"The Hidden Advantage of Building During Crisis: How Sedai's Founder Transformed Engineering Love into Customer Obsession"

Sometimes the worst moments to start a company turn out to be the best. When Suresh Mathew left his 13-year tenure at PayPal/eBay in 2019 to found Sedai, an autonomous cloud management platform, he couldn't have predicted a global pandemic was around the corner. But that timing proved surprisingly advantageous.

"In fact, that was the right time and in fact, it was a favorable time to start a company," Suresh shared in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. "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."

From Engineering Solution to Market Problem

Like many technical founders, Suresh initially approached building his company from an engineer's perspective. His experience at PayPal had shown him the critical need for better cloud workload management, but his early focus was primarily on the technical solution rather than the market problem.

"I like autonomous systems. I like how it works. I like how it helps people," he admitted. "The moment I changed from that to really started loving the problem statement here, then things changed." This pivot from solution-first to problem-first thinking marked a crucial evolution in Sedai's journey.

The Real-World Problem

The challenge Sedai addresses is deeply rooted in the daily struggles of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). As Suresh explains from his PayPal experience: "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."

But the role has become increasingly complex and risky. "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."

Making the Leap

The decision to leave PayPal wasn't taken lightly. "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." This leap of faith was grounded in his deep understanding of the problem from his PayPal days, where he had witnessed firsthand the challenges of managing large-scale cloud infrastructure.

The Engineering to CEO Transformation

Perhaps the most significant evolution in Suresh's journey was his transformation from engineer to CEO. "Being a CEO, you have to understand your understand and keep your customers as number one," he 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 customer-first mindset led to a crucial insight about their market position. While cost optimization is typically viewed as a reactive, often negative initiative, Suresh reframed it as a modernization opportunity. "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 Trust Through Controlled Autonomy

Sedai's go-to-market strategy reflects a deep understanding of enterprise buyers' concerns about autonomous systems. Rather than pushing for immediate full autonomy, they implemented a measured approach. "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."

This careful balance between automation and control has helped Sedai secure over 20 enterprise customers, with their platform managing critical cloud workloads.

Looking Ahead

Suresh's vision extends far beyond current offerings. "It will be the autonomous company for everything that is on Cloud," he stated. Starting with serverless and expanding to ECS, Kubernetes, and storage, Sedai aims to become the comprehensive solution for cloud native platforms.

The journey from PayPal engineer to CEO, from solution-focused to problem-obsessed, offers valuable lessons for technical founders navigating their own transitions. Sometimes, the most challenging circumstances can forge the strongest companies, especially when coupled with the humility to learn and evolve along the way.