In a recent interview Ravi Bulusu, CTO of the TheLoops, outlined the story behind the company and how he sees it moving forward in the next twelve months or so. Here are some of his thoughts…
Why Startups?
I have been involved in start-ups for a long time. Over the last 25 years I’ve done six. This is fundamentally because it gives me the freedom to express myself in terms of technical innovation and product creation. Being a CTO means that decision making is a lot more dependent on me, rather than having five people involved in the process. People that join start-ups have a different mindset, they want to prove something. I like taking charge from a technical leadership perspective. In large companies the decision-making process is slow, it’s not what I’m about.
Ever since I came out of college, I was always interested in building things and it doesn’t necessarily have to be technology – it could be a club or a cricket team for example. But, at the end of the day, I’ve always wanted to build and create the coolest products. In many companies I’ve been both VP Engineering and CTO, and you can do both these roles. But, at some point you have to make a choice, in my last four companies I’ve been both. At TheLoops my sole focus is on being CTO.
Why TheLoops?
TheLoops has been in the making for a few years. My Co-founder, Somya Kapoor, and I were talking to various IT departments and customers, and it soon became apparent that customer satisfaction was a huge priority. You always want to retain business.
In addition, trends in the market were changing. Big monolith products never change, so support departments didn’t need to be too close to the product. However, now products are introducing new features every two weeks, support has to change its role and become closer to the product to understand what the product is doing.
Today, support and product need to align far more closely – they cannot be disjointed. This is where TheLoops comes in. We connect the two. We have spoken to a lot of customers and our solution resonates. Therefore, we knew we were in the right space at the right time.
I’ve created six products before, so I wasn’t worried about that aspect of the job. Then Covid happened. We were trying to raise money at the time but because of the virus that didn’t happen. However, you have to remain positive so we hunkered down and became completely focussed on developing the product and making it even more innovative. We even started bringing customers onboard. So, when Dell came back to us, we were in a really solid position.
What is TheLoops Mission?
The mission for us has always been very clear, even when we started the company. We had a roadmap and we have kept to it. Our solution was always going to be a bridge between support and product. We are determined to make support proactive and preventive. And if it isn’t at the moment, you should have a feedback loop that learns, and eventually makes support preventive. This is the ethos of our company, and we remain on path.
Currently, we are helping the agents before we take the next step and help the end customer, as agents are the people who have all the knowledge. The next step of the journey using the learning from the agent is to help the customer rectify problems within the product.
I think the digitalization of enterprises is just starting. Companies have digitalized their data, but they haven’t digitalized their experiences, just because it’s harder. As enterprises accept the value of doing this, products will become available that help them to digitalize these experiences, and I know TheLoops will be heavily involved in this process.
