Suresh Mathew
Sure thing. Suresh Mathew. I was at Ebay PayPal for the past 13 years. I was leading in substitution, and platform teams there left my job in 2019 to start to die. So that’s me. 

Brett
Wow. So, 2019, that was before the Pandemic. Did you have any doubts when the Pandemic started? Were you questioning what you were doing with entrepreneurship?

Suresh Mathew
In fact, that was the right time and in fact, it was a favorable time to start a company. In my mind, 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. 

Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I guess it was the ultimate stress test there. 

Suresh Mathew
That’s right.

Brett
And what was going through your head as you quit Ebay PayPal? What was going through your mind? Did you have any doubts? Did you have any concerns? Were you afraid or were you just very bullish on this idea and you had a big vision that you wanted to pursue? 

Suresh Mathew
That’s a journey of any founder. In my mind, you almost jump off the cliff, assuming there will be water by the time you land. Right. So that’s always the assumption any founder would take. That’s what I did, too. I knew that the idea was worth pursuing. I knew that PayPal, when I was at PayPal, that was something that was badly needed there and worked pretty well there. Rest of the industry we had to test and figure out. We did. 

Brett
That nice. I love it. And two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. First one is, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them? 

Suresh Mathew
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this name. His name is Garish Madhrabudham. He is the founder of a company called Freshworks. They just went IPO. The good thing about him is the clarity of his thought process is probably what is the most admirable about him. He has awesome clarity. Even if his vision is wrong, it’s very clear on his vision that’s hard to get.

Brett
The second question there is on books. So is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a founder? And this can be a business book or a personal book. 

Suresh Mathew
I’m from PayPal, so one person that we all admire is a Thiel, and his book is probably the most favorite for all PayPal people. Assuming zero to one is my favorite, and it’s Thiel.

Brett
Nice. Yeah. That’s such a great book. Let’s dive deeper into the company. So can you just take us back to day zero or day one, the early days? What’s the origin story behind the company? 

Suresh Mathew
Cool. I’ll start with probably my life at PayPal. At PayPal. When PayPal spun off as a separate company, we solved this huge problem of handling the cloud workload and the most reliable and the most efficient way efficient in terms of cost and in terms of performance as well. That’s when it started building something that is quite different from the rest of the industry, which was trying to build something autonomous like Tesla. Right. Taking that left and right has to be driven by the machine themselves. So it is a lot safer and the journey is a lot more comfortable. I’m not talking about just Tesla as a company, generally the autonomous industry, it’s trying to really help humanity. It’s never trying to replace anyone. I don’t think Tesla will ever replace the driver or take the driver from the front seat to the backseat. At the same time, it helps people have a safer experience. 

Suresh Mathew
So that’s what we did as well. And when I started off, of course you have to jump off the cliff. That was me alone. The first MVP was built. We got the first customer. That’s when we really started looking for fund. And yeah, of course my co founder John after that. And that was built out of the whole company from there. 

Brett
Nice. And how has that evolved today? How would you describe the platform and some of those benefits that users get from using the platform? 

Suresh Mathew
The most important thing is you will take your operators out of harm’s way. That is one thing that Sara offers. 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. When your application needs to scale up or scale down, if there’s an opportunity to scale down, we will not ask your operators to take that decision or put that decision on them because it’s hard to take the decision. The system will figure out what can be done and will execute on it. 

Brett
Nice. Very cool. And just to give us an idea of what traction and adoption looks like, are there any numbers that you can share I see you have some very impressive logos there on the website. 

Suresh Mathew
Yes, we do have a large enterprises adopting it now. Autonomy was considered risky at one point. Now that’s safer than being automated. So that’s where the market is today. If you look at the rest of the companies, they are already seeing the outcome of being autonomous there. Take a note of platforms there. Being autonomous and autonomous is not cool or new anymore. It is becoming the norm now. 

Brett
And are there any numbers you can share to show that the traction that you’re seeing there? 

Suresh Mathew
Yeah, we have more than 20 customers on our platform using the platform with CDs workloads. 

Brett
Wow. And what would you say was your secret? How do you rise above the noise and capture the attention and earn the trust of 20 enterprise customers? Clay I’m guessing that can’t be easy to do as a startup. 

Suresh Mathew
It is hard. It is hard to do asset startup. And the way we rise is as long as you are not, it is hard. Your vision, your problem statement is always interesting, your solution is always cool. Right. You have to stay away from that cool solution and look at the problem statement. So we always get excited about the problem statement helping customers. So that’s exactly what keeps the company different from the rest of the noise. 

Brett
Got it super interesting. And when I introduced you as autonomous cloud management platform. Is that how you define your market category or how do you think about the market category that you’re in? 

Suresh Mathew
That is exactly the name of thematic market category that we are admissioning. Now, the outcome that we are looking at are efficiency, cost, efficiency, performance and availability. But the category wise it is, yes, autonomous cloud management. 

Brett
And is that a category term that you coined or do others use that as well? 

Suresh Mathew
It was coined by microservice itself. If you look at microservices, which is a common cool term today with microservice, you are supposed to manage it with an autonomous system. You were never supposed to handle a microservice in an automated fashion. So it was created to be managed by an autonomous system. So it was coined ideally by the invention of microservices themselves. Now, are there autonomous systems out there that can do the same job? There are traces of autonomous systems in almost all the systems today. Right. From Kubernetes. 

Brett
Got it. Makes sense. And then how do you describe the competitive landscape then, in general? So if they aren’t using you, who are they typically going to use? Or are they just sticking with the status quo and not using anything? 

Suresh Mathew
They are using a plethora of tools if you’re not using autonomous system. So if you look at APMs, if you look at monitoring systems, if you look at alerting system, all these systems along, people are managing these stocks. And the biggest problem is, since there are all these systems out there that are not autonomous yet, there are still opportunities untapped. Now, these are the opportunities that this autonomous system is now taking. For instance, you could have applications running fine, but may have an opportunity to run a lot faster or a lot cheaper, but you’re not never seeing it because you have thousands of applications and those are the things that we are uncovering. 

Brett
Fascinating. And to take a step back, could you just provide some color on what the life is like right now for these SREs at these big modern companies? What’s their day to day life like? 

Suresh Mathew
Sure. I was at PayPal and I was managing one of the largest open stack deployments in the world. And their life typically is looking for opportunities to save, looking for customer calls or complaints and look for the root cause, fix the root cause and do this root cause analysis and get going. So that’s their day to day tasks. And right now with the current market conditions, there is another task that they are taking on now, which is making a lot more efficient. Now, to make it efficient, you have to find inefficiencies that’s where the work starts. You have to do it on a continuous basis, you have to click buttons. And especially when you were to scale down something that your customers are consuming, you need to be 100% sure that this scale down is not going to impact your customers. Now, when you take that action, you are really relying on all the things that you are seeing and all the things that you have seen in the past. 

Suresh Mathew
And you’re not managing tens of services anymore. You have hundreds of services to manage as an Asre. Now if you look at the whole thing, it has become a risky job now and many a times it becomes boring as well. Because now you know that you can do a lot more interesting things. These are not the best interesting things out there, right? These makes it boring. These are like oil. These are super boring. Because you optimize something and the next release itself, all the optimization that you did just now went waste because the next release is very different from the last one. So that’s what they do, that’s what they continuously do and that’s something that we want autonomous systems to manage. So your SRS can now focus on the higher order tasks. In fact, let the autonomous system step in so your SRS can step up. 

Brett
That’s fascinating. And you mentioned it’s risky there. What does that mean? Can you define what those risks are? 

Suresh Mathew
Sure. Let’s say you have hundred nodes running for an application and you think these 100 nodes are not required. 50 nodes can do the job. Now you have to scale it down from 100 to 50. Few options. When do you scale down? Second, how do you scale down? And if you scale down, will it impact the customer immediately or maybe later? When can it say yes, the job is done and it’s safe? It’s all hard questions and it’s hard to answer them. The answer would be scale down slow, very slow. Increment. Now if you go slow, it’s going to take a long time. If you take one by one, it’s going to take 50 steps. So if you look at the whole thing, if you go safe incremental fashion, it’s going to be a lot of work and it’s not just for one application. That’s why slowly all these things make it risky. 

Suresh Mathew
Because at one point you’ll say, you know what, yeah, let’s not go one by one, let’s go just ten. At that point if there’s a customer impact, then yeah, then comes the production calls and production incidents. Everybody will have to come in, scale back up and make sure that the application is back up. 

Brett
Running makes a lot of sense. And as I’m sure you’re seeing there today in the market in general, obviously there’s a lot of crazy stuff happening, a lot of layoffs, a lot of cost cutting. And obviously there’s some businesses that are being affected in a negative way. But a lot of the companies that I’ve talked to, they’re actually being affected in a positive way, especially when they’re on the optimization and efficiency side. So given where your product and platform is, are you seeing an uptick in customer demand? 

Suresh Mathew
Of course. You know what the biggest difference here? If you are trying any cost initiative or cost optimization initiatives, generally it’s almost a sad event. You are trying to optimize something. There is something bad happening now let’s make it a little more efficient or trim down the waste. It’s almost like a sad event, right? You’re not really after an exciting problem. You have to really run lead. But with autonomous systems it becomes a modernization initiative. The good thing here is you’re not just optimizing for that day, you are now optimized forever. You implement that system and the system is going to run lean forever. So it’s an investment in the right direction. 

Brett
And when a customer starts using the platform, what’s that time to value? Are they able to immediately start seeing that savings and the efficiencies? Or how long does that take? 

Suresh Mathew
Being a machine learning AI system, it needs data, it needs time as far. So we take weekly seasonality is one of our key pillars. So we would need two weeks to really learn your weekly seasonality. After two weeks you will see the first set of recommendations. We are an autonomous system. At the same time, we don’t let you run autonomous in the first two weeks. We won’t even if you want to run it autonomous, we won’t let you run autonomous. The first two weeks is for the system to learn and recommend certain things. Those are the things that your teams will evaluate. And once they start liking it. You can turn on autonomy like a crawl walk run in certain systems. You can turn it 100% autonomous. In certain systems, maybe slower. But now from that point onward, the system will turn to being an autonomous system. 

Brett
Fascinating. And I see on the site there that you have a slack community. What does community mean for you? And how important has community been to your success so far? And how important do you think community will be going forward? 

Suresh Mathew
Community plays a key role in our success. Again, we are building this community. We have started building this community. It’s still in this early phase. But the good thing about this community is everybody is trying to build the system or make this safer. So the best thing here is all the feedback that we get from the community, we take it seriously. We work on all those with 100% transparency. Community knows what we are building, when we are building, and when it’s being released. So we take it very seriously and we are actively meeting that community. 

Brett
And last couple of questions here for you. I’m sure you’ve experienced some challenges as you’ve brought this to market. If you had to pick one challenge that you faced and then overcame, what would that challenge be and how’d you overcome it? 

Suresh Mathew
If I can change the question a little bit from being a challenge to something that was kind of a problem for an engineer, we generally fall in love with the solution. That is what I did as well. I like autonomous systems. I like how it works. I like how it helps people. The moment I changed from that to really started loving the problem statement here, then things changed. So that was really the biggest challenge for me as an engineer. I am an engineer at heart. So one thing that I had to change myself was did not fall in love with your solution, fall in love with the problem and then solve it. And now how did I overcome that? Once you fall in love with the problem, you know the problem fail. You know, how hard or how important is it to solve? And once you start solving it’s all awesome. 

Brett
And how difficult was that for you to make that shift from being an engineer to being a CEO? What were some of those difficulties that you encountered along the way? 

Suresh Mathew
Yeah, being a CEO, you have to understand your understand and keep your customers as number one. Right. So they are the ones who know what you should build. You have to really talk to them. You have to make sure that your customers are happy. You need to know what they want even before they tell you. So you have to be that close to the customer, which means you have to be okay taking some of these negative or like, I wouldn’t call it negative feedback, but constructive feedback, you have to be open to probably stopping some of this feature development. You have to start being open to some new features coming up. So having that open conversation, being very close to your customer, finding those customers are probably the most important thing for you. Investors are priorities. That’s paramount for any CEO. The most important thing is your customers and making sure that you understand them well. 

Brett
I love it. Last question here for you. Let’s zoom out into the future. So three years from today, what does the company look like? 

Suresh Mathew
It will be the autonomous company for everything that is on Cloud. That’s what I see the company as. So we started with Serverless. We are now into ECS. We are on Kubernetes. We started being on storage. Now from there, we are going to really work on almost all the cloud native platforms. 

Brett
Amazing. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today’s interview. But before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build and execute, here, where’s the best place for them to go? 

Suresh Mathew
sedai.io amazing. 

Brett
Well, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story and talking about your vision. This is all super exciting and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision and hopefully coming back in a couple of years and share all the amazing updates and progress. 

Suresh Mathew
Thank you very much, Brett, for the opportunity. I’m super glad that I could spend some time with you. 

Brett
It was a blast. Keep in touch.