Why Watermelon (for me)

Today marks 2 years that I started my journey at Watermelon Software Inc . A good time as any to write down a few thoughts on this time.

The start of the current journey

For the last 20 years, I have had the incredible good fortune to have worked with people who have mentored me, and given me advice that has helped me take decisions in my career.

If it weren't for folks like Nikhil Joshi , Sanjay Singh , Anshul Badam , Jai Keven Kumar , Subrato Bandhu , Andrew Harwood , Sean Tierney , Jason Earnest , Mykhaylo Shaforostov and Chris Walker , it would have been impossible for me to navigate the life of a pre-sales engineer in multiple companies.

It was during my work at AppDynamics, where I was made pre-sales partner to Rajeev Vasisht to run the Asia business unit for the company, that I took the decision to work together with him as long as I possibly could.

Hence, when both our innings at AppDynamics came to a close, we shook hands hoping to work together very soon.

When Watermelon Software Inc was founded in late 2021, it was an easy decision to join the team.

Why Watermelon

I think it was back in 2008, the then CEO of BMC Software, Bob Beauchamp , once told me to think about four things when deciding to work somewhere :

1) Does the place you want to work for do something you consider important ?

2) Is the role you want to do there something you consider important ?

3) Are the folks in the team people you respect, and do they respect you ?

4) Are you going to be compensated fairly for your work ?

I've kept these lessons and shared with many people over the years.

When it came to Watermelon, these were the things to my mind :

Watermelon helps large enterprises improve the quality of their business applications. I thought that was pretty important.

Watermelon's vision was to help these enterprises improve the reliability of their software, by extreme automation of the software design, testing and quality engineering activities, and help their operations teams measure reliability.

It was the first company in the world to attempt to treat reliability as a problem to solve across the application lifecycle, with a single platform. This was just at a time when analysts like Joachim Herschmann and Lori Perri at Gartner were writing about the rise of the importance of reliability for enterprises.

So that was the first question answered.

Next, I was looking to lead the Go To Market function at Watermelon.

While I had been part of software sales for a while, I had never handled a Go To Market responsibility before. That was pretty important, and exciting.

There was much to learn for me in areas I had never handled - setting up sales processes, impacting the top of funnel at the company, potentially building a team of BDRs, sales and pre sales . As is fairly evident, that's pretty important to the company !

That was a check to the second question.

Which now brought me to the third, and probably the most crucial question. The people in the Watermelon team.

Rajeev Vasisht is the most methodical, sincere and empathetic leader I had ever had the good fortune to work with.

Harpreet Singh was someone I knew as a customer when he was leading the SRE function at DBS Bank, and saw the detail with which he led his initiatives and the respect with which his team held him in.

More importantly, when we worked together before, we not only had fun and got along with each other's quirks (especially my very poor jokes), but we also actively criticized each other's professional views without hesitation.

I thought any place led by these people, with the knowledge they brought on board, the empathy they had towards people, and the courage to leave their (quite flourishing) corporate jobs to start something at an age where most people are naturally risk averse, had a very good chance to succeed.

The third question was, thus, actually the most simple to find an answer to.

Finally, there was the question of compensation. Unlike a lot of tech startups in the world, Watermelon was a company starting from scratch with industry veterans. The engineering team was being led by people with over 2 decades of practitioners experience each. Rajeev and Harpreet were each leaving their established jobs after working for over 25 years in the corporate world.

Thanks to the financial stability of Watermelon, since it began, compensation wasn't a deal breaker.

That made the fourth check.

The last 2 years

The promise of Watermelon's platform has made the last 2 years a breeze.

A company run by first time founders managed to build an incredibly vast platform from scratch - in under 18 months - addressing software reliability across the application lifecycle.

A company run by first time founders managed to turn revenue positive in under 2 years, with some of the largest financial institutions in US, Philippines, Singapore and India as its customers.

A company run by first time founders now has a pipeline of opportunities which is large enough to need to expand our sales team.

A company run by first time founders now has an average annual deal size which large established companies aspire to have !

And most importantly - despite all the constraints of remotely working while building and selling a platform of this complexity to customers across the world - a company run by first time founders kept its team together and grew it.

The road ahead

Watermelon Software Inc 's platform, is quite simply, path breaking.

It helps enterprises dramatically improve their quality engineering velocity, decrease their P1 incidents in production, and make reliability a differentiator in their offerings.        

The company roadmap is aggressive and aims to address many more aspects of improving the application lifecycle for enterprises, making it easier to create software of high quality.

Overall, I think it's fair to say, the last 2 years has been exactly as I thought it would be :

• Solving problems for customers - something I love doing
• Working with people I respect - something that I've been lucky with
• Helping a company grow its revenue - something that I wanted to do

Visit our website , and reach out to me if you want to know more about Watermelon.