Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4FUJ...

00:00 Intro
01:50 From a Bedroom, to a Basement
05:53 Hiring in 2005: a Big Challenge
10:26 Building Culture, Organically
11:10 Running a Global Company in India
14:16 Being Profitable and Bootstrapped
16:16 Three Near-Death Experiences
22:40 Milestones and the Path Ahead

Pallav Nadhani founded FusionCharts at the age of 17 in an effort to earn himself some extra pocket money. He succeeded in doing so, and now, 17 years later, he has more pocket money than he knows what to do with. The data visualization company has over 28,000 customers as of December of 2019, some of which include Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe, Walmart, NASA, and many, many more. In this video, Pallav explains how he built FusionCharts from his bedroom and turned it into a multi-million dollar company over the course of the last 17 years.

From a Bedroom, to a Basement: Pallav Nadhani was able to run FusionCharts for three years on his own before he realized that he needed help. He onboarded his first employee, a friend of his cousins, and together they worked out of Pallav's bedroom for about a year and a half. By the end of this period, they were working with over 1,000 customers, and couldn't handle to workload on their own anymore. They shifted into a basement office and started hiring more employees.

Hiring in 2005: a Big Challenge: Hiring wasn't a very easy thing to do for a startup in Calcutta in 2005. India's startup ecosystem was still in its infancy, and the startup ecosystem in Calcutta was nonexistent. Employees were hesitant to join the startup despite the fact that they were already working with a number of Fortune 500 companies. However, with time and experience, Pallav was able to assemble of solid team of engineers.

Building Culture, Organically: Even as FusionCharts was scaling up and the startup was onboarding more and more employees, Pallav really didn't know anything about building strong culture. Instead, he simply focused on instilling values like pride in the company, a strong work ethic, and the desire to learn and grow on the job. As a result of these values, FusionCharts was able to establish a strong culture organically.

Running a Global Company in India: Less than 1% of FusionCharts' customers are Indian. This is something that Pallav takes pride in, because going global from India was a pretty big challenge when FusionCharts was first starting out. In spite of this, FusionCharts has been able to build quality products that are good enough not only for India, but also for the world. What is more, they have done so as a bootstrapped, profitable company from day 1.

Being Profitable and Bootstrapped: Because FusionCharts has always been profitable and bootstrapped, they have very rarely struggled with money problems. In fact, the biggest money they have faced is a surplus of funds. The challenge for them has been to figure out what to do with these funds. Part of the reason that they are able to be profitable and bootstrapped is that FusionCharts is a very lean company: they have 68 employees serving 28,000 customers!

Three Near-Death Experiences: Even though cash flow has never been a problem for FusionCharts, the startup has faced from big challenges. In 2007, back when the company was still quite young, another company copied FusionCharts' source code and released a very similar product. Luckily, FusionCharts had already been working on an updated version of their product, and made their previous version totally open-source, resulting in many customers testing out the freemium version and then deciding to switch over to their paid version. Another near-death experience for the company came in the form of Steve Jobs announcing that iPhone would not be compatible with Flash, resulting in FusionCharts being forced to reinvent their product so that they were compatible with iPhones. Lastly, between 2014 and 2015, FusionCharts' engineering team was wiped out by an influx in VC funding in India, which resulted in their employees jumping ship because other companies were able to offer more competitive salaries than FusionCharts, which was a bootstrapped, profitable, lean operation. However, Pallav was able to turn things around by investing in young, highly trainable employees.

Milestones and the Path Ahead: Pallav is proud of the fact that employees take ownership of their role at FusionCharts, and that they become brand ambassadors for the company after they leave to go work elsewhere. Besides this, FusionCharts has birthed a couple of other, separate ventures that have been performing well.

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