Arjun Pratap: Be Very Driven to Fail Fast, Run Experiments, and Timebox Them Versus It Being in a Confused State of Limbo

Arjun Pratap from EDGE Networks Private Ltd.

Tell us about yourself?

I am Arjun Pratap, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at EDGE. An avid reader, technology enthusiast and veteran in sales, tech and management, I launched EDGE to solve the most challenging talent acquisition and workforce optimization challenges. I was fuelled by a vision to build a set of products that would truly provide people with talent choices across the employer, employee, and job seeker. The endeavour is to build usability as a theme across the EDGE Talent Decision platform to ensure disruption is not the buyers’ prerogative but the users’ guiding force. The EDGE mantra is to empower and enable talent decisions in a truly transparent way.

I’ve been fortunate to have worked with the best & been rewarded for it. EDGE has been recognized by Gartner, Deloitte, NVIDIA, NASSCOM and Google’s Launchpad, among others. Simplifying talent decisions is in the EDGE DNA. It is and will always be dedicated to helping companies and individuals spot opportunities and create possibilities by offering intelligent decision-making capabilities. Growth is a two-way street — at the intersection is the organization’s success intertwined with the individual’s personal success.

Before EDGE, I was associated with SpeedERA Networks and Akamai Technologies. I hold a post-graduate degree in Information Systems and International Business from The University of Sydney, Australia.

What lessons has been an entrepreneur taught you? 

Well, I think what I’ve seen is the power to visualize. I think the power to visualize, the power to conceptualize and then visualize the right idea to execution is very, very important. As a lesson that I learned, and it’s not just having the concept at one level; it’s about the pieces of the concept starting to materialize. That’s what I mean by visualising down to the detail. And the second is execution, the power to operationalize – your ability to deliver operational excellence through milestones to small but real movement. And the third is your ability to pivot change. And to handle that change might not be comfortable. But the faster you do, the better it is for your journey and the people who are travelling with you. I think these are some of the lessons that being an entrepreneur has taught me… these are life lessons for me I take it into my personal life, and I took it over into my professional life interchangeably, so I can manage better across many funds.

If you could go back in time to when you first started your business, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Be very driven to fail fast, run experiments, and timebox them versus it being in a confused state of limbo. I think those are a piece of advice that I would give myself. That really is something that I would do. And second is to hold in high esteem either your own financial acumen that you bring in if you don’t get somebody in with the financial acumen because technology and sales when you visualize it actualize it, and you are able to sell a concept, is very different from financing the concept.

And I’m not talking about raising funds; this is about running a business. Those parts of it are, are very critical. These are probably the two pieces of advice that I would give myself if I was starting again.

A lot of entrepreneurs find it difficult to balance their work and personal lives. How have you found that?

So my personal life and my professional life are as you can imagine for everybody else, started becoming more material, the effect of grey areas. What is personal to me say I’m going to have dinner with my wife, but I’ll also call these people because I can talk to them about raising money…I can talk to them about selling the product…I can talk to them about hiring this person in their team who’s come to me as a reference. So suddenly, I’ve coloured it with, I want to have dinner with my wife to I’m doing this. Or I’m going to a social gathering because I’m going to meet these ex-people potentially, that I can meet up for professional reasons, so that starts becoming the grey area again, and the balance is knowing it.

If you don’t know it, and you’re not reconciling yourself to that reality, then you’re not able to manage it well. Balance is also about not professional and personal. It’s about work & play. So, personal life and professional life balance have work; there’s also play in both. Unfortunately, we think that professional is work and personal is play. It’s not that way. Right, the balance has to manage the work and the play in both parts of this. So if you’re able to take time off work, to refresh the brain, refresh the body… similarly, in your personal life, you’ve got to be able to take time off something that you are accountable or responsible to do to something that you’d like to do for yourself, versus it only being for your kids only being for your wife, or even for your in-laws, or your parents or whatever else you may have it, so I think that balance, I’ve started to understand and delivered to. So I see it as something that has kept me sane, has kept me mindful, has kept me clear. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to do it. So yeah, I am on my way to factoring that balance.

Give us a bit of an insight into the influences behind the company?

The influence behind EDGE is the vision to solve a global problem or manifestation of employability. If we can start getting the right people working in these jobs that are out there, then I think everything starts becoming more realistic in terms of form, fashion or outcomes that will benefit the community at large & the world at large. People will start doing things faster and better and being able to construct their lives in a more meaningful manner matters.

And that’s the reason I think we have this mantra, which is to connect a billion professionals to meaningful jobs. Why is it a billion & not 2 billion?  A billion is large enough to start with. And I think we’re on our way with that mission to meaningful jobs, which means economically and emotionally connecting people. It is very important for us to manage the journey for individuals through a financial and sort of committed environment. So, I think the influences behind the company is to solve a global problem, one that relates to employability at its core and then sort of going to the next level thinking about how does one solve this by looking at the different agendas that exist out there and making it easier for the different variables to start meeting, a level playing field? So basically, the outcome of driving people to jobs that are meaningful becomes super sharp.

What do you think is your magic sauce? What sets you apart from the competitors?

So what sets us apart from competitors is also the clinical experience that we’ve gained in solving employability in a country like India. We work with large IT services companies, and that has given us an understanding of the range of problems as well as the depth of as to which one has to deliver value because of the scale. The scale is large volume – 10,000 people, 20,000 people, 30,000 People in ER, and I’m talking about a single company, mobilising 150,00-200,000 people across organizations internally for different projects. And they’re all happening every day, every week, every month. So, it’s scaled. You’ve got a range of problems, as well as depth that you can go deep into solving it. That is probably been our unfair advantage, and allowed us to build our own national language processing (NLP) algorithms, to machine learning (ML) at scale,  allowed us to build a career architecture, machine learning engine, rule-based career progression engine, title-based career progression engine, some of the cool stuff that really backs the search-and-match which is core value prop that we deliver into our products.

And layering on top of this is using that intelligence in the best possible manner through the product. So the application interfaces that speak to user personas that we solve for the recruiter, the employee, the resource manager, the hiring manager, and the buyer.

How have you found sales so far? Do you have any lessons you could pass on to other founders in the same market as you just starting out?

So, we’ve been very fortunate to get some really beautiful brands, like Wipro, HCL, UST Global, CGI enter into our fold. And we have been able to also get brands like Daimler and HDFC, who are very different from what we normally do with services and projects.

But I think it’s given us a fair amount of colour, good solid brands – acquiring them is not easy, sometimes can take nine to 12 months. And that will probably be an even enterprise sales cycle. What needs to be done is get those customers and get an understanding of what problems we can solve in a standardized fashion, so we can sell it as a software service. I think that’s the trick. And my advice to people who are building SAS businesses at the enterprise sales level is to acquire customers and figure out how to acquire customers at scale and also not forget to build stability into their products, so they can deliver these products to their customers. I think that’s one aspect of managing with a balance because you can sell fast enough, or if you can’t deliver, then you end up with a lot of people who are churning.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced so far in your business, and how did you overcome it?

Well, it’s a challenge of building a super solid product team – a product management team. Today EDGE has the benefit of a product head that’s been game-changing. And I think that was a challenge.

Honestly, I would have thought that data science in AI would have been the biggest challenge because of a lack of understanding of that domain, but it’s not, thanks to our team. However, what we found challenging was to take that intelligence and put it into a super-solid useful product. That’s where we kind of went wrong initially. Today, our super solid product team has brought it back to the point where we are building product lead growth. I found that to be the biggest challenge in the company – to have a product-led growth strategy which will really work not just in theory but in practice. I tried three times, failed at it, and the fourth time I succeeded because I knew what I didn’t want. I’m a single founder. So I keep using the word I, but the reference is EDGE.

What do you consider are the main strengths of operating your business in India and the specific state you are in over other states in India?

Operating a business here is the clinical experience. So let me put it this way. If you are a doctor in India, it might sound brutal or ruthless, but you see so many patients that your ability to understand how to tackle situations at scale gives you so much input data that it allows you to start building very quickly a repertoire of offerings or solutions. And then stream learning that. That’s all possible with the way the Indian ecosystem is.

Being in Karnataka, being in Bangalore is the Silicon Valley of India. There’s nothing better than this because you have a cosmopolitan environment; you have certain people that come from all over the country. You can tap into that to figure out how to move things in a more start-up fashion than anywhere else. And hence, I think Bangalore or Bengaluru has benefited us tremendously in the way the EDGE is shaped.

What (if any) are some weaknesses of operating your business within India and your state?

Well, it depends on how India is shaping up. Are we going to be regulated and regimented into running a business, or will we have freedom of expression & building things so that we can say things that might not be accepted but are important to say? Why I’m saying that is we don’t want to necessarily build a China. And I’m saying this also knowing fully well that China has done some tremendous work across different fronts to build some great companies. But it has a very regulated fashion and form, which has worked well for them in the past, but currently is a threat to growth because the growth, as much as it’s exploded, will hit the ceiling. In countries like America, you don’t see that ceiling because you’re allowed to express and move and change, and you have different things that might be very turbulent but generate the vibrance of capitalism. I think India is under the gun, and people are watching the explosive nature of the economy in a positive way. And we should continue that positivity by making sure that the creative juices that are flowing aren’t regulated. And when I say that, it’s also about financial regulation, structural regulation, tax compliance, all of these good things becoming business-friendly. So countries like Singapore, Dubai, US Australia, don’t become reasons to headquarter companies that were anyway meant to be built in India, taken globally out of India.

If you could operate your business in another state in India rather than the State you are in, which state would it be and why?

No. Unfortunately, this thought never crossed my mind. It didn’t because I have been in Bengaluru forever. And I have sort of the benefits of being local. So yeah. And it provides you with the start-up ecosystem that you would really want to tap into. So it’s literally like asking somebody who’s sitting in some part of the valley whether they would want to start anywhere else.

India has an incredibly diverse population. How has the affected your consumer base and business?

The consumer base? Yes, the diversification is in the kind of customers, kind of industries, kind of verticals that you can tackle this horizontal problem that we solve. And that gives you so much of this clinical experience that I was referring to. How has it affected our business, per se? Obviously, diversity is achieved through meritocracy in organizations like ours, who’re not really targeting change or the shift because we’ve been able to achieve a decent degree of diversity just through a very objective way of looking at outcomes that do not bias us to race, colour, gender, and various other aspects that create a lack of diversity.

I think we’ve always been on that front, and even our products speak of it. Because of the way our science is constructed and the way the features are constructed across the application, we are there. This is how it has affected our business on the inside and our customers; be it companies that we get data from that are absorbed in a fashion that allows us to be very diverse and inclusive.

Infrastructure is really important to businesses. How have you seen India’s infrastructure improve recently? Do you see new opportunities opening up?

Of course, the infrastructure has improved recently.  How has it improved? How have I seen it? I’ve seen it improve not as rapidly as one would want. But certainly, a lot of the improvements become par for the course because they should have been there already, but I think that’s judging it wrongly because those improvements weren’t there in the past or they weren’t, in effect. So we need to value the change and not take it for granted.

In an underlying fashion, a lot of India has changed in terms of the way we function across the board. And, you know, I think opportunities opening up is just the way the country is morphing into accepting different facets of products and services that come from within the country versus us being tainted to buying products from the outside. I think we’re more realistic about inward consumption, and this goes back to when Maruti was a car being hit, or the ambassador or the best scooter. Consumption was here first before it was taken out of the world. I think India is centred around building an inward-looking testbed of consumption before taking it out to the world, and I think that’s the pure beauty of the way the system is poised. So opportunities are really high in building companies in India.

What do you want to accomplish in the next 5 years with your business?

The intention is to take it to the next level, meaning that we have so much potential to unlock in the employability space where we’re connecting these billion professionals. We have the vision to do it. And what we want to do is work with the ecosystem, the partners, and the people who are on similar converging points for this mission and see if we can wrap the ecosystem into playing a very, very streamlined connected path to making sure that these billion professionals get emotionally and economically gratified.

India has recently imposed some relatively high tariffs. Has this had an impact on your business? Do you support the tariffs?

EDGE has not been impacted directly by the introduction of the tariffs. The Company believes that the introduction of tariffs could provide some protection to industries that require some timely support. However, the Government should ensure that introduction of these tariffs should not be followed by retaliatory tariffs that could increase the price of exports of other services.

And finally, if people want to get involved and learn more about your business, how should they do that?

I feel am very open and contactable, very approachable. You know, I definitely, as an individual, am looking at all the information that comes in at our official email ID. We have people interact with us by connecting to us through our media, website, sometimes our phones sometimes the contact us form. So, it does come to us, and that’s one way of access. The rest is just through a connected network. I’m on the NASSCOM Product Council – my details are there. And we certainly want to be able to talk more about our business. And most importantly, our marketing function has created multiple access channels through social media, professional media & other online channels, which allows us a wider audience to touch and connect to, which includes Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to start with.

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