CloudJiffy

ESADE Business School

Industry: Cloud Technology – Platform-as-a-Service

Founding Student Name(s): Ishan Talathi, ESADE MBA 2022

Brief Description of Solution: CloudJiffy simplifies App Deployment on the cloud using Platform-as-a-Service containers, and disrupts expensive Pay-As-You-Go cloud with innovative consumption-based pricing. CloudJiffy reduces DevOps time by 60% and reduces Cloud costs by 80% compared to Hyperscale clouds.

CloudJiffy allows customers to deploy new highly-available apps and updates in minutes, compared to multiple days of setup and testing on Hyperscale cloud.

Funding Dollars: $1M Pre-seed

What led you to launch this venture? I have offered Cloud services to over 20,000 customers for the past 15 years. During this experience, I realized that small and medium businesses struggle with right sizing and application deployment on cloud and end up with high running costs, which can make or break their business.

When I launched CloudJiffy, we tackled deployment, ongoing security and maintenance, and running costs by moving from virtual machines to containers, and from pay-as-you-go plans to consumption-based pricing.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture? Within 1 year, we launched Availability Regions in the 3 major continents, grew to 4,000+ paying customers and became operationally profitable.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? I am an engineer with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering. I lacked a formal business education when I launched my first two startups. I learnt through trying different things and failing at most of them. The startups ended up being profitable but not high growth.

The ESADE MBA has helped me become a well-rounded entrepreneur. While I was focused more on technology and operations in the past, after the MBA I became better at the other aspects of founding and running a startup. The MBA also gave me a much wider network allowing me to grow the startup worldwide instead of focusing on my comfort zone in India.

During the MBA, I worked with two high-growth funded startups which further improved my skills and my network in Spain and Germany.

What founder or entrepreneur inspired you to start your own entrepreneurial journey? How did he or she prove motivational to you? Steve Jobs inspired me in my entrepreneurial journey. I was motivated by his laser-like focus, simplicity, and his intense belief in building products that wow customers.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? The ESADE MBA is the best Entrepreneurial MBA in Europe. The entire program was super valuable for growing my startup. From getting basics right in Term 1 (Strategy & Finance), to building and launching successful ventures with Entrepreneurship in Term 2, it felt as if the program was tailor-made for launching and growing startups. Term 3 helped polish what I had learned and the eWorks Startup Treks (with Davide Rovera and team), which expanded my network with visits to startups, venture studios and startup accelerators in Barcelona and Berlin.

Overall, the Global Sales Strategies elective delivered by Professor Ken Morse was the most impactful class for me – the founder and CEO is the first & the main salesperson in a startup!

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? Professor Jan Brinckmann helped lay the foundations for ideating, validating, and running my startup. His wealth of knowledge and connections in the startup world of Europe and USA will be immensely helpful in the coming years.

Professor Kenneth Morse’s legendary Global Sales Strategies course showed me exactly where I had made mistakes in the past, and how to practically go about building a global sales machine for my business.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? India has a large local startup ecosystem, with my city, Pune, being an IT hub has a number of potential users and clients.  We were able to identify our customers early on being a part of local startup communities such as Pushstart and Nasscomm. It helped us validate the product with actual users, ensure there was an actual need for it and that users were willing to pay for a service which was not run by one of the hyper-cloud providers.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? The long-term goal is to be available across the world, closest to where our customers live, and have products which help our customers end-to-end with regards to their cloud infrastructure, software, and solutions requirements. We wish to be the first global Indian cloud technology company listed on NYSE in the next 5 years.

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