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Founder's Story
$0 to $100M Without Funding: The 22-Year Game No One Talks About | Ep 310 with Karan Yaramada Founder of Jade Global and Kanverse.ai
00:26:23
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- [00:01]
Dan
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Carvana Narrator
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Dan
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Commercial Narrator
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Karan
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Commercial Narrator
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Grainger Narrator
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Commercial Narrator
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- [01:04]
Dan
So Karan, I'm really excited to have you today because there's something I feel that is not highlighted enough. In media, the business world, we always hear about companies that got funding. It seems like the if you the news only wants to say look at this company got $100 million in funding, which I've personally never gotten funding. So I don't even know what that's like. I am, I want to highlight people that have bootstrapped highly successful companies because as we know, only a very small percentage of people ever get funding. So the likelihood is small. And I know you have, you are the founder and CEO of Jade Global and I know you founded this company upwards of over $100 million, which is amazing to bootstrap a company like almost unheard of. So let's talk about that journey. You started from 0 to 100 million. What was it like in the beginning?
- [02:02]
Karan
Great, Dan, thanks for inviting me on your show. First of all, for entrepreneurs like you and I, there are only two games. One is you build a company to exit and the other one is you build a company for durability and you don't have an exit plan. And for me, When I started 22 years ago, I didn't think about exit. I thought about building something that can last for long, making an impact to our customers and to our employees and partners. And I think that really set the tone and the culture. Looking back after 22 years, I think that was the right thing. And it's not that for me it was the right thing. But many companies do start to sell from the beginning and they do raise the money and they make headlines and their narrative is different and that's a totally different game. So you choose what game you want to play. And I chose to play this long game where I want to run a company, I want to build a company from grounds up and I want to be here for next 10 years, 20 years. I still want to be relevant for a long time. And I want to build a culture that can survive all these disruptions of technology, innovations, cycles. And here we are after 22 years. It's not that the ride was not that smooth, we've gone up and down through many cycles. But what kept us going, the culture, the leadership, the intent from the beginning to build a company that can last for long. I think those things really kept us going and we were able to reach 0 to 100 million organic, no funding. And I think we built a very strong infrastructure, foundation, leadership, great teams and great customers.
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Dan
I mean that's 0 to 100 million. And on top of that, 22 years, I mean, when was the Internet like you basically started? Like the beginning of the Internet, like the beginning of the most advanced technologies that we've had all the way through now, which is like AI and AI agents and such like. That's amazing. How if you were looking back now and you were to start right now like today, would it be very different than when you started 22 years ago? Or do you think the technology is.
- [04:56]
Karan
Irregardless, fundamentals will remain the same in terms of what kind of company do we want to build. But when we started 22 years ago, you were right. Right after the dot com bust 2003, we went through the huge 99, 2001, the bust, the boom and bust. But things were very low in 2003. That was the best time to start. And we were actually migrating some of our customers during those days from very old legacy systems to network computing or Internet based systems. So that was our starting point back in 2003.
- [05:41]
Dan
It's always funny to reminisce on things when you, when you think though about you as a leader, what needed to change when you go from 0 to 10 to 20 to 50 to 100 million.
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Karan
So what should precede that growth is the leadership and the leadership bench that you build. Actually that's one of the lessons that I learned too. Several times in these 22 years we have overgrown our leadership bench strength. So that's one big takeaway in the lesson. If I have to start again and do this again, I would build stronger leadership team before the growth comes in. When the growth comes first and then you scramble for the leadership team you go through, you put the company through a lot of stress. Because one of the things we are in the services company, we are a services company. When we are in a services company, culture really, really matters because people are your products. Your products can walk away anytime out the door. And what keeps them in, what keeps them together and what keeps the quality? Because one way to just to stay in the game for long is you don't dilute your customer service, your excellence. You can't, when you grow bigger, you cannot dilute the quality of service that you provide. And that is very critical. And you cannot do that without really having the right leadership team and right culture as well.
- [07:31]
Dan
We had another guest on who also like you had bootstrapped to a few hundred million and and they talked about the personal sacrifice. I think their divorce like three times. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that they had to choose the business over family. And they had a lot of regrets. How is it for you when it comes to personal sacrifice? Was there anything that you not necessarily regret, but looking back, was there sacrifices you had to make personally? Doesn't have to be with family, just in general.
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Karan
So the trade offs when you choose the trade offs, this is all intentional. I always, I had a choice. I had, I had a choice. I was working for a company prior to that, one of the big five consulting firms. I had a choice to stay, continue, do more of work, life balance. But I chose to do this and when I chose to do this and I knew the trade offs, yes, there will be sacrifices, there will be a stress that you have to handle and your family has to be ready because you are not there. You are on the road, traveling a lot of time you're spending, your spouse has to support. Because when I started in 2003, by the time I have two young children and my wife was working, but we knew that and it's a choice, it's a trade off. But looking back, I don't think I have regrets in if I could have done differently. I don't think so. But what I've Learned in these 22 years, I could have done things differently if I had to do Jade Global again, which is building the leadership strength. And there are few other nuances that I could have done differently now that having gone through the cycles.
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Dan
And so what would something that you would do differently now and if you did something differently, where do you think that that would have led to?
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Karan
Great question. So one is I already said I would build the leadership strength before the growth comes in. But the second part is allocating the capital more for innovation. We did innovate, we stayed relevant, but we were a little bit slow to react to that innovation. I would have spent more on bringing in the newer services, maybe taking risks with some of the partnerships that we built. Other than that, I would say we did pretty well. Rest because taking the company from 0 to 100, it's like every pivot you're building a new company. 0 to 10 or 10 to 20, 30, then from there to 50, 60, then from there to 100. Each phase it almost like if I look back each phase, you look like a different company. Because when you are 10 million, your span of control is different. You can, like founder, like me, can get my hands in everything. But as we grew, I should be able to hire leaders that I trust and they align with the vision and the culture and they take. They become the custodian and so that I can multiply and not grow very linearly.
- [11:31]
Dan
I've heard this thing where it's like 0 to 1 is very hard, 1 to 2 is easier. You know, like there's this whole thing around, like at one, like one part is easier, and once you get there, things exponentially increase. Did you ever feel like that in any of the milestones that you're referencing where it was like this phase was really, really challenging, but once we got to this, it just exponentially took off?
- [11:57]
Karan
Yes. So zero to. Of all the phases that I mentioned, zero to 10 was the easier for me. And then it started getting more difficult. 10 to 20 was more difficult than 0 to 10, and then 20 to 50 was even more difficult. Now you are looking at bigger complexity, multiple teams, multiple locations. And now you kind of look at more maturity from 50 on. If you want to scale beyond, then you need to bring maturity in every aspect of your business, whether it's leadership team, whether your infrastructure, whether your methodologies, your maturity, the learning and development career paths for people. I always ask a few questions at every stage. Why do people want to work for us? Why do customers want to do business with us? And why do partners want to stay with us? I think if we can answer those three questions, there has to be a reason. And one thing that I always. Then the next thing is, okay, how can I find win win situations with employees, with customers? And what is that? What are those win win situations that I. What can I offer for them? What is in it for them? I think that's kind of becomes really an important question to answer.
- [13:24]
Dan
I love those three questions, by the way, I almost feel like everyone at every stage should, almost every week we should be asking ourselves those questions. And I think it'd be surprising, like what the answers would be if we're open to hearing, right? I don't know if every CEO is always open to hearing, but I can tell you are and that's why you've been able to keep going. There's A. There's a lot of talk around M and A, and for a lot of reasons, right? You have a massive group, a generational group that's retiring. They want to get out of their business. Also, people are realizing that maybe, maybe M and A is a great way for them to not have to start at zero or they're at 50 and they want to get to 100. And like you said, a lot of people are wanting to be acquired because that's why they started their business. How are you looking at M and A in terms of growth for you all?
- [14:20]
Karan
Great question. So through my lens, we had M and A as a strategy. Since last few years, Once we crossed 50, we've been looking at M and A as our growth strategy as well. But whether it's organic growth or inorganic growth, it is.
- [14:42]
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- [15:42]
Karan
Just a tool and then you have to look at Are you making an acquisition because you have a gap in your execution? Or are you making an acquisition because this can add on to your capability.
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Commercial Narrator
Or.
- [16:05]
Karan
A gap that you have in your business service offerings? I say if it should never Be because you have a gap in execution that can be a disaster. So that's exactly what we were building. And then the second is you have to build a muscle internally, whether it's a leadership muscle, your infrastructure, your ability to integrate and M and S really sucks up all your leadership oxygen. Are you ready for that? Do you have that leadership bench strength? So those are the things that we've been preparing for. One, we acquired for the right reasons, which is we have not a gap in execution, but we have a gap in our service offerings. And then two is, do we have the management bench strength? And three, we have infrastructure, processes and methods so that we can integrate successfully. So we were preparing for those three for the last few years and we started looking for acquisitions. It took us some time. Again, this acquisition that we made, we didn't go and hire an investment bank. We didn't go raise fund for this. So we did again, organic, we did search, find a target company, several companies, of course. And then we did fund this acquisition through our own organic cash flow. So even this whole acquisition, end to end, we did it organically. That actually speaks volumes of how ready we are to, to really do this transaction. So that's from the experience.
- [18:06]
Dan
No, I appreciate you saying that. And I've heard friends that have sold their companies that even the process, like the due diligence process was something that they would never want to do again. But they learned a lot about structuring things from the beginning because I think we all know as business owners, many times people are just like running. They don't, like, they're not experts in finance and all these other things and they don't track a lot of things and it's kind of chaos. And then when they get to that point, they realize like they didn't do all these things that are needed for this. And then the due diligence could be extremely time consuming, lengthy and stressful. When you, I know you have canvas AI and I'm very excited about AI agents. You have companies like Salesforce changing their name possibly and talk going all in on AI agents and it seems like it's moving 100 miles every half second here. So what, what excites you in the currently right now in early 2026 about AI agents and what this is going to do for businesses?
- [19:14]
Karan
Absolutely. Great question. So one of the things that I mentioned, we are building a company to last. We are here to stay for a long time. We have to stay relevant. We have to build solutions and services that our customers will need. Not only Today, but the next five years, 10 years, that's the value that we create for our customers. So how do we innovate ourselves and how do we stay on top of the technology? How do we help our customers to really realize all the tech breakthroughs that are happening, all the agent force that you're talking about, all the agentic and AGI that's in the future, robots, everything that's happening. And of course this time it is coming. This innovation, this disruption is at a different level than the previous two that we have seen. The cloud was the last one and then prior to that it was an Internet. And we have seen these cycles. This is the third big one since we started the company and we invest in that innovation. We stay very close to our partners. In this case we partner with Salesforce, ServiceNow, Oracle, Bomi, SAP and also now we are looking at the new age companies like Anthropic or OpenAI and Glean. We just signed a partnership with them just, you know, a few days ago. Glean AI. But that's not enough. And since we stay very close to the customer because we are in the services business, we stay close to the customer, we understand the customer's pulse and then what they're looking for, they they really need. So five years ago we have seen this because the whole AI, what we hear today, in the last few weeks, there's a lot of noise. But at the same time it's been a while we've been working on the machine learning, creating models and for five years ago we were trying to automate business processes using the machine learning and large language models. So as part of that five years ago we saw an opportunity to help our customers with this innovation automation. So we founded a new company, Canvas AI and it's primarily canvas building products, helping our customers to take away all these low hanging business process activities so that people can do high value activities rather than whether it's entering data or processing the data or collaborating and conversation as well. So we did build machine learning and large language models and we have customers. So one advantage we have, we have taken those products to some of our existing Jade global customers and they saw the instant value and they became our lighthouse customers. And then of course Canvas AI went on and sold the solutions to many other customers. But today Canvas AI is an agentic platform. We pivoted last few years we started as an automation using IDP and ocr, all the tech using machine learning. With the last couple of years we started building the platform agent platform. Now our platform is ready 35 customers on the platform. Now we are deploying the agents. What the agents do is in the enterprise world, a lot of back office work, whether it's payables or receivables or sales orders processing, dealing with the customers, vendors. We are helping our customers to take away a lot of this mundane, all the, the low hanging, low value, all that and even the complex ones, actually that's more important. AI, unlike previous automation tools, they could solve simple problems but with AI actually you can target to solve the most complex ones too. So we have deployed agents for 35 plus customers and it's on a growth path. Again, it's all organic. But the good thing is Jade Global is funding and we still have not went out to raise any fund for either Canvas AI or Jade Global. And since we have a 22 years of operating history, we are funding from our own cash flow, which is great. But at some point I see that Canvas AI can really grow very fast and we will be looking out to raise some money in the future. And, and it is its own entity and its own company and, and I happen to right now run both. But at some point I have to choose between the two.
- [24:39]
Dan
Oh, that's amazing. I think it's, I think it's so great when you, if you have a core business and you start something else, you can then merge the two in terms of like client base. Like if you have another one, you might as well dogtail it into, you know, the current clients that you already have. You know their problems, you can solve their problems. I think people sometimes will launch like services and products that no one really needs because I think they need more services and products versus something that you know, that is genuinely like, okay, I know my clients have this problem, I might as well have this other company and then that company grows and that can do its own thing. Like it's, it's, it's fascinating. I love the business world. All the things that we learn from people like yourself. If you want to get in touch with you by the way, because you have fascinating story. I love this. I mean bootstrapped to a hundred million, that's incredible. 22 years of business over 22 years is, is amazing too. But you, you taught us a lot. So if you want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more. How can they do so?
- [25:40]
Karan
Absolutely. And I would love to talk to you again. And this is my passion in building the company and multiple companies now. And I'm always open to helping people and giving at least my point of view if it helps. And I'm sure I've learned a lot of lessons in the last 22 years building a company from 0 to 100. And also we are not stopping here. And this is one milestone. We are already past that 100 million with this acquisition but we'll continue to use the M and A as a tool to grow and it's a complex process. And also like I said 70% companies don't realize the value that they expect shareholder value. But we are a good platform J Global. The way we built is really broad in the sense in terms of the service portfolio and we are one stop shop for most of our customers and that helps us really. We see those synergies that where we can easily acquire the companies and then as long as we have a very strong execution engine and we have a solid infrastructure and we have a strong leadership team and a great culture. And by the way, we are GPTW certified for the last several years. That speaks volumes. And we'll continue the journey and yes, we want to see 250 million in the next few years.
- [27:19]
Dan
Well, I gotta say 22 years ago you had less gray hair. I'm guessing I had hair 22 years ago and now I don't have hair. So a lot changes in 22 years and that, that is, I'm, I think it's like year 5 or year 10. It's like 90% of companies don't even exist anymore. So I love your long term vision and 250 is next. You have this other platform that could be a unicorn in itself. Super exciting. I can't wait a year from now. It's so hard to even think about what's going to even be around in a year from now in terms of technology. It's advancing so quickly. It's just, it's what an exciting time to not only be alive but to also be in business and be able to leverage all these things. But Karan, thank you so much for joining us today on Founders Story.
- [28:09]
Karan
Thanks Dan. It was great pleasure talking to you and thanks for helping me bring my story and tell my story. Thank you.
- [28:23]
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