Automation, Empathy, and Letting Go in Tech | Sunil Ranka of Predikly on BeyondSaaS Ep 009

Jason Niedle Today we’re talking with Sunil Ranka, the founder of Predikly, about how growth decisions should both be process driven, but also consider the chaos, decision flux, and real life constraints.

Welcome to Beyond SaaS, Sunil. Before we jump in, have you got a golden nugget for us today?

Sunil S Ranka Thank you Jason for the opportunity. My golden nugget would be Never Split the Difference. That’s the book I’m reading right now. And the premises is negotiate as if your life depend on it. So would highly recommend the book by Chris Voss.

And he is an ex-FBI agent who was recruited to negotiate hostage situation for Middle East.

Jason Niedle I’ll do some quick introductions here. I am Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We’re a growth agency and for over 20 years we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, lead gen and conversion. And today I’m really excited to be joined by you Sunil, founder of Predikly, which is a data innovation and robotic process automation company. And I hear Sunil that you thrive on solving deep tech problems.

that you’re a mentor helping younger people and products and startups, and that you have this great way of spotting talent and that you’ve invested in, looks like almost two dozen startups so far. So it sounds like you have this great balance between like bleeding edge technology knowledge and also the Silicon Valley growth mindset. So welcome.

Sunil S Ranka Thank you so much Jason, excited.

Jason Niedle Tell me a little bit about Predikly and how do you see your role and what’s your current growth focus?

Sunil S Ranka So Predikly is the name itself is about prediction likely. So I’ve been very fortunate to be on a bleeding edge of technology. So I’ve always invested six to seven years ahead of time. I was part of ERP, left ERP for BI, BI for Big Data, and then been through a few acquisitions, built a company, sold it. And about seven years back, we were very certain that AI is going to be the prime time.

And that’s how we started Predikly because I took a year long course by Andrew Ng about

machine learning and AI and every time they talked about it said likelihood of prediction is 90 percent, likelihood of prediction is 20 percent and that’s when I said okay if I need to build a company it has to be Predikly because prediction likely. So that’s how the name came up. What we do is we started as an AI company, failed miserably and then that’s how we pivoted to automation because what we thought was automation is going to be the next big thing and nobody had heard about RPA which is robotic process automation. So we as a

company identify the inefficiency in their processes by doing automated process discovery and then take those processes and documentation and convert that into automation and the newer way to do those automations AI agent. So we are focusing on the next generation of bleeding edge technologies right now.

Jason Niedle So that sounds really fascinating for me, but I don’t know if I fully understand. What would be like a specific example of that?

Sunil S Ranka the simplest example you can think of is a today you make a phone call to a support service center. Now most of the time the most expensive commodity in the world is a human talent and if that human talent is trained on your product that’s even more valuable to you. Now would you like to utilize the human talent on repetitive mundane stuff which is like reset your password.

versus, you know what, go here, click here, make this setting change and then your computer would run faster. Just a comparative analogy. So what the next generation of automation is bringing onto the table is solving the repetitive mundane tasks by machines rather than utilizing a human. And you utilize a human in the loop only when there is a critical mask is required, which is like critical thinking is required. So that’s what we are on the path of building AI.

solutions which can help companies accelerate their growth so that same amount of people, bigger growth, improvising your margin and better balance sheet.

Jason Niedle I love that. So what stage would you consider Predikly in startup, mid-stage, beyond?

Sunil S Ranka So from the age perspective, we are about seven years old. So if you take dog life, we are 49 years But what I would say is we’ve been so fortunate that we are rebuilding this company fourth time. We started AI, we failed, we built automation.

pandemic came, we lost customers, we brought back customers. Thanks to Chat GPT, the rule-based automation took a new turn, which was nobody wanted to do it. And we were like, okay, fine, we are going to rebuild it. So from the nascent stage of the technology piece, I would say we are pre-seen, early stage company, but from the maturity perspective, we are about seven years old.

Jason Niedle Wow. And I wouldn’t say you failed, you just tested and changed your course pretty quickly, right? So that’s how you get there.

Sunil S Ranka You one of my mentor taught me very simple that we are humble, but we are not simple. So what it means is, yes, we are accepting that we failed because we did not know what to do. And as Michael Jordan says, right, you need to fail a hundred times to be successful only once. So

Jason Niedle Mm-hmm.

Sunil S Ranka When we failed in AI, we knew exactly why we failed. And this time when we need to succeed in AI, we exactly know what we need to do to notch up that failure into a success. So that’s why I take a proud in calling out that we failed. And we failed multiple times, and that’s why we are here.

Jason Niedle because you learned from each one of those. So in that regard, What are you aiming for in the next year?

Sunil S Ranka Yes, that’s correct.

mean as a founder and you’re a founder too right. I mean even though you’re running it for like last 22 years but that doesn’t mean that you’re too old to be the game. You are reinventing the

crux of the game every year because technology is changing. We are in the field of technology. So this year our primary focus is AI agents and we fundamentally believe AI agent is going to change the world to the extent where the human capital will be better utilized. The way If you look at the way ERPs of the world and the software of the world made the department more efficient.

This is the first time humans are going to be far more efficient because of machine. And machines are going to be equally more efficient compared to the humans are. So it’s going to be the race and who’s going to win is going to be the deciding factor. And AI agents are going to help us define that path.

Jason Niedle This is the second time this week I’ve heard about AI agents and I feel like maybe I don’t have a full understanding of what that’s gonna look like in a few years down the road. Like, what might that look like as we go forward?

Sunil S Ranka I think that’s a time capsule. The time is going to tell us what it will look like. But I can talk about what it is today. I was evaluating one of the startup a few years back and you know I was telling the founder that the only way the industry can change is once we start capitalizing on human brain. Have you heard about CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA

the concept called CAPTCHA when you try to log in and there are set of images which you show up all the time, right? It’s actually what’s happening is this guy who said the human brain is so valuable that I don’t even want to waste even a second of the human brain. And all CAPTCHA takes is less than five seconds of your time. But behind the scene, they’re translating millions and millions of data points like books and everything else.

Jason Niedle Yeah, all the time.

Sunil S Ranka Having said that, the most expensive commodity is the human brain. And how do you make sure that that human brain is utilized only for the things which matters. Now AI agents are assistive. If you have a 7 billion people on the world, let’s say 50 % of them are working. And if you can save even a fraction of a second from 7 billion.

You’re saving every hour, years and years and years. What AI agent is going to do is think of them as an AI assistant who can help you do your job faster. simple example could be you buy a mopper at home or you bought an iRobot at your home to help out your wife. Same work is done by her.

but all she has to do is just pick it up, it in a corner, or if you buy the more fancy one, it will automatically map it on it. So that’s an older version of physical AI agent, which is helping you assist. And that’s where the world is going to move that more and more AI agent behavior we bring into our process, the life of human is going to change better and better. And this time, the AI agent is going to really make a difference.

in the business processes and I think that’s what we are more excited about.

Jason Niedle So what would you say your biggest obstacle to growth is this year?

Sunil S Ranka I think the common challenge in its growth is not just about acquiring new customers. It’s about scaling efficiently while maintaining the quality. For us, a major challenge has been building a structured sales organization. As a technical founder, we can solve lot of complex problems, but translating that into a repeatable sales process, because what’s happening is

Even though we are such a small organization, we have always taken a bleeding edge approach, which means something which does not exist today. We are trying to sail the wave as we are building it. We have jumped off the plane and we building the parachute as we are jumping off. So repeatable sales process, pipeline management.

requires a different skill than a technical founder. And another challenge is a long sales cycle in enterprise automation because that landscape is changing, where the decision making can be slower despite of a clear ROI because today people are spending a lot more time on understanding where the dollar they want to spend.

Jason Niedle I imagine it’s hard to sell when you’re so at the bleeding edge that you know that in three months and six months and nine months your product’s going to be completely different, right? And your clients know that too.

Sunil S Ranka That’s correct.

Jason Niedle How do you get around that?

Sunil S Ranka My mom told me a philosophy actually and it’s a very simple philosophy She said, okay, you know why you worry about it? There’s seven billion people in the world. You just need one. So the point here is depending upon what’s your appetites and what your aspirations are at our level, right? I’m not looking like a Microsoft, like 10,000 customers a year.

Jason Niedle Mm.

Sunil S Ranka What I’m looking for is, we are looking for those 30, 40 customers a year. And you can always find one person within that 30, 40, I mean, you know better than anybody, Jason, right? mean, to acquire a 40 customer, you may have to reach out to 40,000 people, and then it trickles down to maybe 30 or 40 customers, right? All you need is that people who believe into the idea that we want to be different. And it’s not getting harder now because

Jason Niedle Mmm.

Sunil S Ranka You know, people wants to be into that bracket where they want to say, okay, you know what, I made a significant difference because now people want to learn. And only way you can have a jump in your career, if you have not used it, it’s going to be harder for you to get it because you don’t want to be that Kodak moment. So we are getting a good traction. It’s harder, but once we get the right person, it’s easier.

Jason Niedle I keep telling my 10 year old that the only one thing he really needs to know is that change is going to be a constant. Like with a rapid pace of change, like he does have to know things of course. But the way to survive this future of rapid and increasing growth is to just be aware that change is inevitable.

Sunil S Ranka Actually that’s a very good point and I have a 14 year old and now I have a son, my daughter she’s in Riverside. She’s trying to figure out her professional part of the life. The agility is going to be very important. mean I don’t think the teachers, schools are teaching them. Schools are teaching more like in a curriculum right now. But I think the way it needs to be is everyone has to be an entrepreneur because I don’t think so in 15 years from now there’ll be all full time jobs.

There’ll be very few full-time people out there where can spend 40 hours. You might have to do like 30 hours of x thing, 20 hours of other things, and 10 hours of other things to accumulate that 40 hours. So as long as you are willing to take chances, as long as you are adaptable, I think you’ll do well.

Jason Niedle So speaking of doing well, What’s working well for you in terms of growth? What can somebody learn from you about how to grow a tech company?

Sunil S Ranka When I started, everyone talked about one thing which was win the deal, win the deal. And always the approach was can we win the deal? And the mindset was okay, I want to win the deal. I want to win the deal or we want to win the deal. And that we included only one side of the paradigm, which was Predikly.

And we always started putting the things together, not thinking the other person’s mindset.

Jason Niedle Hmm.

Sunil S Ranka So it was never a win-win a deal. It was always win-a-deal. I think we changed that paradigm from win-a-deal to win-win-a-deal. And I think that has changed a lot because I follow Jainism. So there are three core principles of Jainism which I missed practicing when I started the company. It was like non-violence, which was predominantly we’ve been practicing for life. Anekantwad, which is like multiple views.

Jason Niedle Mm.

Sunil S Ranka And third one is aparigraha means like non-attachment. So if you can take the last two pieces of a puzzle together, which is anekantwad, which is like multiple views, which now we call it empathy. And the last piece is aparigraha which is non-attachment that, OK, if I don’t get attached to a particular deal, we are going to do well, because then we are going to just think very, separate the person from the process or separate the outcome from the person, right? Then you start thinking more rationally.

because people make emotional decisions. those are some of the things we did well. Another thing what really is helping us is thanks to chat GPT, the art of possible has become very easy. Now people believe it that yes, it can be done. It has brought in another set of challenges that hey, know what, AI is a magic wand and I can get anything done. Just I have to just pull some band out and say, voila, and it’s done.

So an education has become far more important for us as we speak. So what have become is over the years since we have done so much automation, we have done so many process flows, Those are helping us sell better. And the most important thing is we have been able to identify the person on us, that who’s the buyer. And we learned something very interesting that

Jason Niedle Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sunil S Ranka The guy who writes a check is not the buyer. The guy who…

influences the deal is the buyer but it’s just that he or she doesn’t have the right authority so we did some of the things we’ve been short as we went along and that’s where we are at.

Jason Niedle There’s so many interesting things in that what you just said, right? Because as a marketer all the time, I come to a lot of companies that are not very sophisticated and they’re not thinking about the what’s in it for you. And so they’re talking about me, me, me, I’m great, my company’s great, all this is great, but right, we come to these organizations and we’re looking for something very specific for us. And so I see content and copy and strategy that is very missing the target in that way. And you can’t

know what’s in it for you if you don’t know who the you is, right? So if you don’t have a clear persona and how these various different personas affect everything, then you’re in trouble. How do you find these personas that you’re looking for? How do you generate leads?

Sunil S Ranka So that’s a million dollar question, actually. So every organization in their growth phase has a bottleneck. And in our case, the bottleneck right now is, and this might sound music to you, is lead generation, right? Because I think that’s what you’ve been doing for last 22 years, right? And I think what I hear is.

You guys are fair and you guys are more growth driven and value driven rather than, “I need to win a client.” That’s what I think I got from the base of the conversation. So kudos to you. I’m sure you have very happy customers. I think in our case, the challenge has been how do we generate the leads because leads come at a cost. As a newer organization, right, you always feel, you know what, somebody sold you a drink. I’ll send you like 40,000 emails. Half of them will reply. But the problem is,

cold emailing is kind of on a death path because we get so many junk mails. I mean we hired this agency and then one fine day they came back after a month they said you know what there’s a change in internet the our filters are not working and we are getting spammed. Okay fine, month is gone. Now that people said why don’t you guys try you know making a phone calls and we said okay fine let’s hire a team. Now every time a company like us with

the very minimal budget, we try out something new. It’s not about the money. It’s about the loss of opportunity. If I try something new in Q1, thinking it might come back in Q3, and if I don’t result anything Q3, I lost the six months time. So that’s a challenge. So lead generation has been a challenge for us, but fortunately we have landed into a couple of good companies. They write short emails. We are able to get a few people on the call, but most of the time,

Jason Niedle Mm-hmm.

Sunil S Ranka been in the industry for the last 25 years, been very loyal to our customers and loyal to our partners. Our biggest deal year over year has been a referral. And I do not know how to crack more referrals, but that’s where we are at.

Jason Niedle Sometimes there are tricks to referrals and it’s unique to each different business. But I had a consultant who came to me and he was a business consultant and he was like, how do get more referrals out of my people? he made some really special cards. metal cards $300 value, free consultation. And so he gave his customers these VIP credits for consultations and then they gave them to their friends.

And so sometimes having a physical object when you’re in that niche is perfect. Everybody does referral bonuses in tech these days. There are ways to do it, but it takes careful thought and strategy.

Sunil S Ranka Thank

Yeah, so we are working on a very interesting concept right now. So we’re trying to build a community of leaders calling like circle of trust because everyone is going through that. We have recently hired someone called like a chief community officer. So we will be building one.

Jason Niedle Yeah, having a community is amazing. Any other marketing or sales tips that you want to share with our audience?

Sunil S Ranka Yeah.

So it may sound very oxymoron, but we never go and present a PowerPoint. We don’t even have a Because the problem what we saw with the deck was it was all about how great we are. It was never about who you are, why we are. So we said, OK, we stop building the decks. We go and ask three questions.

And the questions are.

who we are?, we are a company, big, small, Why did you join this call?, and what will be the best use of next 30 minutes of your time? And sometimes I ask, can you tell me the top three worries? And you will not believe, sometimes people say walking my dog is my top three worry because I don’t get much time. So here is the thing actually, and this may sound like a joke, but.

Jason Niedle Mmm.

Sunil S Ranka Once we were working with this one company, they are a manufacturer for Starbucks.

and Walmart, they’re a big brand name. And I was talking to this mother and said, what’s your big, top three big worry? She said, I want to spend more time kids. I said, that’s easy, right? I mean, what do you do after going home? She said, you know what? I have this problem where I have to run this damn thing where I download the data and then I massage the data and I just do the inventory checkups because every night we need to run this process. And I said, why do you do it at home? I said, you know, when I run this process,

It takes up all my memory. And I was like, okay, so why are you doing it? I said, no, this is what I’ve been told, to do the job. And when we were trying to do the process automation, and this was a very simple conversation during the lunch, I came back and I looked at it and I told him, hey, you know what? Look at this problem. I think this is a serious problem and she’s not able to spend time with the family. We came back and all we did was we put that entire process up into the cloud.

and made it run during the day so that her laptop doesn’t get cocked. She saved almost like two hours every day, or maybe like, I would say eight hours a week. And we shut down the project. I lost $60,000 because that’s the same process we are trying to automate, but nobody knew where the original data is coming from. And she’s the one who’s gonna give us the data. So we said, okay, now we don’t need to do this automation.

Jason Niedle Wow.

Wow.

Sunil S Ranka We can just fix this problem by just putting the small process improvement. So the point here is that’s how the ROI or that’s how the things needs to be started looking. And that’s where the difference what we brought into the table is rather than saying how great we are, we just ask the question. And that’s how we need to, once we get to know you, who you are, what’s your problem, we say, are we the right partner?

Jason Niedle Well, I love that and what you said, like the essence of what you do is you give people more time. And I don’t know a single person, particularly an entrepreneur or somebody in a tech company who says, you know what, I have too much time. Like that’s none of our problems. right? None of us are sitting around saying, I have too much free time on my hand. We’re all saying, how can I get more time? And that’s what you solve.

Sunil S Ranka In fact, actually that’s what the whole technology industry has been solving for ages now, right? I mean, if you take…

Jason Niedle supposedly, but

how much time do I waste on technology now?

Sunil S Ranka Well, I mean the point here is this, right, Jason. One of the things what I learned after investing into so many companies, right, the only way you can scale is thanks to technology. If technology was not there, you and I would have not met. Today we would have not been using the Riverside. We would have not been having this conversation.

Jason Niedle Mm-hmm.

Sunil S Ranka We are born to two different mothers, two different continents, different race, different color, different belief system. Why we are meeting today? Just because of technology. You send a note, I picked it up, I asked the person to do some research to see should we reply to this, and then we said, okay, fine, let’s have a conversation without any expectation. That’s where we are at, right? And it’s thanks to Of course, it’s gonna…

Jason Niedle And thanks for you letting go

of your attachments.

Sunil S Ranka Of course it’s going to cost you an hour and me an hour but beyond that hopefully this is going to be worth it.

Jason Niedle It’s going to be great.

What you talked about earlier is really important. The human mind now used to have to kind of handle anything, everything. And now we’re saying, okay, the human mind is going to handle less and less. We’re going to automate more and more. what are you looking for when you look for good people and good partners? Because you can automate a lot of the stuff they do. What is the spark that you’re looking for in a human?

Sunil S Ranka Rather than looking at a human, what we look at a process, people involved, and what is an actual ROI this process can achieve if you automate it.

I’ll give you a very simple example. We just recently got introduced to a company in Europe. They are one of the largest ones. They have some kind of a luxury spa company. They came back with five processes and they said, okay, you know what, this is what we need to automate and we did the casting and we said, no, we won’t automate for you because…

After a year, you’re gonna come back running after me saying that, the money what I spent is not even worth, you know, I’m not even getting an ROI. So in our case at least, we’re not looking at directly people, but what we’re looking at is essentially whether a process is gonna give you an ROI. And as part of the ROI calculation, we are looking at the human capital, which means, okay, how much time the human is gonna spend, whether it’s gonna add a value to the balance sheet.

how many error reductions we are going to do, whether it’s going to help us do the compliance, whether it’s going to help you do the better cash flow management. So those are the aspects what we look at it. So the whole ROI is a gamut of things and human capital is one of them.

Jason Niedle So then how do you find good people?

Sunil S Ranka We have very simple process actually. I think the most important piece is we look at the culture of the individual because we cannot hire somebody who comes with a mindset of everything will be given to us at, in a plated plate. There’d been situation where we could not or we refused to hire.

people who are like super experienced with like a Fortune 100 company because they are more mindset of, I have been told that this will need to be delivered in next one year. And that’s how their mind works because it’s like very boilerplate. Give me something, I will execute it, the delivery will happen. But in our case, it’s going to be okay. We need to deliver tomorrow. So we are looking for those agile people, people who have a mindset of hunger.

and a growth. And in our scenario, every employee what we hire has to be adaptive, which means a technology is changing. The change is constant, as you said. So in our case, it could be chat GPT. We are doing a prototype with like say a company XYZ. We’re doing another prototype. We are doing a comparison study and we are bringing the best value to our customers. So our people have to be agile. Entrepreneurs from the past life are the best fit for us, at least the entrepreneur mindset.

Jason Niedle That’s great. So what would you tell other CEOs who might be at an earlier place than you? What would you advise them?

Sunil S Ranka Maybe if somebody asked me what I would have done differently I would have invested more into sales. Typically a technical founders invest a whole lot into capability first. Let me build it then I will sell it because the technologies cannot lie and that’s our problem.

Jason Niedle Mmm.

Sunil S Ranka because in our heart we know it doesn’t work. you flip the switch and you hire a sales guy, his whole job is detachment. He does not care that whether it works, as long as the parameters are defined for him, he will go and sell it and a good technologist will go ahead and build it.

So what I should have done is I should have hired a bigger sales organization, smaller delivery organization, but we did the other way around. We built the delivery capabilities first and then a bigger sales team.

Jason Niedle Maybe that was

just what you needed though, right? Because that way you didn’t spend a bunch of money on a product that wasn’t going to fit right, and now you’re at the time where you can now have the right product and the right sales team.

Sunil S Ranka Well, I mean, we are a consulting company. We are not a product development company. So for us, we are profitable, hour one. We are at a loss, hour one. In our case, time passed is never get billed. Okay, pandemic hit. You can have like a 50 people team. You keep building the product, voila. Post pandemic, you get a big deal. You have an exit. In my case, if I have like 10 people sitting on the bench for a year,

the money paid is gone because nobody’s gonna give me a value. Oh wow, you know what, I’m so happy with you. You kept your people. You know, here is like 50 % more than I’m gonna pay from the industry. No, nobody’s gonna do that. In fact, we are always under margin pressure. Right now, every customer is asking for 5 % discount. Wherein, our people are asking for 7 % raise. Inflation adjusted, right? So we are always on the receiving side as a consulting company and that’s one of the things we are working on to change from being a pure play.

service integrators, how do we become a solutions player?

Jason Niedle That’s been huge for us too, right? Because for most of my career, for 18, 20 of our years, we were essentially a service provider and you come to us and you want a website and we make you a website, but we’d come build a $50,000 or $100,000 website and then those people would be gone and I’m looking for the next business and my people are sitting around idle and then I’m trying to figure out, how do I cover the expense of those people? And that rolls into the next job and then we just end up too expensive, right?

Sunil S Ranka That’s correct. think that’s what I mean the challenge of the services business is right at the end of the day.

Jason Niedle Yeah. So last question, I think in this moment of radical change in the world here, what do see as trends for tech and tech growth is coming year?

Sunil S Ranka I would focus on the industry where I belong to which is more like enabling human capital or giving more time to human, right? That’s our tagline.

AI power automations is a trend or what we call it like AI agentic process. Composable enterprise solution like modular flexible automation rather than large monolithic implementations. Process intelligence or automated process intelligence before automation is going to be important because you know your ROI

from the ground up rather than waiting for it post building it.

The industry is shifting from cost saving to growth enhancing automation. So instead of just using, to cut the cost, now companies are looking at how it can drive the revenue and innovation. And one of the things which we always talk about is,

Jason Niedle Mmm.

Sunil S Ranka Automation is not about just bringing a technology. It’s about bringing a culture of innovation. Once you know that using a technology, it can improve my life or my team’s life, you start thinking in that direction. Because seeing is believing, touching is feeling.

those are some of the changes what we are seeing in the industry.

Jason Niedle Fascinating, I feel like I could talk with you on that topic for an hour, but I’m not gonna keep you any longer. Where can my audience find you?

Sunil S Ranka Feel free to drop me a line at my first name dot last name at Predikly.com Would be happy to educate because I’m one of the board of directors at Florida International University and I have a fiduciary duty to bring academics to the general population or the industry. So yeah, if you are a CIO CEO, I have a fiduciary responsibility to spend

couple of hours educating people.

Jason Niedle Sounds great. And the website, is p-r-e-d-i-k-l-y.com. Right? p-r-e-d-i-k-l-y.com.

Sunil S Ranka That is correct. then you can Google search Sunil Ranka Forbes and it will lead you to my Forbes articles. then yeah, read them, provide feedback. And then what we do is we periodically keep releasing a few videos about the thought process and what we are learning from the industry. So we are here to educate.

Jason Niedle Perfect. Sunil, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS.

For listeners who are leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, please drop any questions or comments below or look me up at tethos.com, t-e-t-h-o-s.com and or reach out for a no obligation consultation on how to grow your company. Until next time, this is Beyond SaaS.