Building the AWS of Testers w/LambdaTest's Asad Khan - Indian Silicon Valley

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Welcome to the Indian Silicon Valley Podcast. I'm your host, Jivraj, and on this podcast, I speak with founders, investors, and domain experts from the Indian Valley, trying to understand the art of building a legendary company. In this episode, I speak with Asad Khan, co-founder and CEO of LambdaTest. 

Asad is one of the fascinating founders I've had on the show as he exhibits the founder experience from a bootstrap mindset, building a multibillion-dollar services business, and the venture mindset building a global product giant. LambdaTest is working towards becoming the AWS of Testers, covering more than a million developers and 500 enterprises. They are one of the most disruptive DevTools companies being built in India for the world.

 Considering the innovative nature of what the USA is building and the massive scope ahead, I was mindful of the insights we could derive from this journey. Through the episode, we focused on tactical aspects around hiring senior leaders, looking out for great talent, the importance of storytelling internally at a growth-oriented, fast-moving company. These GTM strategies worked and that did not, and we tried to uncover how LambdaTest got here.

 And with that, let's dive into the 132nd episode of the Indian Silicon Valley podcast with Asad of LambdaTest.

Thank you so much, Asad, for joining me. Incredibly delighted to be hosting you today.

Asad Khan

Thanks for having me today. Thank you.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Awesome. This has been a long time coming, but I'm fascinated by what you're building with LambdaTest and what the broader team is working towards. We were briefly discussing your mission of enabling the software development journey for developers from India to build global companies. We want to uncover much of how you built LambdaTest and your personal journey. But to get us started, what's fascinating is that before your stint with LambdaTest that continues, you built a company in the services space in a similar sector where it was used for testing. Right. And before that, you've had instances with technology and this space that have shaped your thought process. If you can give the audience more context around what has this journey been like, how did you get fascinated by the idea of entrepreneurship, your first business venture in the services space? That would be a great conversation starter.

Asad Khan

Sure. Jivraj, I started my career working with a product engineering company called Global Logic. I worked with them for five years, helping their product companies in the Bay Area mostly. And I was busy working with the fintech product company in the Bay Area, helping them on the quality assurance side, and then moved into business analysis, doing some presales for them. Their customers were primarily top-tier banks like Bacovia PNC, US Trust, and Bank of America. It was a lot of learning working with the product team and how the core engineering and professional services work.

 Back then, the enterprise software was mostly being shipped in the distro and CDs. I am talking about 2004 and onwards to 2009, mostly in enterprise software. You needed a lot of foot on the ground; you needed a lot of network referrals. That's how the sale used to happen. And the ticket size of that software was quite big. It starts from $3 million and goes up to 100 million dollar deals. 

But from 2010 onwards, the trend started shifting towards the cloud. That's how it moved very fast. Before I go into that, I left Global Logic in 2010 and started an independent, pure-play boutique testing services company. And the focus right from the beginning was to help the product companies in the Bay Area and Central Europe market and set up their quality engineering lab right here in Noida. It's my hometown, and we started building their Selenium Automation lab and performance engineering as well as mobile automation. We scaled that company from zero to 250 FTEs on board, around five $6 million in revenue. 

Bootstrap business development and strategy were handled by me. Right from here, we had a very good account from starting from a quarter million to half a million to $1 million. We never had a foot on the ground. So that gave me the opportunity to learn how to crack the bigger deals on the phone as well. But I was not involved in engineering. My partner was involved. We got acquired in early 2015, and after helping them, in a year and a half, I had an exit. In 2017 the idea of the LambdaTest started shaping up when I was doing my last company because we were doing a lot of automation for our customers. And the question was what this space would look like after 15 years from here. The answer was that we have enough tooling in this space. Are we struggling? Do the couple of products that they have fulfilled the demand, or are they innovating enough? Or if not, what could be done that was the open questions, right? We started pursuing it in 2017. We decided that we wanted to build it.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Interesting. That's awesome to hear. I think after that stint taking that again, bold decision to go into the same space, but with a different approach, with a productized one, and backing yourself with that belief for the audacious vision of how you call it building the AWS for testers, if I'm not wrong and that's what LambdaTest is setting out to achieve. For more context, I understand this is a testing platform for developers on a broad basis of it for those who do not know much. But if you can maybe share more about the zero-to-one journey of LambdaTest, giving us some context of what the realm of opportunity it covers and where it has headed, especially with context to the initial journey, I think that'll be very helpful as well.

Asad Khan

Zero to one was very confusing. Jibraj, I'll be very honest. When we started, low-hanging fruits were available in the market, mostly in the browser and app testing market. And we started in a similar market. We started selling it. But the question was can you keep selling this product for the next 15 years? The answer was no. So what you're doing? Can it exist for the next 20 years? Are you building for the next 20 years? So the answer was no. Who's going to tell you what to build? That was the biggest problem. 

I mean, no advisor or no investor or no founder can figure out by themselves what has to be built for the next 20 years. Actually, it's only customers. Our customers started telling us, and I was quite focused on it and pushed the team very hard. We have to listen to them. I mean, every small and big piece of information has to be captured. And I knew that if I left it to the team, we might lose it, we might skip it. So I took it in my hand. 

This is where shifting from a services company to a product company. The biggest challenge was that I myself actually transformed into a product guide. I was doing business development, unlearning and learning every bit and piece again, and listening to the customer and figuring out that because I come from landscape, I can connect faster with the use case than my team, who's getting on board and they learn the landscape and the domain. For the next two years, you might lose a lot of things. I started working myself on all these use cases which come from customers, which are coming from customers, actually. But in December 2019, we clearly found that what we have to bear for the very long term is that each and every digital test in this digital economy the long term has to be tested on LambdaTest. That's a very long-term goal.

 I mean, people can call you the AWS of testers. They might call you something else. But the final show is that you are running each and every test of the digital economy, whether it's running on the web or mobile or IoT or MetaWatch, anything you want, right? So that's where you want to go. And in the very long term, people are writing a lot of tests. So when you write a lot of code, it is a tech debt. When you're writing a lot of tests, then it's test debt. So imagine, after ten years, you're working on the same suite, and you actually bloated it, where 40-50% of the tests are not useful anymore. 

What will the team look like? What will the execution look like? Will you run those tests forever? Or you need a smart system that can tell you that these are dirty tasks. Test that it's a massively evolved system and platform needed in the smart. We started inching towards that goal, actually. And we shipped our flagship product this January called Hyper Execute, which is like transitioning from Amazon EC Two to Kubernetes. So imagine you were doing engineering on a lot of engineering on EC Two. And then Kubernetes came. A lot of things offloaded can be self-auto, scale, self-healing, and a lot of things can be taken care of by Kubernetes itself.

 That's where our shift happened in the last four years. I think we are an odd little company that invested heavily in engineering. In general, when you are on a zero-to-one journey, it's more about the product. Then one to ten is sold. But our focus on engineering never went down. We kept investing massively. Our 75% of investment went into engineering. You have to build it for a very long term, so you have to get ready for the scale and also multiple product lines on one platform, building it to the highest level of quality. Giving the experience to the customer that they can love was challenging. But somehow, this is also getting true that my team, our engineers, are doing this right here in Noida, that we are simply super proud of.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Phenomenal. I know the transformation from what it started to what it has become and where it is headed. And for you to continuously emphasize the long-term building for the 15-year mark is very, very interesting because I don't think there is anyone like that. I'm sure the best founders have that clarity, but to know that from the outside feels a little less believable. But for you to reiterate, it makes a lot of sense. And I think this is fascinating and interesting. Talk to us about how you had this intellectual honesty. Was it very simple for you to ask yourself that this is not the long term, this will not work out? How were you continuously focused on that long-term aspect? Because initially, it becomes about survival, right? You want to do anything that clicks because that becomes the nature for so much of what lies ahead, but talk to us about what is going inside your head at that time and how did you figure this part out?

Asad Khan

There were always two tracks short term to keep the show running and deploy your workforce in the long term only you have believed in. So I'll tell you that there are a lot of factors involved. When you build board members, you have investors. You have prospects coming in, customers, you have team members, and your job is to keep telling the stories in a different manner so that someone has the fit of story that they want to listen to. You can keep telling them, but the ultimate goal is you need a razor-sharp focus.

 That is how the short-term and long-term will go hand in hand. If you lose the focus on the long term, on a scale, get ready for disruption. Another LambdaTest is coming out, and the cycle is shrinking from 20 years to ten years. Now it's coming to five years. All of us are disruptible. I mean, people will come after us if you're not innovating enough. There will always be two tracks in LambdaTest. It is never-ending, the current and the future. 

So if you are a Datadog or Splunk or you see Snowflake, I mean there's continuous innovation every day. You cannot stay in the market for 30 years if you're not innovating enough. And that is not an overnight job. It's a culture. It's a culture, and you believe I'm okay to grow 60, 70% year on year than 100%, but not at the cost of not innovating enough. You also have to see that you will grow at the same pace after five years. The answer is different. So all these things come when you're working on strategy, working on the shaping of the future, how it will look like, you cannot decide. The customer decides. You go thousand times to your customers and tell them that you like this? Is it useful enough? Is the user coming, right? I mean, all t the metrics that you are tracking right now look promising. Keep building, keep asking.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

This is brilliant. I think this goes to a lot of the fundamentals that we hear, right? You have to think long long-term. Youto thinks about sustainable growth rates, not just growth rates in the short run. And I think the most commonly asked question for me on the show is how do you, as a founder, map the short term and the long term? And I think you answered it perfectly well there. It has to be a continued focus. Tell us how you engrave this culture within the team. Because I understand why you have it, you're passionate about it. You're able to look at the bigger picture, right? But in the day-to-day, it becomes very easy to kind of just miss the longer-term picture, right? How do you engrave this within the team and ensure that this is a culture-wide analysis, not just a one-person mindset?

Asad Khan

So two or three things are my daily job. You cannot take this away from me. It's my everyday job. I just have to talk with my team, some of them, on many different topics. Just keep talking about it, tell them, tell them the stories continuously. Keep telling them, keep repeating it until either they are fully disconnected from the league, or they buy it. Also, sharpen your strategy because when they're interested, they're telling you a lot of things that you are not aware of. So this culture is massive. In LambdaTest, I keep talking about it.

 I spend an hour and a half or 2 hours every day randomly talking to my team. What is next? What is going on? What do we have in the next four quarters? Or can we try? Are we trying enough? So you have to cross the red line almost every month. That is doable. If it is not doable, that's an opportunity for us. So it's just a perception, if you keep telling them a story, that the biggest problem that you are facing right now is the massive opportunity. We just have to decide whether the market is large enough for it or not. That's it. 

The second thing, I keep doing it. Even so far, even you are hiring interns. He has talked to me. I cannot let it go because that is the entry point where I'll fail. And third thing is you have to interact with a lot of people to figure it out. That is how other founders are shaping up the strategy. There's a lot of learning out, and definitely, you have to. If you're not emulating, maybe you can get some inspiration to sharpen your strategy. So hiring and telling them the story every day, almost every month, every week, repeating it many times, telling them what the opportunity is? People might take it as a joke, but I said the line you're writing will become immortal. The code you are writing will become immortal. Can you believe that? If you don't believe in that, you're not crazy enough to go in that direction.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

This is phenomenal. Asad, I think I love the emphasis on the things that really matter in the long run. So there is an overemphasis on telling stories, communicating, and hiring. I think these are all brilliant. Not just pointers, but the way you've exhibited you practice them are amazing points to note, and I think it'll be very helpful for founders. The other aspect is taking a segue to the business side of things, right? I was reading numbers …

Asad Khan

I will interrupt you for a few seconds. When I was starting my flagship product called Hyper Execute, the opportunity to think about that product was available to the whole team, but I just needed one guy to be sold on that story. The guy who was sold on that story made some progress. He is my third co-founder right now. I promoted him to co-founder because he innovated enough. He believed in the product from day one. We promoted him last year. You just need one person who can connect with the future the way you are connecting, and he or she is sold on the future. That was my first success when he started progressing a little bit, and there were almost 100 engineers on the team.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Tell us more. Tell us what that means. How do you evaluate the Founder mindset? To the extent that after somebody has been a team member, you elevate them to a co-founder role because they've exhibited these qualities. What were some of the other signals that convinced you that this ought to happen?

Asad Khan

The very first thing was, is your accountability deeper than me or higher than me? Is this something that you bleed for? The very first thing is, are you signing up for a long-term commitment? On the way, I signed up. And the second thing is that the moment you start talking in my language, actually the language I speak, can you storyify the future in the same manner I'm doing right now? Can you sell it to your team members? And the third thing, obviously, all other things are your hard work and your punctuality. We sacrifice a lot every day, so not everything you'll get is what you want if you're signing up with a founder. So these are the three things that I actually tabled to the board, and Harsh asked me that, does he believe that he's signing up for a very long term. I said more than I did. And that's how we promoted him.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

That's brilliant. I think accountability and commitment from the outside. It looks like, how did this happen? But it's lovely too. I think this is the first time on the show that I'm hearing a story like this, and I think it goes to show that the Founder mindset can be inculcated. It needs to be there organically, and then once it shows, it pays dividends as well. 

The right people will see it, and the trajectories will follow. But this is phenomenal. Thanks for sharing that. I think this is going to be an interesting one. But I was trying to understand more about, let's say, the business side. We've spoken a bit about the People side. We've spoken a bit about the platform now, but I think 500 plus enterprises and more than a million developers are using the platform right now if I have my numbers correct. Talk to us about what the journey in terms of just being sold to enterprises has taught in terms of learnings. And also, when you are building a product for developers at scale, what are the learnings? How do you ensure that this becomes almost like a daily part of their lives in terms of the experience? So if you can share thoughts there, I think it will be very helpful.

Asad Khan

So when you're building a dev tool, specifically, we learn that you should invest massively into engineering. You cannot compromise because your customers are super smart. They onboard very fast, and they leave very fast. Experience is everything. Did you add the value, and did you add the value in the fastest manner? They'll buy if they are talking about your product that is not right or that is not right. They are making so much noise. It means they love the product. It means they really want you to fix the product. Don't get afraid when they open thousands of tickets. 

So it is challenging when you're building a dev tool. But it is also a mind-blowing journey. I mean, you are working with the smartest ICP in the world. The brilliant brains are buying. And for initially they'll buy. I mean, SMBs will buy, individuals will buy, and they are enough to tell you what to build. The moment you grow your install base into assembly and mid-market or maybe individuals, someone from the Enterprise will come out of the box. That company will tell you what you have missed in Enterprise at that point in time.

 You should check your runway. You should check your team's capacity. You should also check everything is okay to start. Then you can probably start doing Enterprise. There's no playbook. Someone told me that you should not start until you are a 30 million revenue company. Someone told me that you cannot sell if you are less than $5 million. My experience says so far, start anytime when you're ready. There's no playbook. And in technology, probably, playbooks are getting obsolete almost every six months, a month, or a year. Things are changing so fast. What I'm telling you is not a playbook for our audience. It's just how we did it.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Absolutely. I think I love the fact that you can't take learnings without context, and this is personal to what LambdaTest went through things in terms of mistakes to avoid when one of them was, of course, feedback, right? Listen to feedback, don't ignore it. But anything else when setting up that initial sales channel, what should you not do? More importantly, I think there's a lot of commonality in negatives in GTM.

Asad Khan

It depends on the product by product and your market size. If you are in the 100 billion dollar market, you can probably clearly focus on product-led growth. But if you are, and that's our learning, I'm not saying this is right or wrong. I mean, not a playbook at all. I'll keep repeating it. 

So we believe that if it's a larmarket, product Led growth is actually the right approach to go after content, community, and distribution. But if it is a $5 billion market or less, your PLG will stagnate after some time. It will not be forever. So then you need a hybrid Go to market. 

But it doesn't happen overnight. You started with the product Led growth, you started getting some install base, and you started getting some traction, which actually got you PMF. PMF for assembled-market,d market, and the Enterprise started kicking in. Then you actually got some PMF for some enterprises. Then you start setting up your sales arc, and the Arc starts from the inside sales. If you're a PLG company, then it probably starts from inside sales. But at the same time, not many companies even failed two times to set up the outbound merchant. We failed almost three times, and my partner is a hawk salesperson. I mean you, when you'll interact, you will figure out that he is a cutthroat salesperson. And we failed together three times. But the fourth time, we got success. So another GDM Motion kicked in, and that outbound started contributing. We thought it would work in the same manner the services outbound worked. Actually, the classic mistake that was supposed to happen. But we realized very quickly that it's not a service outbound. It's a product outbound.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

What was the difference? I mean, for the audience side, maybe just a couple of strategic things.

Asad Khan

The hiring and the enablement was the biggest mistake. Enablement was not enough, and also targeting was not enough, was not right. So, you started fishing in the pond. It will not work. Then we narrowed down the focus, and we started getting some traction. It was not immediate. It took a lot of time. 

So, enabling one channel after another worked with us so far this year. We thought about how to go to the top of the pyramid, and after that node testing company went there and opened up the very top of the pyramid, like people who want to buy on-prem solutions. I come from a product engineering background, where I have actually seen how professional services and core engineering work together. I have seen that if your core product is maybe a million dollars, then you are doing around 500,000 professional services business as well. 

It used to be a trend 15 years back, but now most of the dev tools we have are selling licenses. So our PLG motion was set. It is working nicely. You have a massive funnel coming in. But at the same time, it started doubling down from the top down. Then it completes the bank, and I started looking after how these four or five funnels will look after 48 months. So it matched my number, what I was having in my mind because none of these funnels will grow overnight. You have to grow 60% on the scale. You cannot do it overnight. You have to actually prepare 36 months before or 48 months before. So the top level, we picked five funnels that started growing, and we see that they will keep growing because of these reasons. And we should have five funnels after 48 months so that you're not facing any issues growing enough at the scale.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

This is, again, I think, very thoughtful. Talk to us about the design in such a case. Right, so you've already mentioned that there was a lot of focus on product engineering, right? So, product engineers, there were a bunch. But you're also talking about setting a very advanced or forward-looking process for sales and ensuring your GTM is in line. How do you break down some of these aspects within the organization? What was the focal area three years back? What is it right now? What is the split like if you can maybe take us through that trajectory? Any experienced founders listening in can maybe take cues from that.

Asad Khan

So we actually started building parts, product-wise parts where DevOps front-end design, back end, and product managers come in one part, one product line, right? And then you have customer engineering associated with these parts. On one level up, there is a presale and solution that goes across the products, and then you have sales. ORC GTM, for us, is not a Demand Generation. I mean, marketing is not for us. We added a BDR to the sales team, not to the marketing team. I heard that enterprise software companies have BDR as a marketing function. 

We actually took the slightly odd approach. It is working closely with the sales team. But our marketing team has two different parts, product-led growth, and enterprise marketing. And the rand is one brand. Actually, I mean across. Right. So product-led growth is all about content and community evangelism, and Enterprise is more about ABM paid marketing and thought leadership. A lot of case studies get the content. All these are coming on the sales side.

 For Inbound, you have inside a sales funnel that sign-ups are coming, and they're going after you have an account management team, they go after the existing installers, and then you have SDR team, which are going after actually smaller ticket size inbound funnel. For outbound, we have different account executives. For Inbound, we have different account executives, and there is another funnel that we started believing in this year is, the partner funnel. We started investing massively into partners and getting some results. I'll be honest since Manish joined us, he started taking care of that. He's taking care of the whole GTM right now. But more focus on that's it.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

That's phenomenal. I think that's as strategic as it gets. Thanks for sharing how you've gone about the design there. But the ancillary question and to complete the circle is the hiring part. And you mentioned Manish. That was one of the key hires that made a lot of noise in the ecosystem. And similarly, I'm guessing you've been very thoughtful about whom to add to the company at which point and how that can elevate it to the next level. Any cues? You mentioned founder traits as well after the elevation of one of the co-founders now. But what do you look at right now? You've gone through these 10-12 years of building a services company and now are building a product company. What do you look for? What are traits that you can highlight? I don't want to keep it at a very high level, but more importantly, you just want to understand how you evaluate people to understand that this is really a long-term player.

Asad Khan

All of us have learned actually from failure in the last five years. We also made a lot of mistakes in the hiring, but you learn from leadership hiring. If you are interested in hearing about leadership hiring, we invest a lot of time. I would say our leadership hiring is mostly coming through our advisory. We work with them before we onboard them. It's good for both of us. 

I mean someone is coming to you and leaving a lot of things. You carry the responsibility for his or her success as well. You just cannot go and offer someone if you're not prepared. So bringing the leadership, I believe so far what I learned is that it's a huge responsibility for their success. You got to invest before the offer, and after an offer, of course, you have to be super aligned with their success, but even before the offer, at least a year, I need before I decide for you. We onboarded Sripriya Kalyana Sundaram, she is working very closely with me in my office. She ran the testing practice for 30 years in Cognizant and three years in UiPath and Deloitte strategy. We knew we spent a lot of time before we said yes, and the same thing is happening with the other leadership that we are looking at right now. We prefer to go through the advisory road, actually.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

That's brilliant. I think it goes to show that there's no alternative to spending time, effort, and investing truly in hiring the next set of leaders for the company. I think the emphasis on this has been very clear since you've spoken, and I think that's a very, very important mark. Like you just think like five steps ahead, not just like one step ahead.

Asad Khan

Damage is huge on both sides. Someone is at the leadership stage. If someone decides to join you, their credibility is also at stake. They are giving you everything that you want. At the same time, if they fail here, the company loses a lot of time. Your tenure for success gets longer and longer if you make more mistakes. So, I involve my board; I involve my team. You have to go through and talk to almost everyone. Do you feel at home? That is the first thing you feel at home, and did you start getting crazy in the same manner that you see us? If the vibe starts coming in, then we go deeper.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Got it. I said the other thing in company building that the LambdaTest has done well, at least from the external standpoint, is having a very interesting set of investors, and you've had multiple funding rounds in the last couple of months, right? Think about the last 24 months; talk to us about when looking at long-term partners from an external standpoint. People who will not be involved in the day-to-day, but they will be involved in setting the trajectory of the company. They come into the picture, be it advisors, be it your sports system, be it your board members, or investors; what is your mind space or framework to choose them, if at all? Or what do you look for in them?

Asad Khan

That set of people mostly so far in the last five years, whatever the rounds happen here and the partners we have, most of the time, we looked for the partner who went deeper into the product and landscape instead of financials. They were better aligned. Then you can understand our language easily. Product and landscape are super important for us to choose a partner or your only financial partner; then probably you don't care about other things at all, then we might think about it as well. But in between doesn't work. In between the product and financials, and you're not here or there, it doesn't work.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Got it? So understanding language, I think that's a key way to put it. I really like that. But no, this has been great. I think we've covered a wide spectrum of things when it comes to the LambdaTest-building journey. As we go to the concluding parts of the conversation, I'd love to understand that, as an individual, how have you perhaps grown through this journey. We can see the scale at which LambdaTest is when your previous company got sold, etc. But what are the different things that the founder journey has taught you personally? How have you scaled through these years? I think that'd be an interesting thing to note.

Asad Khan

I have seen a massive change in me in the last five years. I'll be super honest over here, in the last five years; it has been upside down. And where I learned from my team and my customers. They changed me 180 degrees. I'll tell you to have the patience not to get overwhelmed, think long term, how to manage the short term opportunities and other things, everything. Actually, there were only two segments that I was learning from his customer as well as my team members. Whenever they said can we look upon this?

 There was always some answer over there. So the product mindset, the PMF that you see setting up the Arc or hiring people, what do we need, and how much aggression is required? Too much aggression or balanced aggression? Do you really see the situation where you are actually becoming unnecessarily aggressive or aggressive enough? I mean, all these things are super important, and you cannot learn from anyone else other than your team. They make you a better founder.

 Of course, in the last five years, what I learned, I didn't learn in my whole career. And the full credit to the team as well as my customers, of course, advisors, and my partners as well. All my partners helped me a lot. I mean, if you talk about Harsh from Sequoia, we have Rahul, who was my boss and my founder in Global Logic, as well as my investor. I can call him at 03:00 A.m. In the morning. And when I'm at the stage of zero to one that I cannot make a decision, then he is the person who tells me simple math why we should choose zero or why we should choose one. And we have Atuj. Yes, we have Karthik and Sanjay from Blume Ventures as well. Definitely, all of them add value at some juncture.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Of course, I can imagine. It's amazing to know that the transformation has been high. And it's just amazing the pace at which founders learn and just evolve. And one question I really like asking founders, and I'd love to understand from you, is that it's such a fast-moving environment to be a founder or CEO, right? You have to manage, you have to do, and you have to look at the bigger picture while absorbing new trends and new learnings and reflecting. Do you have a method to this madness? Because I often find it very challenging to understand which part to overemphasize. Is it the reflection? Is it a new experience? Is it doing anything that you can share on that front?

Asad Khan

I don't have any algorithm or playbook to manage it. But yes, what I did in the last two or three years was that I offloaded myself a lot, giving a lot of liberty to my team members, and helped them to find a lot of time for myself to figure out what LambdaTest will look like after 48 months, or how LambdaTests will look like after ten years. What's going on in the market? I mean, where things are missing, where we can have a top view because everyone is looking at the horizon. To go to the top view, you have to offload yourself a little bit. So when you offload it yourself, it means it is directly connected to how much you give liberty to your team members. A lot of freedom with definitive accountability as well. Like, I have checks, I will ask questions, I'll never stop asking questions. But it doesn't mean that you are not getting enough liberty. You are investing massively in your failure. But we want you to take accountability. You have to take the calls, enough calls so that I can spend my time somewhere else where I can tell you something that you're missing. There is always an oriental view as well, as well as a top view. So I definitely go and see how things look from the top view.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Awesome. I think that says, right, the leader should look at the high-leverage things, as they say. And I think that just attests to it, and offloading, that's an important skill. I think it comes with time. But lovely to hear that.

Asad Khan

Yeah, nothing is in the playbook that I learned. Every business is unique; every founder is unique. They always build templates and playbooks by themselves for their businesses. I learned in the last five years that there's no playbook, and there's no one rule; rules all.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Absolutely no, I completely agree. And the hope with the podcast is also to just bring more perspectives to the table and ensure that you know everything but apply the things that work for you, not just copy anything. So I think that's lovely to mention. I think this has been great. But for the second last question, I think the other objective of the podcast is not to paint the founder's story as one, which is very glorified. Right? It is not the easiest journey by any stretch of the word. So if you can, maybe again, I don't want to be stereotypical, but any challenges along the way, times when things were not going your way or the way you thought they would, but you still were so mission-oriented that you kept going.

Asad Khan

There are not too many examples right now, but yes, there was one product line that we were going very deep into, and after spending a year, we figured out that this would not go solo; we were just wasting our time. And we found quickly through our customer that it's too early to build. So that was also learning that if you are building something very unique ahead of time and not selling fast enough, that will also not help. Building at the right time with the right market is actually the thing that every founder should do; at least, I learned that I should look for and should not make mistakes in the initial team. Definitely, the first team that you're assembling; just don't rush. It's a massive loss. You lose a lot of staff, equity, time, and everything. I mean, it massively hurts. The first team that you're building is definitely game-changing. I burned my hand because I came from a service background. I never had the people on the product team. It took me a year and a half to learn that. What is the pattern? What kind of people do we need? It costs you a lot of money.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

Got it. No, that's very honest of you to mention. Thanks for that, for the last question. And I would love to understand from you what the forward-looking mindset for LambdaTest is looking like because you mentioned this, of course, a bunch of times. And the vision that you have, being the platform for every digital test in the world, eventually, that's not the star. How do you look at the next couple of years from a forward-looking lens? If you can talk about the mission that keeps you going to date every day, that gets you out of bed with the same amount of energy and more, I think that'll just end us. End this conversation on a very refreshing note.

Asad Khan

Our theme for continuous innovation will keep going on; it's never-ending and has sustainable growth. These two themes on the high level will be continuously working on also looking at the trends; I mean, things in tech are changing very rapidly right now. You and I are watching; I mean, everybody is seeing right now. Just keep your eyes open everywhere. You never know where things start changing for you actually overnight, right? So keep a tab on the market trends, how things are changing in your landscape and other landscapes, and keep listening to your customer. Go closer to your customer when the market is in a tough situation so the customer will keep telling you what's next. Actually, I'm very confident about this because I myself will not leave these two things ever. You can't take these two things out for me, and I understood, and that's.

Jivraj Singh Sachar

The superpower it is. I think continuous innovation at a sustainable growth rate, keeping up with market trends, and listening to the consumer closely is the final narrative. Thank you so much, Asad, for a wonderful conversation. I have thoroughly enjoyed how thoughtful you have been about the long-term journey of building a company and goes to show much of why LambdaTest as a team has been successful and the audacious vision you're going after, and I'm sure everyone listening would have a great couple of learnings to take back. Thank you so much.

Asad Khan

Thanks for having me, Jivraj.