Leaving a big job at a successful company to start your own scrappy company is way harder than it looks.
- Startups are brutally hard.
- Customers don’t always like your product.
- Startups mostly don’t turn into real companies.
- You probably won’t pay yourself for years.
- You won’t have a big team to support you at first.
But you are on your own and finding your way.
That hard-earned independence is the good part.
Dharshan Rangegowda, founder of ScaleGrid, left a decade-long engineering career at Microsoft to solve a painful database operations problem he had firsthand experience with.
After early missteps selling to enterprises, he shifted to helping developers manage MongoDB, Redis, and Postgres on the cloud, bootstrapping the business from scratch.
ScaleGrid grew steadily through product depth, technical support, and Dharshan’s mastery of SEO—becoming the top organic result for many key searches.
The company expanded into multiple database engines, added a distributed engineering team, and reached 20 employees by 2021, serving both SMB developers and some enterprise teams.
Dharshan sold a majority stake to Spotlight Equity Partners during the pandemic after receiving an unsolicited offer, later stepping out of day-to-day operations while remaining on the board.
Dharshan knows many great developers who wouldn’t be successful entrepreneurs. As he describes it:
“You can’t take random people and make them an entrepreneur. You have to want to be an entrepreneur and want to be on your own. You have to enjoy the freedom and the risk and the upside that comes with it and the unmitigated downside as well. You have to accept and be comfortable with it.
“You want to be on your own so you can try things. You are constantly looking at problems and new solutions. You want to be around people who like that sort of process: Here’s a new problem and here’s a new solution.
“But the most important thing you have to do as an entrepreneur is you have to add value to your customers. And most people forget that.”
Dharshan survived long enough to learn what customers really wanted and were willing to pay for. It took him a few years.
But once he got going, he added team members, improved the product, mastered SEO, and kept solving hard challenges.
After selling most of ScaleGrid and moving on, Dharshan is doing it again.
Starting up is usually brutally difficult. It helps to like it that way. That’s why not everyone is doing it.
In this week’s podcast conversation, Dharshan also shares hard-earned lessons about product-led growth, support as a strategy, SEO as a long-game advantage, and how bootstrapped founders can build meaningful outcomes in massive markets.
Check out this episode with Dharshan Rangegowda on the Practical Founders Podcast.
