Today we’d like to introduce you to Shyam Sivaramakrishnan.
Hi Shyam, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Sure, thanks for including my story in your publication. I started off as a research scientist at GE’s research headquarters close to Schenectady, NY originally after getting a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. While in grad school and later in corporate roles, I had the opportunity to build a lot of software, typically meant for monitoring and controlling machinery. Today, we use the term IoT to describe this line of work.
While working on IoT systems, I noticed that the cloud revolution was well underway and it was becoming much easier to build, test, deploy and monitor software. In particular, in my last two roles, I started managing teams that had to build the brains in the cloud to provide high-level instructions to what we call the ‘Edge’ or the computer sitting next to machinery. This was the time when I saw true marriage of software engineering practices and algorithm development including AI algorithms.
Along the way, I had always been interested in innovative technologies. I attempted to kick off a venture when I was in grad school around smell sensors but realized my visa status was going to present challenges doing this in the USA. So, I gave up on the idea and decided to become part of a team that were making something real and putting it in customers’ hands. When I started working on cloud software technologies, I realized this was an area that did not need a lot of investment to start a business in.
Around the same time, my brother, Shankar, had followed a similar path and had come to the same conclusion. So, that’s how we started our cloud software solution called BanyanBoard. We tapped into my brother’s network to hire our first employees and decided to work on a pain point that both of us faced as professionals, which was documentation and collaboration.
We have now built a visual collaboration, documentation and approval tool called Colab, that is part of our BanyanBoard digital asset management platform. This tool lets folks record their screens, cameras or upload other videos from their browser and draw or comment anywhere on these videos. This reduces the time it takes to document complex thoughts and avoids people getting into meetings for understanding each other. In this age of work-from-home, we are hoping this will improve the efficiency of remote teams.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It is a little hard to say since we are only two years into this journey. Some things that have been going for us is the overall acceptance of startups, worldwide access to the cloud and dramatic pace of open-source technologies. I am also super thankful for the wonderful support of our families – am sure it must be unnerving for anyone to see your loved one quit an established corporate role to try something totally new.
On the business front, we have had to make a lot of pivots and learn a lot about new domains. We are a differentiated player in sports analysis solutions now; we are getting into broadcasting soon. We are already heavily into supporting ed-tech. We did not foresee any of this when we started, but it came out of listening to various stakeholders and customers.
In terms of struggles, I personally think there is a lot of noise today each of us is exposed to and it is hard for a new product to grab attention, however relevant it may be. We have had our share of learning around how to cut through this noise and make it easier for potential customers to appreciate what we offer. Another struggle initially was understanding which customer segment is not a good fit for what we offer. This is also becoming clearer now as we knock on more and more doors.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Sure, we specialize in working with videos and generating value for customers via videos. In the ed-tech sector, our software is used by tutors to provide contextual comments at different points of the video and solicit questions from students on this. This enables different cohorts of students to learn from each other’s questions and perspectives. In this segment, we are known as the ‘Visual Stackoverflow’, which is in reference to the popular Stackoverflow platform used worldwide for learning from each others’ questions.
In the sports sector, our video-handling expertise translates to better analysis for sports teams. For instance, if you stream a live sports event to Youtube, you can get two of your analysts sitting anywhere in the world to simultaneously work on analyzing the game and ‘tag’ interesting events. These interesting events can then be seen instantly by players, coaches and fans. There’s a few different players in this area; we stand out in the ease of use – anyone can sign up online and start doing what I just said today with just their Gmail account. We offer free tiers for recreational users and support serious heavy-duty tagging and analysis for professional teams.
This list of applications goes on with a variety of examples like interior decoration, software product development and more.
When it comes to what we are most proud of, we take pride in helping our employees and clients. We spend a lot of time training our employees. My brother, Shankar, particularly is passionate about this and invests a lot of his time in this. Similarly, when it comes to customers, we truly invest a lot of time deploying, stabilizing and supporting of customers. On the surface, it will appear that our customer acquisition rate is low. But, in reality, this leads to excellent customer satisfaction and true benefits for customers. Frequently, we will find that customers will want to do more with us as a result. It is one of the reasons we try to remain bootstrapped; to allow ourselves time to patiently help both our employees and customers.
We are also comfortable staying under the hood of customers’ products. So, we have put a good bit of effort into letting customers white-label our solution and sell as their own. This is something we are learning is a big differentiator.
In terms of what sets us apart from others, one of the things we strive to do is to have a very do-say ratio. After close to a year of projects with customers, we have heard customer feedback acknowledging this. We take a lot of care in our commitments and try to exceed expectations.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
Like I mentioned earlier, I think there is a huge amount of noise each of us is experiencing in our daily lives because of the amount of information we consume and how connected we are. Given that, I think the ability to focus and help others focus is crucial.
For example, when it comes to our jobs, it is very common to see a ping on a chat thread because a customer has raised an issue. Unless there is a well-established culture in a company around what to respond to when to take something extra seriously and more importantly, when to ‘do it tomorrow’, this noise will add to a lot of latent anxiety in everyone’s jobs. This anxiety leads to short-term thinking and knee-jerk decisions.
Cutting through this noise and keeping a focus on what’s truly the best way to help everyone involved seems very important to me.
Pricing:
- BanyanBoard’s paid plans range from $20-$200/month for organization sizes ranging from 10 -100 users, with different tiers for storage and features
Contact Info:
- Website: www.banyanboard.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/banyanboard/?hl=en
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/banyan-board-96216724a/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/BanyanBoard
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@banyanboard-whiteboardingo7000/videos
