From PayPal Engineer to CEO: Inside Sedai’s Evolution from Technical Solution to Market Problem

Every technical founder faces a moment when they realize building a great product isn’t enough. For Suresh Mathew, that moment came after leaving his 13-year career at PayPal to build Sedai. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he shared how he evolved from an engineer in love with autonomous systems to a CEO obsessed with solving market problems.

The Engineering Mindset Trap

“I like autonomous systems. I like how it works. I like how it helps people,” Suresh candidly admitted. This engineer’s love for the solution initially overshadowed a deeper understanding of the market problem. “The moment I changed from that to really started loving the problem statement here, then things changed.”

The Leap of Faith

Leaving PayPal wasn’t a decision taken lightly. “You almost jump off the cliff, assuming there will be water by the time you land,” Suresh explained. “That’s always the assumption any founder would take. 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.”

Understanding the Real Problem

The transformation began with deeply understanding the daily challenges of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). “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,” Suresh shared, drawing from his PayPal experience.

But the problem went deeper. “You’re not managing tens of services anymore. You have hundreds of services to manage as an SRE,” he explained. “Now if you look at the whole thing, it has become a risky job now and many a times it becomes boring as well.”

The CEO Mindset Shift

The transition from engineer to CEO required fundamental changes in thinking and priorities. “Being a CEO, you have to understand your understand and keep your customers as number one,” Suresh emphasized. “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.”

This meant being open to feedback that might challenge his engineering assumptions. “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.”

Reframing the Value Proposition

Once Suresh started focusing on the problem rather than the solution, he discovered a powerful way to position Sedai’s offering. Instead of emphasizing the technical capabilities of autonomous systems, he focused on the business transformation they enable. “With autonomous systems it becomes a modernization initiative,” he explained. “The good thing here is you’re not just optimizing for that day, you are now optimized forever.”

Building Through Community

The shift from engineering to CEO mindset also meant understanding the importance of community. “Community plays a key role in our success,” Suresh noted. “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.”

Results of the Transformation

This evolution in thinking has led to significant market traction. With over 20 enterprise customers, Sedai has proven that autonomous systems can move from “risky” to essential. As Suresh observed, “Autonomy was considered risky at one point. Now that’s safer than being automated. So that’s where the market is today.”

For technical founders making the transition to CEO, Suresh’s journey offers valuable lessons. Success comes not from falling in love with your solution, but from deeply understanding and obsessing over the problem you’re solving. It requires moving beyond the comfort zone of technical excellence to embrace the messier world of customer needs, market dynamics, and business strategy.

The hardest part isn’t building the product—it’s transforming yourself from an engineer who can solve technical problems into a CEO who can build a lasting company. Sometimes, the biggest technical challenge isn’t in the code—it’s in changing how you think about the problem itself.