Bootstrapped for 8 years, how this woman entrepreneur is making a dent in the shared enterprise SaaS space
Founder, Director of Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd, Ms. Srividya Kannan’s interview published in yourstory on the future of the IT Industry.
With 20 years of professional experience in multiple domains, Srividya Kannan started her entrepreneurial journey in 2013 with Avaali Solutions. Eight years and counting, the company is still bootstrapped, with zero debt. Here she talks about her journey to success.
In the early 2000’s, women’s contribution to the technology sector was not known to be significant. Be it IT, marketing or finance, women as leaders in these departments were few and far between.
However, Srividya Kannan was different. With degrees in BCom, MBA Finance and ICWA, in her 20 years of professional career, she had worked across diverse functions including sales, alliances and channels, strategy, innovation, business finance, operations and sales enablement.
“I used to stand in courts for litigation, and also manage collections during the tough recession period of 2009-10. Even my mother used to always tell me at the time that this is the kind of job I should be doing as a woman,” Srividya chuckles.
After earning extensive experience in creating and managing high-performance teams, working in large matrix organisations such as Wipro, Oracle and SAP, she decided to start up on her own.
“This was 2012. At the time, there were not many women entrepreneurs setting up businesses from scratch. But, I’ve always been passionate about two things. One is that I try to turn around something that’s been defunct, or when I set up something which is non-existent – that’s when I feel I’m in my best flow,” Srividya tells Yourstory.
Today, with a team of over 120 people, her company Avaali Solutions has been operating in a completely bootstrapped manner, without any external funding for the last 8 years. “With our targeted go to market being large enterprises primarily, we are today completely profitable with zero debt, zero write-offs and zero bad debt across these years,” adds Srividya.