[00:00:00 – 00:00:07] Nitin Bajaj

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

[00:00:08 – 00:00:11] Sundari Mitra

Thank you very much, Nitin. It’s such a pleasure to be here.

[00:00:11 – 00:00:15] Nitin Bajaj

Pleasure is all mine. Let’s start with who is Sundari?

[00:00:15 – 00:01:03] Sundari Mitra

Who is Sundari? It’s a deep question. I thought about it. When I saw your question, I identify first being a mom of two kids. I’m extremely proud of that and who they have become today. On, the professional side, this is a third company. So Asato is my third venture that I’ve started. I have been a value executive, and I love our entrepreneurism. Who defines me as a person? My value system. What is that? It is to stay humble. It is to always be truthful even if the path to getting to where I want to go is hard. Ultimately, what defines me is resilience. You gotta keep fighting. You gotta keep living for what you want to be, and then ultimately it comes to you.

[00:01:04 – 00:01:51] Nitin Bajaj

Very beautifully said. And having gotten to know you, and I would say just even a little bit, I have a lot of respect for the words that you purposefully chose about not letting things stop you, about resilience. And you have been through a lot in your personal life, and I know it’ll come up in our conversation. But kudos to you for continuing to press along your North Star and staying true to the spirit of entrepreneurship. Now tell us about Asato. What is the mission, the vision, and most importantly, why do this? You know, you could have done many things or just even, taken a break and and retired. But what brought you to this?

[00:01:52 – 00:02:58] Sundari Mitra

Great question. Right? So, to me, an entrepreneur has to start something to solve a real problem. It is not sexy technology. It’s about addressing the problem. And to tell you why I started Asato, I have to give you a little bit of background about my previous startup. So I was running NetSpeed Systems, which got acquired by Intel. I went in with a very small team of 35, 40 people into Intel. But fast forward into about twenty months of my journey at Intel, and I was managing full time employees that were over 6,000, maybe a team of around 8,000 people. And what occurred to me was that I wanted to move as fast as entrepreneurs do, even within intel, which means what? Which means taking rapid decisions. To take rapid decisions, you can’t just have data. You need to have data, but you need a lot of insights on that data. And as an executive at Intel, I had access to a lot of data because Intel’s IP was reporting into me. Mhmm. I had a phenomenal operations team, so I had a lot of Power BI dashboards, PowerPoint slides that came up. But it was siloed information which was being mined. The interpretation of that data came to me via the managers who were managing those entities, but it was still to the best of their intentions. They were doing it, but it was siloed views. And that’s when the idea of saying that in today’s day and age for every corporation, we all have a very strong digital footprint. And if we can mine the IT systems of record that already exist, connect them up, and give a single pane of visibility in terms of observing your organizations, observing your business, observing your operations, it could be a win. And what would help leaders do is be able to make good data based educated decisions on their own portfolio. K? That was what sparked the idea of Asato. Asato is actually.

[00:04:08 – 00:04:09] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:04:09 – 00:04:23] Sundari Mitra

From untruth to truth. So connecting up databases to give that visibility, that is what inspired the genesis of Asato. How did I think this is a age old problem.

[00:04:23 – 00:04:23] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:04:23 – 00:06:40] Sundari Mitra

How did I think that it’s possible to do it? Right? It’s because while I was at Intel, I watched mister Elon Musk come in and shake it up at tweet Twitter. And for me, it was three years into my journey of wanting to transform my team at Intel. And I was like, man, it’s taken me three years. I haven’t come up with the right solution, and here comes this individual. I know he’s very gifted, but how did he do it? And so I went about very deterministically, interviewing and talking to people to figure out that there must be some science behind the genius. And bingo, there is a connected knowledge graph that one can build off your assets to be able to make calculated decisions. You can use it for betterment. You can use it for optimization, or you can do it to cut costs and cut whatever you want to cut. Correct? And that is the genesis of Asato, and that’s how it started. So you asked me a few more questions. You said, how did you start? But you also asked me, what is your mission? What is your vision? So how do you take this and turn it into a business concept? I can’t go with a vision to try and raise funding or even hire a team because we’d be lost. It has to be crisply defined. So we said we are going to go after CIOs. We’re gonna make the CIO the superhero. The CIO has access to all the IT systems of an enterprise. And, if you can connect into existing systems of record but provide them a unified view of it by having a master knowledge graph where you connect all of these things together, the CIO will be able to optimize, observe, first of all, get visibility of what they have, and then figure out, do you want to go after cost savings? Do you want to go after understanding how much Gen AI you’re using in your company? Whatever it is that you want to optimize for. Is it compliance issues? Are you threatened by vulnerabilities because you don’t know how many SaaS apps you have? Mhmm. You can go answer all of them. So our mission is to give that power to CIOs so that they can optimize, they can use it that information to do the best for their organization and win.

[00:06:42 – 00:06:57] Nitin Bajaj

That’s amazing. Now you’re pretty early in this, journey, relatively speaking. Give us a sense for the impact you and the team have been able to create, in this short time.

[00:06:58 – 00:07:11] Sundari Mitra

Wonderful. I’ll give you a concrete example of us working with a healthcare enterprise customer of ours. And we went in, and in three weeks, we were able to show them a 33% reduction in their IT bill.

[00:07:12 – 00:07:13] Nitin Bajaj

Wow. Right?

[00:07:13 – 00:08:03] Sundari Mitra

That’s massive. Weeks. And very low touch engagement from their side. From our side, we simply connect into the existing systems of record and and do our analysis and come back with this. The other thing Asato does is if we are unable to, we not only identify these. But if I go back to my intel days, I remember assigning action items and then coming back six months afterwards to see did they get done very rarely. Right? So Asato not only lets you understand, optimize, but we also have, not today, we don’t have the agents, but in the future, we’re gonna have agents which can actually take the action for you and give you that data. So it’s like a something that is real time. It’s learning about what your inefficiencies are, optimizing it with by taking actions.

[00:08:04 – 00:08:30] Nitin Bajaj

That’s really amazing. And as you said, it brings that dashboard to help you optimize either for efficiency, vulnerabilities, or looking forward in terms of where are we going as an organization and do we have the capabilities and the right tools to get there. So you’re bringing in a lot of systems together, and most of IT is very famous for not talking to each other for the most part.

[00:08:31 – 00:08:31] Sundari Mitra

Correct.

[00:08:31 – 00:08:54] Nitin Bajaj

So I would imagine that’s that’s a challenge. But so is many other challenges, newer technologies, newer security vulnerabilities, and just even in terms of globalization and localization of different systems. Amongst all of these, and ones that I may not have even thought of, what’s the one big challenge you would like to call out?

[00:08:55 – 00:11:38] Sundari Mitra

So the good news in all the challenges you brought up is today there are APIs that exist to pretty much all these systems. If you can get access to those APIs, you can go in. The the biggest challenge for a company like Asato is convincing the traditional IT leaders that we are not invasive, that the data stays safe with us, and we are challenging the status quo of IT. That to me is what we need to read through, is how do we work through this. And so what we have done to address this is we go in with a very point small use case saying give us access to just these few, two, three things. Tell us what your problem in these areas are, and in a couple days, we will tell you whether we can or cannot provide you the right insights. So the bigger challenge for us is the mindset, saying that observing what you own on a continuous basis, it’s not optional. It’s mission critical now, especially because of everything you said, Nitin, saying that there is hybrid operations. You have on prem, you have cloud. You don’t know how to leverage the beauty of, agentic AI, Gen AI. You don’t know, is there a risk? Is it going to give you dividends? How do you discover what is really there? Because I think the advent of SaaS apps and the ease with which you can download it has also presented vulnerabilities, reasons for that. Right? So all of those need to be answered, and it’s not easy to answer them unless you can connect into these systems, get that visibility. What am I paying for? Am I really paying for it? Do I even own it? When is the renewal coming up for it? Can you help me negotiate the license terms of it? Is what’s happening with the migrant SaaS apps that exist? In the meanwhile, the entrenched enterprise apps are all bundled. And how do you tease apart those bundles to say, my god. I’m paying like an arm and a leg for it. How am I using it? Is it effective? Is it not? Right? How do you do it’s just a lot to do. So that is why the timing of doing this is now, and we have the ability to do it. We have the tools to do it because we are not Asato is not reinventing everything. We are leveraging so much that is already there. We’re just hooking up things together, building graphs off Mitra. Again, leveraging existing tools for that. How do you connect into systems? It’s easy now versus meant long time ago. There are apps that exist for us to leverage that.

[00:11:38 – 00:11:39] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:11:39 – 00:11:54] Sundari Mitra

Right? So that’s why so we’ve been here about Mitra. Now in May, it’s going to be two years for us. Right? But we are already working with several large enterprises, and we are I’m proud to say we are able to show very good results.

[00:11:55 – 00:12:03] Nitin Bajaj

That’s amazing. And I’m not surprised at all given your experience and that you’re at the helm of this. That doesn’t surprise me.

[00:12:03 – 00:12:04] Sundari Mitra

It’s the team.

[00:12:04 – 00:12:05] Nitin Bajaj

Of course.

[00:12:05 – 00:12:06] Sundari Mitra

I’m just there.

[00:12:08 – 00:12:22] Nitin Bajaj

As always, very humble way down to it. Now on the flip side of challenges come opportunities and amongst the many that, we briefly touched upon, what’s the one that has you most excited?

[00:12:25 – 00:13:15] Sundari Mitra

Again, for me, I’m, like, very disruptive in my thinking. So I always want to challenge status quo. Right? So I’m excited to make Asato sort of a global platform of choice for people. And and the journey so far, they say well begun is half done. Yep. We we did start Sundari had hiccups for the first maybe several months, in fact, because I am reinventing myself as well, Nitin. I have been a semiconductor executive and a semiconductor entrepreneur. This time, I’ve gone into enterprise software. And even over there, one of the feedback I got from a lot of the VCs that I went to traditional VCs to raise funding is that they said that the founder market fit was missing, and I said, I’ll take that up as a challenge. I will learn a new market. I will figure out how to get it done. So to me, all these are welcome challenges. I just need to be challenged.

[00:13:15 – 00:13:16] Nitin Bajaj

Yes.

[00:13:16 – 00:13:18] Sundari Mitra

We’ll figure out how to get the answers. Right?

[00:13:19 – 00:13:22] Nitin Bajaj

The the challenge is the opportunity and the exciting. I love that.

[00:13:22 – 00:13:23] Sundari Mitra

Challenge is the opportunity.

[00:13:24 – 00:13:57] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. Now as we look forward to these exciting challenges and and more of them, I’m sure they’ll come your way that you will dominate and steer them in the right direction. I’d love to take a pause and reflect in the rear view mirror and have you share a couple of instances from your personal and professional life. One where things did not work out as you had expected. There were lessons that came out of that experience. And on the other end, something that you thought was a success beyond your imagination.

[00:13:58 – 00:18:28] Sundari Mitra

Yeah. So I think when you ask me this question, it’s hard for me to not answer it honestly, Nitin. Perhaps the biggest challenge of my life has been my own health, my personal health. So So when I was a young mother of two kids, I had a ruptured brain aneurysm, which took me out of commission for a year and a half. It was a very sudden event with no warning. And, like, my daughter used to walk around and tell everyone saying, my mom’s purse and car came home, but she didn’t. It was, that kind of an event for our family. And the incredible support I got from my husband, from my parents, from my friends, from my work environment, I used to be at Sun Microsystems at that point in time, taught me that, a, life happens. It’s not predictable. B, you gotta fight through it. At the end, it’s your journey. You control it. How you respond to these things is your answer to whatever comes your way. It has taught me that big problems come. They come in unexpected ways. You’ve got to, a, be patient. So I had to be patient to let myself, my body, my mind. It’s your brain that is impacted when you have a brain aneurysm. And I was feeling slighted when before I could go back to work, they wanted me to get an IQ test, an EQ test, and meet a psychologist and, a psychiatrist and everyone. But it was all for good reason. They wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t hurt myself more or hurt anyone else around me. Right? Because it’s a tenuous situation, but you can do it. After that, I’ve been an ex continue to be an executive in large companies. I founded three companies. More importantly, we have my husband, Sameer, and I, we have two wonderful children. We have been able to take care of our parents and live a full life. Right? What have I lost as a result of my health hiccup, and how have I turned it around? I lost some time. Precious time, a year and a half of being disabled was no fun. But what else have I lost? Some of my memory, it’s I’m probably not as sharp as I used to be in terms of remembering things, but I’ve turned that to my advantage. I’m like, I’m so organized. Right? It’s I have to be. Because if you can’t remember, you have to be much more organized. So I have to take notes. I have to follow through carefully. Very importantly, I have to always be truthful because I can’t remember two things. Where the hell will I make up shit that I have come up with? Right? So it’s helped keep me it keeps it simple. It keeps it simple that that the in and out stack over here is a short one, helps you prioritize life. So you can multitask, but I’m always prioritizing saying, okay. I have these 20 things to do. These are the three I can do. So let me just focus on that, and we’ll deal to the deal with the rest after. No point getting stressed out. If I get stressed out, it’s only my health that gets impacted. Right? How you deal with what is presented to you is as important as the result you’re going to achieve. And so that’s been my learning is to say, issues are gonna happen. Take it on. Smile and keep moving. Right? And no one is perfect. There are other people who are better than you. Learn from them. And anytime there is something that is intimidating, you have to turn it into a learning opportunity. Right? So that childlike curiosity, saying a child doesn’t have anything when they’re learning, when they’re growing. They navigate. Why? Because they’re not afraid to fail. Right? So having that saying, what? I almost lost my life. I’ve come back. What else can I lose? Right? As long as I live an honest life with my value system intact, I think that is the most important, and that’s my journey. So what have I learned from it? I have learned to be organized, to prioritize, and to live with integrity because you never know when it ends. Right? So you wanna be remembered for being good. In the end, we are just writing a memory, all of us, for longevity. Right? And posterity.

[00:18:29 – 00:20:00] Nitin Bajaj

This is so fascinating on so many different levels. Just the sheer persistence, but also the clarity such an event brings to you that you have to and and and as you said, you have but no choice. Now, one other thing that this brought to me was pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. And you took that to heart and you said, this is the hand I was dealt with. What am I going to do about it? And I find that very few people and increasingly less number of people are able to figure that part out and to be able to do that when that organ of our body helps us make that decision. The fact that you were able to get that and stick to it, you know, amazing amount of respect for you to be able to do that. And to be able to share this, with many others that might be going through this, but just don’t know how to essentially take our lives back in control. Because end of the day, the control lies with us. We just have to realize that. And so thank you for being that beacon of hope and, for being that inspiration for many others out there that just don’t know they can do it. And here is a a living, breathing person who has. So congratulations to you and kudos, and thank you for sharing this.

[00:20:01 – 00:20:37] Sundari Mitra

No, Nitin. I have to tell you that I’ve been a coward. I have not shared it for close to thirty years. And somehow, like I told you when I met you, I was like, okay. Maybe this is the right time for me to speak up about it. I have so many people to thank. It’s not me again. So many people to thank, and probably we can do another show just about that. But very inspiring people all around me, both my moms, my mom and my mother-in-law, tremendously instrumental. And, and, of course, the rest of my family and friends. So a lot of people to thank.

[00:20:37 – 00:21:02] Nitin Bajaj

Well, thank you again. Really appreciate that. Now just as you’re doing a lot of these things, taking on newer challenges, when you have to pause and reflect and step off that bandwagon, What do you do to either de stress or disengage or engage into some other activity? What’s your go to?

[00:21:02 – 00:21:53] Sundari Mitra

I’m an avid reader. I like to read. Music is my passion. So I have played the sitar, and I’ve learned it forever. So I have a a degree in sitar, actually, music. I Sundari don’t play it anymore, but I can it’s teaching you know, taught me how to appreciate music. Love nature, love going out on hikes. Very fortunate to be living in a part of a world where I can just walk out from my house into wilderness. Love doing that. So that’s my stepping away. Once in a while, I’m female. Once in a while, I’ll shop. But most of the time, it’s music, nature, books that keep me going, and it’s therapeutic. Yes. Right? To do that. That’s really it. But enjoy being with family, being with friends, and that that’s it. So So that’s my fun part of Sundari.

[00:21:54 – 00:22:07] Nitin Bajaj

That’s awesome. And we share quite a few pretty much, I would say, all of them. And I’ll say shopping is not restricted or shouldn’t be restricted to women only. We also have to get a little bit of that guilty pleasure, and I enjoy it.

[00:22:08 – 00:22:08] Sundari Mitra

Good.

[00:22:09 – 00:22:16] Nitin Bajaj

Now any book or podcast that, is a favorite and you would like to share it with us?

[00:22:17 – 00:22:48] Sundari Mitra

Absolutely. There are, like, at a time, I probably am reading two genres at a time. So there are I was thinking about, you know, if I get asked this question, which is the book, very recently my you know, I’ll start with the business side of it. I’m always looking to get inspired in terms of business. And you’ve all read The Art of War. We’ve, read a lot of strategy books. Yeah. But very recently, my son gifted me a book, and I found it, like, remarkable. I I have it here.

[00:22:48 – 00:22:49] Nitin Bajaj

Oh, yeah.

[00:22:50 – 00:23:41] Sundari Mitra

And it’s called Unreasonable Hospitality. It’s by Will Gudera and how he transformed some restaurants and hotels. It’s, it was it impacted me profoundly. So I keep refreshing my reading. So on the business side, this is one. If John Boyd’s book, my one of my mentors had suggested that I read Mitra, and this is on strategy. This is a fighter pilot who has changed the art of war. Right? So that’s one of my good business reads. In terms of life, I have been through a bunch of life being an engineer. I research on my own topic and my go to big book for understanding the journeys that I have personally been through. There is doctor Wes’ books. Many masters, many lives

[00:23:41 – 00:23:41] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:23:42 – 00:24:32] Sundari Mitra

Is one. Mitch emblem, Tuesdays with Mori. That genre of books, I love. There’s another beautiful book which feels like a chapter out of my own life. It’s called My stroke of insight. I actually had a stroke, a brain stroke, an aneurysm that burst as a stroke. Right? It’s a brain anotomous who has gone through a stroke. She’s conscious through it and how it happens and how she recovered. The value of relationships, what it means. For longevity, we hear it all the time. Social structures, relationships, how important it is. I cannot tell you how important it is because I’ve lived through it. So on the life side, it’s those on the inspirational side. My by far, the book that I has resonated with me the most is the autobiography of, Nelson Mandela.

[00:24:32 – 00:24:33] Nitin Bajaj

Yeah.

[00:24:34 – 00:24:59] Sundari Mitra

What is it? My walk to freedom or something like that. I can’t remember. Something to do with freedom. I absolutely resonate with how he fought back. How can you be imprisoned for that many years, come back, and rebuild a life? It’s just incredible. I love his quotes, and, actually, they one of the quotes that I’m known to always use is it it always seems impossible till you do it.

[00:24:59 – 00:25:00] Nitin Bajaj

Yes.

[00:25:00 – 00:25:17] Sundari Mitra

So you gotta keep going. So these are books. In a podcast, I listen to it, but there’s nothing that I remember right now. I’m still like a old school give me a book, let me hold it, the paper, and read and take my notes kind of person.

[00:25:19 – 00:25:38] Nitin Bajaj

I don’t know how old school is that because our daughters refuse to do anything, any reading on the screen. They want a physical book. It’s I think just something about holding a book in your hand, even though I cannot do it. But my dad and my daughters, they have to have the book in hand.

[00:25:38 – 00:25:57] Sundari Mitra

I’m like that. I’m like that. I look on Kindles to see which books to order and I ordered it all as a book and I’m reading it. And then I have my own collection, but there’s so many libraries that accept the book. So it’s always recycled for others to there must be other nutty people like me. So

[00:25:58 – 00:26:18] Nitin Bajaj

I’m surrounded by them. So we started talking about something that, transitions well into my favorite part of the show, which is the one line life lessons. Sundari, I would love for you to share your life lessons with us.

[00:26:20 – 00:28:44] Sundari Mitra

The, how to not, keep it verbose and how to keep it one line is a challenge, so we’ll we’ll we’ll get there. But for me, I said it, maintaining childlike curiosity in your learning only comes from humility in learning and comes from being unafraid. I live to learn. So living and learning is probably my number one and living it with childlike curiosity. Right? That would be my number one, thing. Second thing, resiliency. People ask saying, entrepreneurs, you must be lucky. You may the timing was right for you. You can have all of the above. You can be smarter than most individuals, but the thing that makes an entrepreneur win is resiliency. You’ve got to just keep at it. So to me, that is number two. And again, to quote Mr. Mendez, and it’s just, this is a vivid quote for me. It says, do not judge me, but by my successes. Judge me by how many times I fell down and got up to win again. Right? So that is important. And the other is playing the infinite game. This is Simon Sinek. Who doesn’t like him? Who doesn’t like listening to his podcast, reading what he has? But playing the infinite game, meaning I’m not looking for gratification anytime soon for whatever I’m doing. Right? I would even argue that it’s not just this lifetime. So whatever I do in my life today is about doing good. You do good. And even as a business person, the good I want to do is to kind of have many more entrepreneurs spring out from whatever it is that I do. They enjoy their journey. Every employee of Asato, my question, what I tell them is irrespective of the success or failure of Asato, your journey needs to be successful. You need to be successful. Right? That’s playing the infinite game. You play the infinite game, doing good. Life is always smiles back at you. Right? You smile at the world, it smiles back at you. So that’s probably defines who I am.

[00:28:45 – 00:29:27] Nitin Bajaj

And that is so amazing. Being able to live that true life that, you talked about with a clean heart, having no agendas or games where everybody can thrive, having that mindset of abundance. Because once you realize this is my box and I’m comfortable in it, you are able to just be yourself and allow others to do the same. And that’s such a fascinating place to be in. Sundari, thank you so much for sharing your journey, your story, your life lessons, but most importantly, for being an amazing and true leader and helping others live the best version of themselves. Really appreciate it.

[00:29:28 – 00:29:50] Sundari Mitra

It’s absolutely my pleasure. And I think I will steal your one liner. You said living is abundance. You can take that from me. I almost didn’t live. Right? So why is life and living abundance for me? It’s because that’s a fleeting thing as well, and we should never take it for granted.

[00:29:52 – 00:29:52] Nitin Bajaj

Thank you

[00:29:52 – 00:30:02] Sundari Mitra

so much. It’s been such a pleasure, Nitin. Ever since I met you, it’s been a pleasure to know you, and I I hope to keep this relationship up beyond this interview.