Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 1)

Ganesh and his two co-founders have built Responsive with a very small amount of capital.
They started by Bootstrapping with a Paycheck. Excellent execution, much to learn on many issues.

Sramana Mitra: Ganesh, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Ganesh Shankar: I’m originally from Coimbatore, India, down south. My entire childhood and my studies – undergrad and postgrad – were all in Coimbatore, the place where I was born and raised. I come from a family of government employees. There’s a saying in our family: “Even if you get a quarter cent, it better be coming from the government.” This was instilled in us by my grandmother, a strong character in our family. My dad works in the agriculture department, and my dad’s brother is a retired army colonel.

Sramana Mitra: So you have a lot of government-influenced families in the process.

Ganesh Shankar: I didn’t want to become another government employee working from nine to five. So here I am. I live now in Frisco, Texas.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get to Frisco, Texas? You said you did all your education in Coimbatore. How does that bridge to Frisco, Texas?

Ganesh Shankar: It’s a little bit of a whirlwind. I did my undergrad in the computer science, but I figured computer science is not my thing. I pursued my MBA immediately after doing my computer science, but I majored in finance and marketing.

Even in my wildest dream, I never thought I would be in the software industry, let alone I would run a software company eventually. Right after my MBA in 2005, I was a sales rep in Coimbatore, India selling financial services products like mutual funds and insurance. I was working for a stockbroker basically at that time.

Then in the 2008-2009 timeframe, I moved on to Chennai for another smaller stockbroker, but in a bigger role. I was managing the sales for entire South India. That’s when the stock market crashed. It made me realize that I did not like seeing people lose their money in stock market. That’s when I realized technology is the way to grow.

So I pivoted my career in 2009 from selling financial services into technology. I actually took two steps backward from managing sales for entire South India to an entry level job as a business analyst at a startup. The startup selected me because of my functional expertise in stock market. I’ve always been a very curious guy. I was not studious, but curious. So I was able to grasp a lot of things around stock market – how it works and portfolio management. That got me into this business analyst role in the startup.

In 2010, I moved back to Coimbatore for various reasons. Of course, I started missing my family. I started missing my then girlfriend, who’s now my wife. I moved to the role of a senior business analyst for a company in Coimbatore that happened to be headquartered in Portland, Oregon. It’s a legal software company called Exterro. So they moved me here in 2011 as a director of product management.

In 2015 I started a company along with my two other co-founders. It used to be called RFPIO. In 2021, because of COVID, we migrated because I wanted to be under the sun. Portland felt a little too cloudy, windy, and rainy for me. I ended up in Frisco because of the weather, the food scene, and the centralized airport to get to the country.

 Sramana Mitra: Is Frisco in the outskirts of Dallas?

Ganesh Shankar: Yes, it’s about twenty five minutes north of Dallas.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive
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