[00:00:00 – 00:00:08] Nitin Bajaj

Everyone. Welcome to the industry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me today is Satish Polisetti. Satish, welcome on the show.

[00:00:09 – 00:00:12] Satish Polisetti

Hey, Nitin. Looking forward to the conversation. Nice being here.

[00:00:13 – 00:00:16] Nitin Bajaj

Likewise. Now let’s start with who is Satish.

[00:00:17 – 00:00:36] Satish Polisetti

Yeah. I think I describe myself probably as a student, somebody who’s always curious to learn and looking at new things always. In addition to that, a father for 2 kids, a husband, and, yeah, I mean, a student at heart.

[00:00:37 – 00:00:47] Nitin Bajaj

I love that. I love the, you know, letting curiosity drive where you’re headed next. So and we’ll talk a lot about that, in the next few minutes.

[00:00:47 – 00:00:48] Satish Polisetti

So Yeah.

[00:00:48 – 00:01:16] Nitin Bajaj

I’m very curious, and this is the first time you’re doing this. Very curious to learn about your startup, Polymorph, which had a successful exit with, no less than Walmart. So tell us why you started Polymorph. What was it? And then since the acquisition a few years ago, what has it transpired to become and what kind of impact have you been able to create through it?

[00:01:16 – 00:03:19] Satish Polisetti

Yeah. Surely, like many of us in the audience, probably I’m a immigrant and brought up in India. And I came to US to do my master’s in UC Berkeley. After my undergrad in, I came to UC Berkeley to do my master’s. And as a part of the master’s program, we were solving this was the time when both data was just kicking off. Right? 2010 ish. 2007 is when iPhone came in. So 2010, 11, the first app store launched and a lot of apps were being built. And the big question that was being asked was how does human verification work on devices? So if you know these olden days, they used to be these quickly little characters called CAPTCHAs, which used to be shown to a user and say and and I’ll, hey. How do you solve this CAPTCHA? You said you had to type all these things. So they were okay for a desktop, but actually doing a mobile device is extremely hard. The mobile device is meant for swiping and clicking and not typing. So, essentially, that is when we started looking at how can a user interaction be with the caption on a mobile device. So we build this interesting image based cap. We filed a patent for it. It’s now referenced in a Google patent and things like that. But, yeah, eventually, we took that school project or a colleague or, like, a university project and converted it to a company. Had initial bumps in terms of, like, product market fit and all of those funny things, which people have from minus 1 to 0 and 0 to 1. And then, we came into a very interesting situation where a chocolate company, Mars, they came and said, hey. We wanna show some unique experience. I have been focused on solving this capture for 10 seconds. That’s an amazing, eyeball time for me. So can I build some unique ad experience? Out of that is what Polymer was really born, where we were trying to monetize a customized experience and we did not have any off the shelf software to, essentially make that happen. And that is when Polymorph, kinda like, was born to essentially make many other developers like myself super easy for them to monetize their, eyeballs and applications and games and stuff.

[00:03:20 – 00:03:33] Nitin Bajaj

That’s very cool. So walk us through maybe the one minute version of the acquisition and and what maybe was the the conversation if we should exit, should not exit.

[00:03:33 – 00:04:35] Satish Polisetti

Yeah. That’s the fun part of the journey. Right? We basically did our seed round financing, some extreme came on board. We had some very good advisers. We did a a round as well. And then we were coming close to our series b, I would say. That is when we were having the conversation on how much capital would it essentially take for us to get to the next level versus the other way around and stuff. So we essentially then said we should start with all the large companies. They’re we are a natural fit in terms of a business development opportunity. That is when we made a gigantic list of companies that we should potentially be working with. And then out of those conversations, couple of them expressed interest to take it to a more strategic level. And then we said, okay. We’ll conduct, like, a process, and then we went through that entire process to say, okay. Who else is interested? And we went through the acquisition. It took almost, like, I would say, 6 months from the first initial intent of interest to come through. But but, anyway, that’s how we approach it more from a BD angle. And then from there, it fall into an acquisition opportunity.

[00:04:36 – 00:04:43] Nitin Bajaj

That’s relatively very quick, I would think. So walk us through the timeline. So you launched both in 2010, 2011?

[00:04:44 – 00:05:27] Satish Polisetti

So we launched in, yeah, 2012 ish, I would say. The early versions of it is in 2012 and 13. So did a c round in 2013. A was in 2016 time frame, and then the exit was 2019. So overall, I would say for about a 6 to 7 year journey from either the series a were, like, rightfully timed 2 to 3 years time frame and stuff like that. And then the acquisition part in itself yeah. The 6 month was good, but I would say the intent to get a signal also was something that we were planting the seeds. So Walmart, I would say, 12 months before we started having conversations with the large company so that you’re planting the seed. And then, once the intent came, it was, reasonably okay to execute from them. Yeah.

[00:05:28 – 00:05:37] Nitin Bajaj

That’s fascinating. Now the acquisition happened and that I think in and of itself could be an entire episode. So we’ll park that.

[00:05:37 – 00:05:38] Satish Polisetti

Yeah.

[00:05:38 – 00:05:43] Nitin Bajaj

But I’m curious to know once you became part of Walmart, what has that journey been for Polymorph? Right? So you went in and you were working with a certain number of clients, but then Walmart comes in. How did that transform the company, the business, and the technology that came?

[00:06:00 – 00:07:51] Satish Polisetti

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Great question. I think Walmart, Nitin, in my opinion, is not very well understood by a lot of people in the valley. Obviously, like Walmart is a gigantic organization. You watch number 1 in terms of revenue. They have 5,000 different stores across the US and many around the world and stuff. But more even more fundamental is I think Walmart is a very down to earth, humble, good organization, very at the top in Walmart. And, primarily, they’ve been growing with lot of acquisitions going way back to jet.com and many other brands after that. And so Walmart we joined a sub team inside Walmart called Walmart Media Group, which later now is known as Walmart Connect. But this is the team which basically did the acquisition of the company. And yeah. And then and the company was very humble and nice. They gave us a period where we were able to support other clients because, it’s important that our software was the top three priorities of the senior. We have directly monetization software. It’s a revenue software. So any disturbance that we basically are creating, the our client CEO, job is on the line. Right? So so it was very important, for for Walmart to understand that as well. So we had a grace period of almost, I would say, 9 to 12 months where all the clients slowed were given notice, seen through so that none of that is getting disturbed. And the ones that has happened, in parallel, we ensured that all the integration into the core Walmart systems was happening as well. So that way, we ensured that we’re not burning the bridges with our past clients and also ensuring that we were accelerating our integration into the Walmart Satish and stuff. But, yeah, if anybody out there, I would con recommend them to look at Walmart. It’s a company which has maybe 20 inside it, ranging from health care, advertising, energy, finance, all of it. Yeah.

[00:07:51 – 00:07:58] Nitin Bajaj

Yeah. It’s a fascinating company, and I’ve had the fortune to know a few people that have been instrumental in a lot of the parts of, what Walmart is today. Yeah. And also, I would imagine the conversations that you had with your existing clients, very delicate, very nuanced. That’s an amazing experience and exposure to have. So really happy.

[00:08:14 – 00:08:43] Satish Polisetti

Totally. Yeah. We had a very some parts were White Glove. We were very engaged with them. We were probably the first early companies to adopt the Slack channels back then, so we would give a lot of customer success support. So for a company which was doing 25 k TV all the way to a $1,000,000 in TV. So we would really be, yeah. So so, yeah, it was an important, way to I mean, again, world is small. Everything comes back. Karma is so ensure you’re not deep burning the bridges with anybody. Right? I mean yeah.

[00:08:43 – 00:08:59] Nitin Bajaj

I’m curious to ask you about the size and scheme. When you got into discussions with Walmart to say a couple years down the line when you were fully integrated, if you remember the numbers or if you can just give us, maybe percentages.

[00:09:00 – 00:10:30] Satish Polisetti

Yeah. It is almost for me, it was like going from 1 startup to another startup in a gig because, yes, we were doing a pretty decent size of revenue. We were doing, like, close to 25 to $30,000,000 in revenue when we were here on this site. When we went there, the existing revenue was almost 10x of that. But Satish, in in the lens of a Walmart, that’s probably, like, a chump change and stuff like that. So we barely, I think, about 50 to 60 people when we joined that entity. So the engineering team was small. The business team was small. Everything was and, the the core product that we essentially integrated and deployed and stuff became foundational to some important product lines at Walmart. And we were fortunate to basically see that about, like, double, triple by the time we essentially started going into other parts of Walmart. I spent about 2, two and a half years at Walmart Connect, helping either integrate the technology or pick up some other parts of the advertising products that are being built at Walmart. And then the tag end, the other 2 years I spent in supply chain and other parts of Walmart. But, yeah, extremely amazing to see the growth. And sometimes it makes you feel that if a large elephant moves, is drum roll, we will scratch our heads to crack a contract for $1,000,000. And here, you are, like, basically getting touring requests from companies. Yeah. Big brands. I take my money. Take my. Yeah. It was good to see that market pull for a product that was there and also a company like Walmart.

[00:10:31 – 00:10:32] Nitin Bajaj

Fascinating experience.

[00:10:32 – 00:10:33] Satish Polisetti

Yeah. Now Yeah.

[00:10:35 – 00:10:43] Nitin Bajaj

Moving on to today’s time. I would love to hear from you what is the biggest challenge you’re facing.

[00:10:44 – 00:11:47] Satish Polisetti

Yeah. Good point. I think I think the current wave that we are seeing in AI is incredible. Right? It’s a extremely amazing tailwind, And the amount of things that we’re able to do with that is also extraordinary. At the same time, never has been so difficult in order to do customer acquisition. Right? Building from a concept to, like, an MVP has become so much more easier. And when people used to talk about the whole we have a set of data centers. You guys have AWS. Now it’s, like, even more. And now I’m, like I feel like I’m of the past generation and stuff. So more easier. But I think, customer acquisition continues to be and probably will be extremely more difficult and stuff. So I think that’s one aspect that’s, like, top of my mind in terms of any business idea that either I’m investing or to, like, potentially be engaged with part time or full time capacity that I’m that putting a lens on. And I think, like, second time around, if I had to run another company, I think the conviction building is gonna be, like, even more harder. I think than the EBT of the first time

[00:11:48 – 00:11:48] Nitin Bajaj

Yes.

[00:11:48 – 00:12:16] Satish Polisetti

Just anymore. You are, like, in your b twenties and stuff. Doesn’t matter. Just go do it. Now you have a baggage of that experience and things that slow down. So I think how do you overcome that inertia? How do you overcome that, conviction building process? And, also customer acquisition. I think those 2, I would say, are, like, top of my mind in terms of things to solve. It’s not unsolvable, but yeah. Yeah. Good hurdles at this point. Right. Yeah.

[00:12:16 – 00:12:21] Nitin Bajaj

Challenge nonetheless, but good ones to have. Now on the flip side of challenges come opportunities. What’s the one that’s most exciting you at this point?

[00:12:26 – 00:13:26] Satish Polisetti

Yeah. I think, we are looking or I’m thinking more on what will the next several years look like, assuming that there’s gonna be a lot of, like, foundational model development and stuff like that. Right? We know there’s a superintelligence paper out there. We’ve seen oh, yes. I think where our curiosity is going is how does spending a lot of time in Google market does commerce look like in 3 to 4, 5 years from now? Where does advertising that’s a good amount of time that we spent on. Where does that kind of go and stuff? We’ve been talking a lot about efficiency and automation on the enterprise side, Nathan. That’s another angle that is, like, curious to us, which is how does like, in the personal life as well. So those I would say are, like, the curiosity, ideas, spaces that I think underserved at this point of time, but potentially have a lot of gold mines to dig and stuff. Yeah. Advertising, commerce, efficiency, productivity, home assistance, all of that.

[00:13:27 – 00:14:04] Nitin Bajaj

I’m very curious to find out where you head into. So I would love to bring you back on and see what you’ve come up with over the next few months. As we look forward, I always love to pause, reflect, take a moment and ask you to share two moments in your life, career, or personal. Where in one instance, things did not work out as you had expected. There was failure, lessons that were learned from Nitin another instance where things took off and became a success beyond your imagination.

[00:14:05 – 00:16:57] Satish Polisetti

Yeah. Okay. Good one. I I think the big failure, I would say, would be, like, hiring too soon and not really understanding product market fit, maybe. I think we’ve burned through do some lot of capital trying to staff up a pretty senior leadership sales leadership function. And I think in retrospect, we probably should have let the founder sales go on for some more time before we essentially do I think, yeah, now there’s so much amount of literature, advice, and stuff that is definitely available. But, yeah, when you are in the playground, in the war arena, you sometimes miss that and stuff. So I think there’s nothing wrong to I I think the leaders that we recruited were great. I think the process was great. Incast, founders, and the early team, we should have got the right signals and said, what should potentially be done. So I think that’s one lesson that I think about, which is, yeah, be truly genuine to yourself if there is product market fit. How fast are we growing? Is the founder led sales? Or is it, like, a machine already built and stuff like that? A lot of companies, a lot of venture firms are talking about it, for aspiring entrepreneurs now. On the other side, in terms of the success, I would say the acquisition in itself, Nitin, I would say is, like, a decent we didn’t plan for that kind of an outcome. We didn’t plan getting into it and stuff. Neither we did, expect that everything to fall in that particular fashion. But if I just retrospective, I think we kept at it. Some of our values, grit, I think a lot of immigrants could potentially have that grit, bias to action. Everybody talks, oh, Amazon is a customer centric company. Yeah. We were taught that when we were, like, small, like, kids back back in India about customer success and stuff. One story which always, sticks with me. I was in my grade 10. I was studying for my board exams and stuff like that. And, my dad had a pharmacy attached to the house. And then somebody in the middle of the night, at 1 AM or 2 AM rings the bell and say and then he goes down, gives the medicine, and comes back. I was like, super cute. Dude, what are you doing at 2 Yeah. Morning you’re, like, missing your sleep going down? And he sold, like, a stomach pain tablet, which was, like, if I convert into dollars, 1¢ or something like that. And on that, what margin would you make? Like, really less. And then he was, Satish, you can quantify the profit we can make, but can we quantify the pain of the customer? Right? Things like that are really stuck, with us. So I think some of those principles are important. I think where I’m going with it is, I think every company and every founder need to figure out their unique strengths honestly to themselves. Somebody can’t fake to be a big tech person or a great salesperson or a customer. I think what are functionally very key to you, I think you only will know about that. And then others, you can complement. But there should be some core skill sets that unwaveringly, should be good to our founder. Yeah.

[00:16:57 – 00:17:45] Nitin Bajaj

I love that connection. And we’ve seen this growing up as you said. These things, these principles are ingrained in us as part of our culture, as part of our values. This was I wouldn’t say our families, parents hammered that into us. They just lived by example. That’s why it’s so natural to us. And I think one of the things you talked about immigrants that I believe and have come to know is true is the aspect of adaptability. Because we’ve moved across countries, across cultures, we are very adaptable to our surroundings, which helps us become and be very successful as entrepreneurs because that’s one key tenet that makes you be resilient but also continue to have that grit. So

[00:17:45 – 00:17:47] Satish Polisetti

Okay. Got it. Yep. Yep.

[00:17:47 – 00:18:01] Nitin Bajaj

Now couple of quick questions for you. What do you enjoy doing as either a de stress or something where you’re hanging up the boots, if you will? What’s that one activity that you really enjoy?

[00:18:02 – 00:18:07] Satish Polisetti

Yeah. I’ll keep what is the reason? Like, there was a period I’m obviously, like, when he played a lot of cricket and Yeah. And stuff like that. But somehow that has been, like, in the back burner for a lot of period of time. And then my grown up right now, my my elder son, he’s been asking me to teach him or play with him a lot. And then I noticed that now I’m watching a lot of these snackable bites about either cricket or soccer populate my YouTube feed. YouTube does an amazing job. The moment you search something, your entire feed is, like, cluttered with that. Right? So I think that is one that I’ve been doing a little bit. Generally curious about different concepts and different people and different influences that way. So I’m not a Instagram kind of a guy, a little more of a Twitter and next kind of a guy. So I consume that to, like, wind down, a bit. And then, yeah, as I said, like, the kids are now coming to an age where I am meaningfully enjoying the parenting part. Maybe the early years is not. It’s more a choreish and this is more fun, period, probably. So that’s another my wife, she brings an amazing angle to our lifestyle and what we do as a family and stuff. So, yeah, that, that occupies decent amount of, you know, meetings. Yeah.

[00:19:15 – 00:19:17] Nitin Bajaj

Very cool. Very well rounded. I truly appreciate that. 

[00:19:17 – 00:19:19] Satish Polisetti

Totally. Totally.

[00:19:20 – 00:19:23] Nitin Bajaj

Any book or a podcast that you would like to recommend?

[00:19:24 – 00:20:00] Satish Polisetti

Maybe a bunch of your audience might have heard. I’ve been recently look I’ve been hearing all in podcast for the last, all the 200 episodes, so it’s more than that. Definitely heard all of that. Great addition to the drive time. Acquired is another podcast that I’ve been doing, and their long form content is very well done for sure. Yeah. Those 2. And then in 2021, 22, that time frame, somebody connected me and started showing how strong Bhagavad Gita is. So Mhmm. Once in a while, I get some interesting quotes that they shared and look at. But, yeah, those are probably my recommendations.

[00:20:01 – 00:20:12] Nitin Bajaj

Yep. And I love all of those. Yeah. Yeah. On to my favorite part of the show, we call this the one line life lessons. Would love for you, Satish, to share your life lessons with us.

[00:20:13 – 00:22:00] Satish Polisetti

I do the author or who said it, but maybe some things that I’ll be the stick with. I think I think one from the Geeta. Right? I mean, like, you can control the effort and control the outcome. You can tell that in multiple different variations and stuff like that. And that is it’s important, I think. Also, I, remember an episode where I was meeting one of my friend. This was in 2012. The company was not going anywhere at all. And he was like, Satish, are you sure that you are putting your level back? And only that matters. Nothing else matters. If you are not sure that you are putting your 100%, 200%, nothing else matters. So I think, yeah, that is one thing that sticks with me. Like, how control you can control the outcome. You can control the effort you put in. That sticks with me. Recently, Nava had a interesting thing and a concept around then people were asking about magic and life and existence and science and all that. He has something in the line. Life and existence is magic, but everything after that is science. Something in that lens, which is yeah. Segregate. The existence is magic, but everything else after that is the curiosity. So I think that stuck with me a little bit. Also had another episode of maybe all of us are, like, trained to be little like mammals and lions. We probably will sprint for a lot of time, then we rest, and then we, again, sprint for some time. I look at entrepreneurship and stuff like that almost. You sprint, you do something, and then you again maybe dial it down and stuff. Yeah. Those are some things, that probably stick with me. Others are all values maybe, Nitin. Yeah. Same thing like bias to action. Just have an open mind, curiosity mind. Just say I don’t know. That’s so much more easier than trying to defend the point of view and stuff like that. But but yeah. Again, I’m I’m too young to to basically say any of these bigger things. But but, yes, those are some of my principles I tried to live by.

[00:22:01 – 00:22:03] Nitin Bajaj

At least, thank you so much for sharing those and for sharing your journey and story. Congratulations on all the successes so far. And I know there’s many more to come. So Thank you. I would love to bring you back on here and can talk about your next journey.

[00:22:16 – 00:22:30] Satish Polisetti

Yeah. Thank you. Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks, Nitin. Thanks for having me. And, yeah, I’ve been a big fan of your content in so many seasons. But kudos to you as well for putting so much more effort to bring a large community of builders to talk about the story. It’s always inspiring.

[00:22:35 – 00:22:36] Nitin Bajaj

Thank you, man.