In this exclusive interview for Global Indian Alpha, we speak with Ranjan Parthasarathy, whose career spans technical leadership at Nutanix, founding LOGIQ (later acquired by Apica), and currently serving as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Apica. Parthasarathy shares his experiences leveraging India’s talent ecosystem, navigating cultural barriers, and building successful global GTM strategies.
Q: You’ve had a storied career; Nutanix, your own startup, LOGIQ, that later got acquired by Apica. Talk to us about how important the Indian market has been for you in terms of both talent and market. Through your journey, how tough or easy was it for you to attract the right talent from India? What were the initial challenges you faced? How did you overcome them? We’d love to hear some anecdotes.
Ranjan: I started LOGIQ with a co-founder based in India. So, we structured the company to have an Indian operation. Considering that we were a seed-stage company with a co-founder based out of India, it made a lot of sense to tap into the technical talent in India. It also helped us keep our burn low in the early stages.
India has a vast pool of very talented young individuals who are looking to break into the global market and be part of the technology revolution.
We also have so many quality institutions in India that ensure we have a very well-educated and trained pool of talent in STEM disciplines.
You are not well recognized as a small company (LOGIQ), so hiring can be tough. You will never be able to offer top dollars, but it really has to be upon the founders to sell the vision and the opportunities for accelerated learning. At the same time, we had to be picky so that we would get the right people.
You have to get creative to find good talent. One of the interesting things we did to filter people who were as hungry, who could think out of the box, who were willing to go the extra mile was to ask applicants to submit an assignment. We saw very interesting responses, e.g. we had given a technical assignment and one applicant not only solved the problem but also submitted unit tests for the code they had written.
We look for indicators that fit the growth and the driven mindset we are looking for. We also always ask people to put on the CEO hat in their areas of expertise to see how they approach problems, challenges and/or have addressed issues they faced. Those are very interesting conversations and shed a lot of light on how well someone will fit into our company/way of working.
Q. What prompted you to try out India as a talent market? Any research before arriving at the decision?
Ranjan: Some of it was just a fortunate coincidence that we had a co-founder based out of India; the other factor was the opportunity to build a larger company.
I have always wanted to do an India / US startup, knowing how good our human capital pool is in India.
Q. What measurable impact did expanding to India have on operations?
Ranjan: Velocity obviously increased. My teams can be slightly bigger because there are more people for the same dollar I spend.
The second aspect of it, which is one of the more significant reasons, is that it allowed us to operate 24/7, right? And that is very important, because we are talking to customers here in the States. They want to see us make progress. You’ve got to move quickly on many of these early opportunities.
If a customer wanted us to do something, by the following day, when they woke up, we would have actually finished it. That night-time India team working made a huge difference. And beyond that, there were other tangible benefits too.
Engineering cost per feature came down. CAC reduced. Our burn stretched further. So it was a very strategic advantage—not just talent availability, but also cost efficiency and faster iteration cycles.
Q. Shifting gears to Apica. Talk to us a bit about Apica’s India numbers today. What percentage of your workforce in Apica is from India? How has Indian talent contributed to Apica’s innovation and expansion? Can you share examples of how your India-based teams have influenced Apica’s global strategy?
Ranjan: We do all our R&D in India– 100% of it. Teams based out of India can drive significant product innovation, not just software development. I mean, design, architecture, development- all of these things happen in our Bangalore office. We are fortunate to have very talented people who are driving significant innovation.
Q. How does an entrepreneur/CxO practically bridge the geographical distance? Even with all the Zooms/Gmeets of the world, there is that cultural gap that has to be overcome.
Ranjan: Yes, there is definitely work you need to put in due to time zone differences. We are right now in 5 geographies in my organization (Apica), UK, US West, US East, Stockholm and Bangalore. So, there are a lot of online calls and travel. I have shifted my daily routine to start at 4 am to ensure I am connected with all the teams.
My dog wakes up as well around then due to me ☺ Likewise, folks in Bangalore stay up late as needed. It is a shared adjustment, and we do it as needed.
Cultural differences also play a role, but we try to normalize things by ensuring some standards with how we work, expectations for individuals, roles, etc.
Q. What role do processes play in managing a cross-cultural, distributed team?
Ranjan: We sometimes think that whole cultural differences need to be discussed a lot, and training needs to happen. But what I’ve seen work best is when you actually take it out of the equation. And the way you do that is you come up with processes that are uniform across teams.
That takes the personalities, the cultures, and the individuals out of the equation. If broadly you agree that this is how we should work, this is how we should communicate, then it doesn’t matter what culture, what personality. It’s best to handle it in a way that it’s more focused on your goals rather than the individuals involved.
Let’s eliminate the individual aspects of it. Let’s bring uniformity in terms of how we operate. And if we do that, all the other things get eliminated.
Q. Being one of the top folks of a global company, how do you divide time across the various offices across the globe?
Ranjan: We do have odd timings we have to work with. As we discussed before, we are right now in 5 geographies, and there are a lot of online calls and travel. I travel to meet the India team frequently, 3-4 times a year, and we also have people who travel to the Bangalore office to spend time with them. I have also had to travel to Europe and the US for customer events.
Q. What is your hiring philosophy when building early teams?
Ranjan: We kind of took a very simple approach (in LOGIQ) where we said, look, we are a small team.
And anybody we hire, whether it’s a co-founder or a first hire or the 10th hire, everybody needs to kind of be operating with the CEO hat on at all times.
You need people with the right attitude. That is more important than people with the exact right technical skill sets. The second part gets addressed with the exercises, the assignments, and the technical interview that you do. But it is very, very important to gauge the attitude of the person.
You have people with strong technical skills, but a poor attitude. It’s a huge problem.
Q. How do founders discover and define their company’s culture in the early stages?
Ranjan: To some extent, it has to reflect the values the founders bring to the table. To that, you add what is necessary for a startup to succeed.
Hustle, velocity, being independent thinkers, and moving fast. Some of these everyday things are required. So you put that together, and that becomes the culture of the team.
You have to be very cognizant of what you enjoy doing every day. And you have to ask that question: will people who work for me enjoy the same things? If you do not find those people, you will have a culture clash that will always happen.
Part 2 will cover Ranjan’s thoughts on global GTM strategies, enterprise SaaS challenges, and blending Swedish innovation with Indian engineering talent. Stay tuned!