An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Different is better than better. If you’re trying to disrupt an existing space, being 10% better or even 100% better, doesn’t matter. Your competitors are also talented, have a head start, and are lower risk. Ideally, you can be at least 10x better on two separate axes that your customers care about. When I launched Amazon Redshift, AWS’s cloud-native data warehouse, we led with a tagline of being “10x faster, 10x cheaper.” In that market segment, it was transformative and led to what, for a time, was AWS’s fastest growing service. We couldn’t have done so without building and selling differently from market segment incumbents.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anurag Gupta, founder and CEO of Shoreline.io.

Anurag is the founder of Shoreline.io, a DevOps company focused on incident automation — making it easy to automate away commonly occurring incidents and possible to quickly and safely debug and repair new incidents. Before Shoreline, Anurag was a VP at AWS, where he was responsible for transactional database and analytic services, growing this business a thousand-fold over his time there. He has also been an early member of three startups, with one IPO and two acquisitions.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

I grew up in New York City. My parents moved to the US from India when I was 4. It was hard for them, but it gave me access to world-class libraries, museums, music, magnet schools, etc. We’re all shaped by our childhood experiences — I’m probably more direct, more passionate, and have more varied interests because I grew up as a New Yorker than if I grew up somewhere else.

After college, I came out to the Bay Area, working at Oracle. While Oracle was already a billion-dollar company, database development was just 20 people. I learned a lot there — most importantly, that you can do large impactful work with a small team. I then did 3 startups and eventually landed at AWS, which was just getting going at that time. It was a great place to build, innovate, and grow services that mattered to customers. After that, I started Shoreline, which is the next chapter in my life.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Since we’re talking about making something from nothing, let me give you a quote from an email I wrote to one of my teams when we were about to release our first version.This quote is about the principle of reflexivity.

“As you shape your work, your work shapes you. If you work on things that are easy, you become indolent. If you work on things that are dull, you become dull. If you work on things that are commonplace, you become commonplace. Conversely, if you work on things that are hard, you hone your ability. If you work on things that may fail, you gain courage. And, if you work through times of ambiguity, you become a leader.

That’s why it is worthwhile working on these difficult, ambiguous projects that aren’t all that likely. You come out the other side a better person than you came in. And, at the end of the day, that’s pretty much all you carry from project to project, team to team, company to company. Yourself.”

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

There are so many! One I’ll pick is “Material World: A Global Family Portrait” by Peter Menzel. In this book, 16 of the world’s foremost photographers traveled to 30 nations to live for a week with a statistically average family. At the end of the visit, they took a portrait of the family outside their home, surrounded by all their possessions and holding the one they found most precious. There’s also wonderful descriptions about their daily routines, their income, what they most want in their lives etc. I must have given at least 10 copies away over time.

I’ll never travel to all these places or meet all these people. The book gives me a chance to do so through reading and careful observation. I learned so much! It reduced some of my biases that came from living in one environment surrounded by people much like myself with many of the same concerns. Peter did a similar book called “Hungry Planet” showing families surrounded by a month of the food they eat. It’s also fascinating.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

When we think about startups, we generally only think about the ones that succeed. But, 90% of startups will fail. Creating something from nothing is hard. For most of us, it is the hardest thing we can do over our careers. There’s no question it will be a struggle.You may have a great idea but have gaps in how to execute or reach customers. As a founder, it is important to attract people who are better than you on these things. In the beginning, people are joining because of you, not the specifics of your idea. That’s also true of investors — you need to create a precise, succinct description of what you’re embarking on has potential. You’ll get lots of objections. That’s OK. Use it to make your idea better. You’ll be spending the next years of your life working on this so the feedback is a gift.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

Launching first isn’t critical. Understanding the product your customers want is. Microsoft Zune launched a year before the Apple iPod. Zune’s tagline was “Welcome to the social.” iPod’s tagline was “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Apply understood its customers better than Microsoft did and that was reflected in the success of these two products over time.

If the market you will serve is of any meaningful size, it will support multiple vendors. Many of the world’s largest companies were not first to market. As a startup, you’re usually not competing with other vendors, but with non-consumption. Figure out what you can do differently or better than others in a way at least a portion of your target customer base will find overwhelmingly important.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

  1. Different is better than better. If you’re trying to disrupt an existing space, being 10% better or even 100% better, doesn’t matter. Your competitors are also talented, have a head start, and are lower risk. Ideally, you can be at least 10x better on two separate axes that your customers care about. When I launched Amazon Redshift, AWS’s cloud-native data warehouse, we led with a tagline of being “10x faster, 10x cheaper.” In that market segment, it was transformative and led to what, for a time, was AWS’s fastest growing service. We couldn’t have done so without building and selling differently from market segment incumbents.
  2. Celebrate the small victories. Day to day, it can seem like little is changing at your company. Your team will be heads down focusing on all the work that needs to be done. You need to regularly lift the teams’ eyes to see not just how far they have to go, but how far they have already come. Each new customer, new hire, and new release is a victory worth celebrating. No one outside your company, even your family, will understand these as well as the people you work with.
  3. Simplicity is a killer feature. Your customers struggle with the cognitive load of all the products intended to make their lives better. A simple solution, elegantly designed, purpose-built for the task they want solved will win over more sophisticated solutions that take time to learn. At one startup, we were in a POC requirements meeting along with the others involved in the bakeoff. By the end of the meeting, our solutions architect had finished building a model of what the customer needed while the other team had just created the requirements doc. Guess who won?
  4. Founder depression is real. Being a startup founder is difficult. Expectations are high. Your investors, first and foremost, have invested in you, as have your employees. You will need to keep an uplifting and optimistic demeanor for everyone but you’re also the person who they’ll reach out to for all their problems. It can create dissonance between the person you portray and your inner landscape. Many (most?) founders suffer from anxiety and depression. It is important to know that we all go through it and you will too. Perseverance is the most important quality for a founder.
  5. It isn’t a competition. Every day, you’ll hear about some great funding round or some awesome launch from some other company. The people you used to work with have gone on to do amazing things. It doesn’t matter. You’re not competing with them and there’s no point second-guessing your decision once you’ve set your path. Stay true to your vision and keep walking forward.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

The single best thing you can do when formulating a new idea is to have hundreds of conversations with your prospective customers. They may not understand what you plan to do or the underlying technology you’ll use. But, they can talk about whether they currently have pain or how this might enrich their life. This will also help you pare down what you are doing to the core value you’ll provide.

Second, you need to see if you can excite others to spend the next 5–10 years of their lives building and scaling the company. Startups are exceptionally risky in the beginning and none of us can succeed on our own.

If you can check both of those off, you’re in good shape and can plan what it takes to build the minimum awesome product that adequately meets your customers’ goals.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

It depends on how much money one needs to have a testable hypothesis, to build a product, and to have others provide feedback. All founders are optimistic — you have to be a little crazy to do something as unlikely as starting a company. It helps to assume it’ll take twice as long to get your initial product built and twice as long to get to break even. If you can reduce burn, make the numbers work out, and don’t have to worry about others entering your space, you should certainly bootstrap — or at least delay fundraising until you have a lot to show. Of course, even if you raise, it is simply pragmatic to remain frugal and make the money last, just as though it came out of your own savings.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

Over the past dozen years, my wife and I have focused our giving towards improving the quality of life of children and adults on the autism spectrum, with a focus on those considered severe. We do this in three ways. First, we fund basic science and translational research on interventions that improve quality of life for children and adults on the autism spectrum — such as support for the Suramin Phase I clinical trial at UCSD, the MTT Phase I clinical trial at ASU, pre-clinical research on mitochondria and metabolism in autism at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, and basic science research at Stanford on the pathophysiology of neurobehavioral exacerbations. Second, we believe children should be able to achieve based on their abilities, not their disabilities. We fund initiatives that help individuals with ASD who cannot speak fluently or handwrite access an age-appropriate education, such as support for the Autism and Communication Center at California Lutheran University. Third, through support for Communication First, we help educate the public, advocate for policy reform, and engage the judicial system to advance the rights, autonomy, opportunity, and dignity of people with speech-related communication disabilities and conditions.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.


Making Something From Nothing: Anurag Gupta Of Shoreline io On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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