Venture capital investors won’t invest if your payback opportunity isn’t big enough to provide massive returns.

What if your growing software company could someday provide those big VC-scale returns, but not in the 5-7 years these investors require?

You’d actually be thinking bigger than those VCs, but over a longer time frame like 10 or 20 years.

You might tell those investors No Thanks and keep growing steadily and patiently.

On the Practical Founders Podcast this week, Gopal Krishnamurthy shares his journey to change the way millions of people inside large companies use data and analytics every day.

It’s a bold vision that he is executing patiently and efficiently. He’s a serious and practical founder.

He grew and sold his BI consulting company to focus on his software products business called Lumel.

Lumel products are already used by most large companies and the company will be profitable this year, but Gopal and his team of 180 employees are just getting started.

Despite his big vision and big traction, Gopal is executing efficiently and patiently and isn’t looking for big VC funding.

Here’s how Gopal describes it:

“As an entrepreneur, you have to be bold. You have to take some risks. But I’ve got to tell you, the biggest learning for me is YOU HAVE TO BE PATIENT.

“You have to be patient because there is no point in being impatient with your employees. Your product has to mature and become usable.

“I’m very reluctant to raise VC funding because success for VCs is to invest X and realize 10X, so they are not patient. If you build a software company to actually make a lot of money fast for VCs, that’s different than building a software company that actually touches people on a daily basis. Those are two different things.

“So I have learned the hard way that patience is a big part of building a sustainable product. In a product business, to build a product that is very, very foundationally strong, you have to be very patient.”

Gopal has a big and bold long-term vision for Lumel, but they are building it practically and efficiently every day.

Listen to this podcast with Gopal Krishnamurthy on the  Practical Founders Podcast.

Thanks for sharing your story, Gopal. And congrats on your big progress!

#practicalfounders