Adhithi Ravichandran

So I grew up in India and my dad had a small business. He was buying and selling cleaning products to hospitals and local companies. And he's a very ambitious person, but of course he didn't scale up to a large company or anything. It was just two people, my mom and dad.

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and he would always go meet these customers, and basically it was more for the flexibility, and he loved being an entrepreneur, so I just kind of grew up watching that, and I knew that was a possibility, and I knew that he didn't have a boss, but he had many bosses. He was always after all these customers and all of that. So I guess that's where I draw my inspiration from.

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Yeah, so I did computer science undergrad in India, actually. And then I came for my master's to KU. And right after that, it was a good economy. It was 2012. So I got a job right out of college, moved to Kansas City, went to a big corporation. So yeah, that's kind of how my journey began.

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Uh-huh.

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I did do that for a while, but now I'm more into the web apps as well. So I was doing React Native for a long time. Once in a while, I do get customers who do React Native. So I do both. Gotcha. Yeah, React and React Native.

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You have to go scan our code to find out.

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Yeah.

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You know, we try not to work together, honestly, on projects. Yeah. Why is that? We have similar personalities, and we kind of take lead a lot. Right, two leaders. It could be conflicting. So we try to have our own customers, have our own clients. Once in a while, we would maybe review our code or something like that.

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We talk about problems in our day-to-day work, but I don't think I've ever worked with him. Yeah, I work with them in conference talks and stuff. We would sometimes give a workshop together, but actual coding and architecture work, we don't work together.

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I just think that's too much. Like we see each other too much. That's too much. Yeah. We need that space. Yeah.

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Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, I agree with you. So what happened was I started out first while he was having a full-time job.

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And I didn't have any ideas of scaling or anything like that. I just wanted out and wanted to be an entrepreneur. But I didn't know what that really meant. And at that time, my goal was mostly I want to spend more time with my baby. And I want to earn what I was earning in my full time. And that was my goal. I didn't have a large-scale goal. So I was like, I need flexibility.

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I want to spend time with the baby. And I want to make as much as I made in my full-time job. So I wasn't looking to... So I just needed a company. That was the goal. So that's how it started. And then when Avi started, it was a year later. And he had... He probably had a different mindset. So by then I was doing React Native apps. So we weren't sure if we needed different brands or how we went.

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So he started his own. But technically we're just two people. So we need to merge together. Our future now, I think we have more clarity now over the years. And we see our son growing up. So we had a second baby. So maybe once he goes to daycare and has a more stable routine, I think we want to scale. And that's when we want to merge. We have no reason to have two different companies.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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Yeah, we don't even actually, like, now that you guys are talking about it, we haven't even talked about it or thought about it that way. Oh, well, we're helping out then. We just know we're doing basically the same thing in different names. That's it. That's okay. And there are times, you know, when I might be fully booked or he's fully booked.

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If customers come over, we just kind of, like, send them to the other person. So it's not like... Oh, that's nice. We don't really view it as two different businesses.

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Yeah, that's right.

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Yeah. But you got to be careful because, you know, the sword cuts both ways. He sent people my way, too. Right. So he gets his referral fee, I guess.

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Yeah.

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Yeah. And he's been super supportive. A lot of the risks I was able to take was also because he was in a stable full-time job with health insurance and everything. So I was like, all right, I'm going part-time now that we have the baby. And then I was like, now I'm going to go to a startup. Or, you know, I was able to do all of that stuff because I knew I had like a support system.

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And then once I got the stability in that business, he was able to take a risk too and start.

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I think personally, ever since I got my kid, my first kid, I kind of found more purpose in life and I wanted to do something out of the box and kind of be a role model to her as well. So I just don't want to do a nine to five for 30 years and then realize that I missed out on something. So I wanted to try out being an entrepreneur and see how that journey goes.

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I think the flexibility was my first motivator. With the time as a new mom, that was my primary goal. But eventually, obviously, it's the money, the flexibility, the happiness. To be able to see success and failure quickly and then iterate upon that and have control. I just don't want a boss controlling my career. I want to control my career on my own.

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Yeah, I'm sort of in that space right now too, yeah.

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Because right now you're kind of emulating that. I do, because I want to. I think right now we're kind of capped out at a certain extent, and we don't have to be that way. The goal is, I think in a year or so, we're going to have to try to scale by bringing in people who, right now the brand, unfortunately, is just me and him.

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So we need to build that trust with our customers and be able to train people. So it might be a journey, so we don't know what that is or what it looks like, so we'd have to train people and bring them to the level where like, hey, these are the software engineers we trust. slowly start scaling that way.

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So it might take some time and money to train these people who we trust and be like, hey, they're part of our brand as well. I definitely see myself scaling for sure.