Intro

Mike: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host, Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 53, with Rajoshi Ghosh, co-founder of Hasura, a relatively young startup, using GraphQL to connect Enterprise data. I’m happy to report that Rajoshi is the first Indian national we’ve had as a guest on the podcast, a trend which I hope continues. Although she’s normally based in the Bay Area, Rajoshi was in Bangalore in late July when we recorded this.

Before we get started, I have a quick request – we all want to help open-source founders and startups. I make the podcast, but I need your help to get the word out, so tell your friends, post on LinkedIn, tweet out a link, post on Hacker News, or follow me and share one of my posts on LinkedIn, whatever you think makes sense, go for it.

As I mentioned, Hasura is a young startup, but given their success in momentum, I thought it’d be interesting to hear their stories sooner than normal. If you’re interested in GraphQL you might also want to listen to episode 41, with Geoff Schmidt, the founder and CEO of Apollo.

So, without further ado, here is Rajoshi Ghosh, co-founder of Hasura. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us today.

Rajoshi: Thank you so much for having me, Mike. I’m really happy to be here.

Origin

Mike: What’s the origin story of Hasura?

Rajoshi: At that time, Michael, we started working together really long time back, and I think at that point, we really wanted to work on something that would make application development easier, but we did not know what shape or form this would take,  and so, what we started doing was, we started building products for — started off with friends, and then, moved on to like local startups and then started working with one of the largest banks out there, help consulting with them.

We realized that if we were building enough products across different types of companies and different industries, then we would learn a lot about the different businesses, and also, it gives us an opportunity to try and build tooling that can work across companies of different sizes and different industries and verticals.

So,we got into this consulting business that we did, but the entire time we had a small team that was continuously building different products that could be used across different clients that we were working with. So, we did that for about three and a half years, and then, it came to a point, where we built a bunch of these tools, and you know, we were faced with the decision of signing like a multi-year contract for a consulting gig with a really large bank or actually going back to saying, “Okay, let’s take these products to market and build a business out of it.

So, we decided to start Hasura, wind down the consulting practice. So, that’s kind of how we set up the tools, that, like, parts of Hasura were built. So, what we did after that was, we spent a few months taking these different pieces that we built to market, trying to open-source a bunch of them, saw how folks were reacting, trying to understand the business implications of these products being used.

And that’s kind of how the Hasura GraphQL engine, which is our open-source product sort of came about. You know, we spoke to a bunch of people, realized that data access was a big problem that people seem to be struggling with across all kinds of companies, and again, different sizes of businesses. So, that was the piece that when we open-sourced and we wrote about it, and we put it out, and I think the first blog post that we had about our product resulted in our Fortune 500 health care company, reaching out to us and saying, “Hey, we really want this.” So, we knew we were onto something. So, it started out with this consulting practice, building pieces of this data access problem, from there, and then kind of polishing it up and launching it as the Hasura GraphqQL Engine in 2018.

How Is Hasura Different From Apollo?

Mike: A few episodes back, we had Geoff Schmidt, one of the founders of Apollo GraphQL, and although this is a business podcast, not a tech podcast, we have a lot of tech listeners out there. So, maybe you could just give a quick overview. I know that Apollo is part of the community, you’re part of the community, and the products are different, but maybe you could just give a quick overview of like how the products fit in the market?

Rajoshi: Absolutely. At Hasura, we kind of came at this problem, from the data access angle, we were trying to solve the data access problem, and back in our consulting days, we have actually built our own version of GraphQL called Urql, and we had that whole thing going. And every time we would talk to people about what we were building – and this was around the time GraphQL was getting popular, people would tell us, “Hey, this sounds an awful like GraphQL, why don’t you add support for GraphQL?”

So, that’s how we sort of braided into the GraphQL space, but we sort of came at it from the data access piece, so, what Hasura as a product does today is the service that you connect to your database and other data sources, and it kind of instantly gives you GraphQL APIs. So, it’s sort of short-circuits, the path, like you don’t really need to build a GraphQL server, Hasura kind of becomes that piece in the middle that connects to your database and other services, and gives you these APIs. And Hasura gives you a metadata engine, where you can specify the relationships between your different pieces of data – you can add authorization, logic, we have a very granular authorization system built in. And then, you can start accessing these APIs directly from your front-end clients.

That’s how we fit into the GraphQL ecosystem. And now, we have our – Hasura is available as a cloud product, and what you also have is, you have a lot of features that help you kind of run Hasura production. And there’s a little bit of overlap with some of the things that Apollo engine does, which is basically, like monitoring and analytics, and sort of add that API layer. So, these are the features that we have in common, but the problems that we’re solving are very different.

I think Apollo is coming at it from the side of being, like a GraphQL Gateway, where every different service speaks GraphQL, and they’re kind of the GraphQL Gateway. And they are building tooling at that GraphQL Gateway sort of layer, where, we are sort of more on the infrastructure layer, where we are solving the data access problem. And we give you GraphQL APIs.

Lessons Learned

Mike: If you could go back to that day when you said, “Okay, we don’t want to take this contract, we want to move forward with a software company.” That must have been a little while back, but if you could go back to that day, would you do anything differently in terms of how you executed after that?

Rajoshi: That’s a very interesting question. I would say not. Because what happened, like, the steps that sort of followed from there, we took the product, we had built some great text, so, we raised some seed money based on some of the tech built, we took that to market.

And once we put out the GraphQL engine on like, we did a show and launch like a Hacker News launch. And that was a pretty good launch that a lot of people found out about the product, and usually what happens is with Hacker News launches, they are very transient. Somebody finds out about it on one day, sometimes it goes great, but sometimes, there are new products being launched that every single day.

But I think what helped us sort of stick around after that initial launch was the fact that when people started trying it out and looking at our documentation, there were two things that I think really helped us over there. One was that either documentation was very complete. This was also because this was a problem that we’ve been at for a while.

And the second thing was that getting started experience was magical, like it was 30 seconds to your first GraphQL API. You would connect it to an existing database, existing Postgres database. And you would instantly get APIs. So, that sort of helped us get the word around, got people excited. And they spoke about it to each other, and that started off our sort of developer adoption journey.

So, we were still tagged Alpha back then, and we already saw all kinds of companies starting to use Hasura, and putting it in a very critical part of their stack. So, what happened is, we hadn’t actually started building a commercial product just then, we just put this out and we were still trying it out. But because of the kinds of companies who’ve started using us, they started calling us inside, saying, “Hey, you know what, we’re using this — if this goes down like who are we going to talk to, like, can we sign a contract with you. And then, he started getting these calls from companies, and that also helped us sort of like inform our kind of roadmap of how we were going to build into our Enterprise product. And then, we launched that earlier this year.

I think the journey has been one of learning, and on all sides of things, like growing an open-source community, growing the usage of an open-source software, and then building a commercial product around it – that’s been a really good journey. And I think the fact that people really, like, the commercial versions of the product as well is something that comes from having been through the journey with our users, listening to our customers and working alongside them over the last two years.

Monetization Strategy

Mike: So, that pivot that you’re describing is really difficult to make from open-source project to commercial product, and you’re probably still making that pivot as we talk, but can you talk about what are your thoughts about the strategy for whether – I heard you mention that you launched a cloud service – that’s certainly a fantastic business model. There’s also a lot of innovation around open core, making certain parts of your product, commercial vs. open source. So, how have you figured out how to monetize some of the open source to fund the company?

Rajoshi: I think the way we’ve been thinking about what comes apart of sort of our commercial offerings is, things that companies using GraphQL engine in production will start needing, you know, when they are in production. Things like monitoring and analytics, stuff like query capture, so that you’re able to create allow lists when you’re in production, prevent breaking changes with regression testing, great limiting of your queries – these are kinds of features that people need when they’re in production. So, these are the kinds of things that we put in our commercial versions.

And the core GraphQL engine, which sort of gets you building and then, you need to self-manage, and you need to build all of these toolings yourself, but the call that sort of gives you the APIs and helps you connect to data systems – that’s in the open-source part. Because that’s part of your critical infrastructure, and you know, being an open-source product, if you’re in the infrastructure I think is almost given these days.

Cloud Positioning

Mike: What’s the positioning of the cloud product? I understand you just launched that, but what is your vision for? Is that going to be a major part of the revenue streams, or is it just from so people can get started and kick the tires quickly – where do you think that fits?

Rajoshi: It’s very new. We just actually announced a general availability, we launched it about 4 weeks ago. So, it’s very, very new, but we do foresee it being a critical part of our like revenue stream going forward. So, what we did is, we actually re-engineered a sort of open-source engine for it to be like a true cloud SaaS product. Both of the things you mentioned are important in the sense that getting started with Hasura on cloud is something that we absolutely care about, that being the best experience for you to get started on Hasura, so that’s extremely critical to us that anybody who wants to try Hasura, the experience of getting started on cloud should be magical.

So, that’s very important, but it’s also something that we’re building for, you know, companies running Hasura at significant amounts of traffic and scale introduction. We have interesting sort of things that we’ve built into the cloud, and one of those is sort of like dynamic data caching. And that’s something that we’ve — I know that the podcast is going to be out about three weeks after we speak, but actually in just about an hour, my co-founder’s going to be speaking about server-side caching and dynamic data caching as part of the GraphQL summit, where he’s going to talk about how we’ve built it, and what is our sort of vision of the cloud, which is something like CDN for data. So, that’s kind of where we see it going, where you build, you connect your data sources.

Data is being fragmented, and data is everywhere – it’s in your databases, it’s a multiple data sources, and you have this managed infrastructure piece in the middle that just has to connect to all of these data sources, magically get this API. And it’s fully managed, it scales, it’s super fast. And so, yeah, that’s kind of the way we look at the cloud product.

Value Prop

Mike: You mentioned that Hasura is almost like a data connection layer. One of the main value propositions must be getting access to your data, but what are some of the other reasons that driving Enterprise customers in particular.

Rajoshi: I think for Enterprises specifically, since that was your question, I think one of the things that we’re seeing and that our Enterprise customers are seeing is that time to value and time to market. So, as people like building with Hasura, and we recently had our user conference, where, Philips healthcare, one of the Solutions architect there, who’s been a Solutions architect for 26 years, spoke about how something that they were building with Hasura would have typically taken them two to four years, but build and ship this product in under a year.

So, companies and Enterprises are saving like quarters and like years of work by using Hasura, because Hasura is just – you get these APIs with access control out of the box. This could be anywhere from like 40 to 90% of the backend logic that you need to write. So, that’s a huge benefit. And that’s kind of what is also helping Hasura spread by word of mouth within the Enterprise. Once one team starts using it, other teams sort of see the pace at which people are building, and that’s helping the word spread within Enterprise for us.

So, that’s one. The second – there’s two other things that, again, we’ve heard our users talk about. One is having better domain understanding. There is this layer that connects to all of your different data sources. You sort of have a better understanding of your domains. And that helps architects and that helps team lead sort of build faster, because as things are very fragmented, Hasura kind of brings that unified view of your different access control rules across different data sources. That also adds to the speed aspect that I spoke about, but that’s also in itself with huge benefit that enterprises are seeing today with Hasura.

And the third one is enhanced security, and again, each of these points of sort of building on the previous thing that I spoke about, which is, we have the Hasura console, which is this UI, where you can see all of these different access control rules. And so, you’re able to see very granular access control rules are set up for, again, all of the kinds of data access that you need to do. So, having that visibility in one UI makes it very easy for again Enterprises to handle the security aspect of data access. These are things that we’ve heard time and again from our Enterprise users as benefits that they see building with Hasura.

And on top of this is the entire GraphQL piece, which is all of the benefits of GraphQL that is making people move towards GraphqQL, the amazing developer ecosystem around the tooling, the developer experience for front-end developers to get started and build products fast. So, the front-end experience with GraphQL along with the themes experience with Hasura to handle all of the different data sources in the access control kind of makes that package really valuable for our users, especially in Enterprise.

Community

Mike: You mentioned the user conference, and I’m wondering what is the current community like for Hasura, and how do you see developing the community, and giving the community enough value going forward?

Rajoshi: We have a really, really engaged community around Hasura, and it’s something that we’re all very, very excited about. And it really makes us very happy, and we deeply care about the community around Hasura. So, more than half of our engineering team is working on our open-source product. There’s continuous development, and we’re listening to our users in the community very closely and sort of acting on things that they are talking about. So, there’s that aspect to it.

And there’s also the aspect of like really helping the learning process. So, we have a very extensive set of tutorials on GraphQL on Hasura, on authorization that we’ve built on hasura.io/learn, which basically the GraphQL tutorials over there are like vendor agnostic tutorials, which are just about getting started with Hasura, whatever sort of stack your come from, especially for front-end developer. So, I think we have almost more than 10 tutorials for different stacks for you to get started with GraphQL.

And overall, the site has I think almost like 15 to 17 tutorials on like full stack, front-end, back-end authorization data modeling. So, these are things that we put out continuously for the open-source community. We have a very vibrant discord community, and we have community champions, who are folks, who are helping out each other and helping out other users who are coming into the Hasura, new folks who are coming into the Hasura community, so that’s where the community hangs out.

And yeah, I think bringing all of these aspects together at the user conference was truly amazing for us two years into launching Hasura that we put out this user conference, it had about 33 talks of which three were from Hasura folks, and the other 30 were from the community, just talking about different ways, in which they are using Hasura different pieces of tooling that they’ve built. So, it was really, really good to hear and good to see the community coming together, giving back, and by talking about how they’ve learned and build things with Hasura.

Community Code Contribution?

Mike: Does the community actually commit any code?

Rajoshi: We do have community contribution that’s happening on console code based, on documentation, on sort of lots of tooling, but yes that is community contribution going into the code records.

Pricing

Mike: Pricing is one of the hardest exercises, not only for open-source startups, but I think for every company. What are some of the gates that you’re thinking about for pricing, and how do you get, for example, intrinsic value based pricing for the customer?

Rajoshi: Yeah, this is something that we’re thinking deeply about and also evolving. We are very, very early in the stage, in this journey. I’m sure, down the line, that we add a lot more color that I can add to this conversation to this topic, but right now, we’re thinking about it as basically pricing on the cloud product, consumption-based pricing, which is basically on data pass-through.

We have a starting tier with certain amount of data pass-through, and then, we’re basically charging on data pass-through. And we have a few more things on, the number of collaborators and the limits we apply on some of the features that you get. But the primary way that we’re thinking about pricing is on the data pass-through.

So, that’s currently how we price on the cloud product, and for Enterprises, which either on the cloud or on, a self-hosted model currently, its feature bundles and pricing per project, which is unlimited usage but pricing for project – that’s how we roll pricing on the Enterprise, but on Cloud, it’s with these usage limits. And that scales as your usage of the product scales, and each of these is for personal project.

Serving SMB?

Mike: So, a lot of software startups, some in your area, are making most of their money in the Enterprise space. I bet you think that you’ll find a way to also offer products and services to smaller organizations.

Rajoshi: I think. I mean, today our users do span the spectrum from the hobby developers to folks in the enterprise, we definitely – our Cloud product is meant to be something that caters to smaller products that are just kind of getting started in introduction. And there’s always open source that you can sort of sell, post and run across any kind of hosting service that is – yes, but the cloud is something that we have envisioned to be anyone running GraphQL introduction should be able to start a pricing would make sense for them economically. And that’s sort of how we’re thinking about it. And like I said, it’s very early days for us. And so, we’re going to sort of observe and see how it scales for us over the next few months and keep tweaking this.

Team

Mike: Right now, you’re sitting in Bangalore, one of the urban hubs of technology, what are your thoughts about growing the team, and how you’ll have to adjust the plan for the pandemic?

Rajoshi: We started, becoming a distributed company early in 2019, I think 2019 was when we brought our first remote colleague on board. And since then, we’ve been hiring across the globe remotely.So, that was very helpful to US during Covid, like all of our communication and all of our working in a distributed manner across different time zones. So, that really helped us when we all went with Covid-19.

So, in terms of growing the team, I think we will continue to hire across the globe in different cities and different countries –  that’s how we’re thinking of growing the team. We do have a base in Bangalore, and we have a base in San Francisco, so, we will look at hiring across these two cities. But we, also, currently, we have people in, I think, over 20 cities outside of these two, the side of Bangalore and San Francisco, maybe even more – I haven’t actually done a proper count, but we have everybody from, like LA to Melbourne, and like everything in middle.

So, we can’t actually do an all-hand’s call, where we have everybody in the same call, because we have like the West Coast, we have Europe, we have India, southeast Asia, and Australia. So, we kind of do this call in the morning, you know, morning time SS. And then, we record that, and we do one in the evening, like late evening, which works for like Australia, Asia and Europe. And this kind of play the recording, and then do another second half, and then, record that, and play that in the next thing. So, we figured this out, and it’s working pretty well.

But we’re already across time zones, where we can’t fit everybody into one call that is not a crazy hour. So, I expect us to kind of keep trucking along that way. And it’s fun! I mean, it’s great to have colleagues from like all over the globe, and we try to bring everybody together twice a year. That’s surprisingly enough. We actually had one of those this year, which sounds magical and unbelievable almost, that we actually had a team off site in 2020. But we did that just before Covid struck, and now, we’re all waiting for that to happen again.

Advice For Open Source Software Startups

Mike: It’s really hard to start any kind of business, but open-sourcing your software adds a little extra challenge I think. Do you have any advice for founders on how to find the right balance to make open source an advantage in their business model?

Rajoshi: Yeah. I think open source is a very important question to ask, if you are sort of just starting off and the decision is between, like, should I open source or not. I think why is open source important, it’s that specific kind of business is for important question to ask. I mean, there are every kind of products that are open-source and closed-source alternatives.

In the infrastructure space, open source has pretty much become table stakes for people, for how software is being adopted, but I think thinking through the business model from the beginning, and not making that an afterthought is going to be very important. That would be my only piece of advice to sort of think about it from day one, at least as much as you possibly can.

Because there are two ways – either you start a business intentionally, saying this is going to be an open-source business. And then, I’m going to start clearing on commercial features. Or you build something open source as a side project, and that kind of takes off, and then, you try to figure out, “Oh, wow, everyone’s using this – how can I make a business out of it?” I guess if that’s the way you’re going about it, then, you will have to figure it out as it happens. But if you’re intentionally doing it, I think thinking through, really thinking through how will you start monetizing, right from day one, is going to be very important. Because, often times, if the differentiation factor between what is open source and what you plan to make a part of the commercial feature, if it’s not very well-thought out, then, that can lead to all kinds of problems, both from the community, as well as just generally as to become a viable business.

Did Hasura Plan The Business Model Early On?

Mike: Did you follow your own advice there?

Rajoshi: Yes, we did, we did. I think we did. Partially we did, definitely, we know that we didn’t want to make our commercial offering. Their support base model wasn’t what we were going for – that’s not the kind of open source company we were building out to be. And we also did not want to have our Cloud version to be just like a hosted offering. Because the problem, the way we see it, if it’s a hosted offering of your open-source software, then, everyone’s bound to compare it to here. But I can host it on so-and-so provider for like this much cheaper.

We did not want to go down that path, we wanted to really offer teachers, which were part of our commercial offering that would really, again, make sense for the stage of the company you were. And, it would economically and ergonomically make sense.

So, it was always about that – what are the things that you will need once you’re in production, you know, you birth the product, you trust the product, and now, you want to go ahead in production. And what are the things you don’t want to worry about when you are in production. And that’s kind of what we look. The jury is still out – I mean, well, we’re going to see how this works out, but so far, the signs are good. I think people are really liking our commercial features and the product, but it’s early days – we will see how things evolve.

Role Models For Rajoshi?

Mike: You’re the first Indian female founder we’ve had on the podcast, and we hope you won’t be the last. I’d like to end with this different question than I normally ask. Who are some of the leaders and role models that influence your decision to co-found Hasura?

Rajoshi: Wow…that influence my decision to co-found Hasura? That is a very difficult question to answer because I used to be in genomics and research – I’m a bioinformatics person by sort of education, in the first few years of my career. And if somebody had asked me then, “Are you going to be the co-founder?” Like, whatever, start a company – I think it would have not crossed my mind. I was deep in the academic world, and it was so far away from anything that I thought about that, I don’t think I would have had an answer.

When I started working at this Incubator is when I saw how startups work. You know, I found about startups, this incubator that I work. I used tohave a lot of folks who worked at successful companies, who would come and speak to the students, though I was a mentor there, I was also a student, because I was teaching them programming and learning about all of these different amazing business things from folks that had successful startups. And that was the first time that thought crossed my mind.

I think my journey – once I did that, that was an 11-month thing, where I thought – I think for me after that, it just seemed like the next step that I have today. And that’s kind of how I got into it. It wasn’t again like an extremely like, “Okay. I am going to start a company.” sort of thing, it’s sort of just like my life experience has led me to this. So, I guess I don’t know how I can sort of talk about role models and who kind of influenced my decision – I think that experience that I had teaching at this Incubator – which is actually based in West Africa in Ghana, and it’s done by a Silicon Valley company called Meltwater. It’s an amazing program, and they bring students or fresh graduates from university, who want to start companies, and train them. And just being part of that ecosystem, I think that was my inspiration, that entire experience was my inspiration to sort of stop something and not get bogged down by, you know, it’s just going to be really impossible to do.

Closing

Mike: Oh, congratulations. I think you’re going to be the role model for the next generation of entrepreneurs going forward. So, best of luck with Hasura and everything else you do. And thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Rajoshi: Thank you so much, Mike. Thank you so much for having me.

Mike: Thanks to the Hasura team for help coordinating the podcast. Audio editing by Ines Cetenji, transcription and episode website by Marina Andjelkovic, cool graphics from Kemal Bhattacharjee. Music from Broke for Free, Chris Zabriskie and Lee Rosevere.

Next time, we have Justin Borgman, CEO of Starburst. If you don’t know Starburst, I highly recommend listening because it’s an amazing story of a perfectly executed startup – Justin was great.

Until next time, stay safe, and thanks for listening.