In Conversation with Arish Ali: A Media Entrepreneur’s Swell Journey
Arish Ali is the CEO and co-founder of Swell, an interactive audio platform. This article covers his path from India to Silicon Valley, takeaways from his previous venture, Skava, and his mission to innovate the red-hot audio landscape.
To hear Arish’s full interview with Zarir, download the Swell app and click here
Early Journey: Inspiration from Unexpected Places
Arish’s love affair with technology began in the 7th grade when he first got his hands on an issue of Target magazine, which typically featured articles and cartoons targeting middle-schoolers. To keep pace with the late 1980s, Target ran a series of articles teaching beginners the basics of computer programming. Arish, who had never clapped eyes on a computer in the small Indian town he grew up in, was hooked by the idea of creating with code and instinctively taught himself the fundamentals. His love for software led him to graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, before moving to the United States to complete his Master’s degree from UMass Amherst. Ten years after Arish was introduced to Target, life came full circle. He landed his dream job as a software engineer at Microsoft, the holy grail of the software revolution at the time.
Bitten by the Entrepreneurial Bug
Arish learnt the ropes at Microsoft, where he met Sudha Varadarajan, his future wife and partner-in-crime in startups. Together, the couple moved from Redmond to San Francisco to join their first startup, Brience. The timing couldn’t have been worse — their leap of faith took place in early 2000. Although Brience eventually succumbed to the fallout from the dot-com crash, Arish and Sudha spent a few years working in the trenches with some of the smartest people in their fields. Brience alumni have gone on to found some of the most prominent companies of the last decade including ride-hailing venture Careem (acquired by Uber), the network security company Perfigo (acquired by Cisco) and many more. Another reputed name in this hallowed club is Skava, the mobile e-commerce company the husband-wife duo seeded in 2002.
The Art of the Pivot
‘Pivoting’ may have become a buzzword in consulting circles but it remains one of the most important parts of a startup’s journey. Skava, as Arish explains, is a tale of three pivots. The company was founded as a platform for multi-player mobile games. Given that this was well before the rise of iOS and Android, there was not much demand for single-player games and apps, let alone the grand designs Skava envisioned. Arish quickly realised they were ahead of their time. Instead of selling their platform to other gaming developers as intended, they used it to build their own games which were sold through rudimentary app stores of the day (hosted by telecom carriers like Verizon, AT&T and others). This provided the company much-needed revenue to remain bootstrapped and continue operations till the explosion of Apple and Andoid.
With the mobile era dawning, Skava returned to its platform roots and the company re-aligned as an m-commerce application, providing a best-in-class shopping experience to consumers in the nascent age of e-commerce. After successfully filling this market void, Skava made its final pivot when it transformed once again from a leader in mobile commerce to an all-encompassing microservices platform provider for e-commerce. Traditional e-commerce players faced several problems and were not able to adapt to mobile fast enough. Arish spotted this chance and the opportune decision to adapt into a cloud-based microservices provider paid handsome dividends. Skava was acquired by IT giant Infosys for $120 million in 2015.
According to Arish, the ability to successfully pivot is one of the most under-appreciated skills in an entrepreneur’s arsenal. Timing the pivot is dictated by market forces. Entrepreneurs should have a laser-focus on the product-market fit of their offerings. Most successful technology behemoths today had different origins (think Netflix and Amazon). And perhaps more ominously, as Arish muses, how many startups have come tantalizingly close to success, only to fall short because of an inability to pivot?
Swell: Is Audio the new Video?
After working for 4 years with Infosys to help integrate Skava into its parent organization, Arish felt the need to hit refresh and start from scratch again. Only, this time he set his sights on the burgeoning audio industry. Although audio has been around in varied forms for the better part of the last decade, it is only in the last year that it has really picked up traction as a field of its own. Spotify, arguably the market leader in this space, recently re-classified itself from a ‘music’ to an ‘audio’ company (and if that wasn’t tangible signalling, the $100 million shelled out to acquire Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast definitely was). Drop-in audio platform Clubhouse’s jaw-dropping valuation is again testament to the industry’s meteoric rise.
Swell is a challenger to this crowded space, but one that is uniquely positioned to dominate its own niche. Swell focuses on ‘asynchronous audio’ — users can communicate interactively but are not limited to conversations at specific points of time. Instead, they can navigate conflicting schedules to interact at their own convenience.
Swell allows users to host public ‘Swellcasts’, broad public discussions on a range of topics. Notable Swellcasters include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and actor Stephen Fry, amonga legion of politicians, sportspersons and other A-listers in their fields. Swell can also be used to stay in touch with friends and family on private groups, an audio alternative to the tedious Whatsapp groups many have grown weary of. Besides, the application allows users to share pictures with an accompanying audio commentary (useful when an Instagram caption doesn’t do the image justice). Probably the most laudable application of Swell is that it facilitates interviews (including mine with Arish) allowing interviewees to reply at their convenience, making for a more engaging, unhurried discussion.
In a world hyper-focused on real-time delivery, Swell offers users a respite, allowing conversations to be built on ‘stolen moments of time’, as Arish puts it.
Business Model of the Future
Arish believes that advertising is the biggest culprit of what is wrong with traditional social media platforms. Ads can create the wrong incentives. The purpose of Swell is to foster authentic conversations; ads can be intrusive in an audio experience. Swell, which will begin monetizing later this year, follows a two-pronged revenue strategy. It will allow creators on the platform to monetize their content through the freemium model, charging for premium content which is gated through a subscription fee for consumers. On the other hand, Swell will also introduce SaaS-based premium features for organizations and professionals, for a fee.
Transitioning from B2B to B2C
For Arish, transitioning from e-commerce to media was not a problem. The bigger challenge came from shifting gears from an enterprise-focused company to a consumer-facing startup. There were several things to be learnt (and unlearnt) to build two structurally different organizations. Everything from sales and marketing to customer acquisition required hiring teams with different skillsets. For an enterprise product, an entrepreneur needs to wear the shoes of the customer, understand specific client requirements and individual needs, then customize products and workflows accordingly. For a consumer product, the process is easier to visualize, as the entrepreneur and wider team are all consumers of the product. This results in more creative brainstorming and cross-functional collaboration and, according to Arish, increases the fun in execution. For example, test engineers are users themselves, constantly selling the product both internally and externally. Conversely, sales representatives often uncover bugs and can suggest improvements themselves after repeated use of the product. This alignment leads to a thriving ecosystem, especially in the initial stages of a venture.
Qualities that Entrepreneurs look for in Potential Hires
Arish has a controversial hiring philosophy — he looks for people who will not listen to him. Probed further, he reveals that he wants people that will not listen to him blindly. Startups need independent thinkers who courageously make decisions because they firmly believe it is the right course of action, not because the instruction comes from a higher-up. Another vital quality Arish looks for is humility. A startup is a ‘collection of mistakes’. The ability to learn from these mistakes and constantly adapt is what makes or breaks an early venture. Technical skills of candidates like coding and marketing are easy to test. Shared values and an aligned mission are more important and far harder to gauge. As the famous Silicon Valley (where Swell is headquartered) saying goes — ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. Arish signs off in approval.
