Bhavin Turakhia is a billionaire serial entrepreneur, and the founder of Flock, Radix, CodeChef and Zeta. He is the CEO of Flock and Zeta. He co-founded Resellerclub, Logicboxes and BigRock in 1998 and exited them in a $160m transaction in 2014. Subsequently, he founded Radix in 2012, Flock in 2014 and Zeta in 2015.
How did you get started as an entrepreneur?
I was very fortunate to find my passion early on. I was born and raised in Mumbai, and my school installed its first computer room back in 1989 when I was 10 years old. This was before the internet or Windows or anything like that. I went to the lab every chance I got. Because my family didn’t have a computer at home, my teacher would leave me the keys so I could stay after school for two to three hours to teach myself how to code. To help, my father bought me over thirty programming books, and I’d practice all the various techniques.
I was always a voracious reader, and my father also bought my brother and I many other books to read around this time. Biographies were my favourite genre, and I read the stories of many successful entrepreneurs. This helped inspire me to build my own company. And, because of my love for computer science, I knew it needed to be in tech.
As teens, my brother and I did software consulting on the side after school. When I was 17, I co-founded my first company — Directi — with my younger brother, using a $375 loan from our father. We bought a server from a company called Alabanza, started selling web hosting and domain names, and grew the business from there.
Later, I co-founded four more companies- BigRock, ResellerClub, LogicBoxes, and Webhosting.info, which I sold in a $160m transaction in 2014. At present, I am involved with 3 B2B SaaS companies. Radix, a domain name registry that operates leading extensions like .online and .tech, Nova, a suite of productivity and communication apps that includes Flock and Titan; and Zeta, a banking tech company that is changing the way banks deploy technology.
Where do you think your work ethic stemmed from?
One of my cherished beliefs is that it is our moral obligation to make an impact that is proportionate to our potential. I strive to learn about different problem spaces and push myself constantly to excel and take on challenges, it’s a part of my core programming. The work ethic comes naturally when there is a strong motivation.
What does the word success mean to you?
For me success is having a fearless mindset and that is something that I learnt from my father. “You can achieve anything if you set your mind to it,” that’s what my father used to tell us all time. It’s okay to fail, but the thing that scares me the most is not giving my best shot.
What makes you get out of bed each day?
The excitement of working with a wonderful set of people around me and solving problems with technology which brings efficiency in the real world makes me look forward to each day.
Can you name a person who has had an impact on you as a leader?
I’ve read tons of amazing biographies in my life and stood on the shoulders of giants. I’ve really learned a lot from entrepreneurs that have made an impact. If I had to choose one right now, it’d be Elon Musk. His biography is one of my favourites. There were many times that Tesla and SpaceX were on the brink of bankruptcy. Even now, Tesla is the most shorted stock and people question Musk’s judgement and abilities in many ways. I admire his determination and the fact that he’s chosen crazy and massive goals to reach for. That level of ambition and drive is very admirable.
How did Zeta come to be?
My co-founder Ramki Gaddipati (pictured below) and I have always been very passionate about the banking and payments space.
If you look carefully, banking software is stuck in the stone ages. Banks today work with several disconnected and monolithic software vendors that have been around for 20+ years. Most banks were built on decades old technology deployed at a time when Mainframes, Cobol, and Batch-processing were the standards. Cut ahead to today, as a result these legacy challenges banks are slow to innovate and provide sub-par user experiences to their customers.
To address this, Zeta has built from scratch the most modern banking stack ever. Our stack is completely cloud native and provides 100 percent API coverage vs. legacy monolithic banking core systems. It helps banks to be faster and to be more agile when launching products. It enables them to participate in the coming open banking and Banking-as-a-Service revolution. Even space travel has been disrupted before banking! So we have taken on this undertaking of providing a much more modern platform for banks to help them create the kind of experiences that 100s of millions of customers are looking for today.
How do Zeta’s offering support banks during the ever-changing digital era?
After finding success with our credit issuance offerings and our partnership with Sodexo, we started to iterate and design a modern platform for banks. We discovered along the way that a large part of the problem is that there are so many vendors offering disconnected and legacy solutions that it’s impossible for a bank to create meaningful new experiences for its customers – a problem that newer fintechs and neo-banks did not have.
The result is Zeta Tachyon, our modern Omni Stack banking platform that is cloud native, is built using micro services, and has 100 percent API coverage. Most importantly, the stack is truly complete in its – scope – a bank can use it to run a complete neobank – everything from the mobile apps for its customers to the core banking systems and every component in between. What Zeta has fundamentally done is to integrate what are 5-7 different banking tech industries into one. We believe it’s what banks need today to deal with the headwinds and the tailwinds from the pandemic and the rapidly changing landscape.
Finally, it’s taken 100s of engineers years to build out the full solution – an investment that 100s of banks globally cannot undertake. And we believe the value proposition speaks for itself. Banks we work with are rapidly innovating and launching new credit, savings, and buy-now-pay-later offerings with Zeta.
How did the pandemic impact the growth of your businesses?
We have been growing at a fairly accelerated pace. We have signed on over 10 banks in the last year alone. We have large contracts with entities such as Sodexo – a leading issuer of employee benefits and rewards with over 30 million global users and with HDFC Bank – the 14th largest bank by market cap in the world. We also are working with more than 25 fintechs that have signed up to use Zeta’s platform. My other businesses such as Flock, which offers a communications and productivity suite, are seeing similar growth as organisations the world over invest more in digital toolchains with work from home and associated trends.
What are some of the key learnings you have learnt from your multiple ventures?
Over the years, I’ve created a lot of products and features that no one wanted to use, even though I had great conviction in my ideas. I’ve invested more time and money into the wrong ideas than the good ones. This has taught me a valuable lesson — building stuff is easier than getting people to use it. It’s very tempting as an engineer to build products and features based on assumptions without validating your hypothesis. Good product managers and leaders understand the impact of their decisions on acquisition, activation, retention or monetisation. Everything product managers do should influence at least one of these four things. If it doesn’t, then they’re wasting time and resources. It’s super important to validate that your hypothesis improves one of these goals before you implement it.
What would you classify your style of leadership as? And how has that developed as you grow your businesses?
The task of running a company is similar to running a successful sports team. In sports, you don’t have managers, you have coaches, and there’s a huge difference. Managers manage tasks. They have checklists and assign work to get done. Coaches, on the other hand, empower players to do their best.
For me, leadership is not about “directing people.” It’s about coaching your team to get the best out of themselves. As a leader I must remain conscious that my job isn’t about getting things done or directing others to get things done, but rather communicating the purpose, rallying the troops around that purpose, and letting them do their magic. I pride myself on the quality of the team we’ve created and the painstaking processes we put into place to ensure the bar is always high.
What advice would you give to someone who has an entrepreneurial flair but doesn’t know where to start?
My father used to tell us, “You can achieve anything you set your mind to.” I strongly believe this, and it has inspired me to found four companies, all in different areas.
For example, my company Flock is competing against big players in the workplace communication industry, and Zeta is building a massive banking technology play. When I started these companies, I knew nothing about their respective spaces, but I believed that I could learn and achieve anything I set my mind to. This belief has been instrumental in my approach to entrepreneurship; identifying a problem and creating an organization or business to help solve it in an impactful way.
What motivates you as a leader?
One of my primary drivers is the belief that each of us has a responsibility to make an impact proportionate to our potential. As an individual, I’ve been focussed on improving productivity and efficiency in my own life and have developed different processes and methods to make every minute matter and get the maximum out of every moment of my day.
How do you ensure your own personal development?
I’ve always been a voracious reader, following in my father’s footsteps. His bedroom, when my brother and I were growing up, had more books than some neighbourhood libraries! To this day, I go through at least two – three titles each month with Kindle and Audible being my go-to apps. Kindle, in particular, is an absolute godsend for the prolific highlighter in me.