Who is Arman Eshraghi?
Arman is a husband, a father, a serial entrepreneur, and an American by choice. I live with my spouse, Kathy, in Redwood City. Before moving to California, we lived in Virginia, just outside Washington DC, for 24 years.
I started my first software company at the age of 18 out of my fascination with Personal Computers; I loved my Commodore 64! By the time I graduated from the university, the company had employed over 50 people. I sold my shares and started my second software company with Kathy.
In 1995 we won Green Card Lottery and moved from Iran to the US. It was around this time that the Internet was starting to revolutionize the life of human beings. I started my 3rd startup in Northern Virginia and introduced the first Business Intelligence (BI) platform natively created for Web and XML. The company was initially named LogiXML, then rebranded to Logi Analytics, grew to about 250 employees when it was acquired.
In 2016 I started my 4th startup, Qrvey, when thanks to AWS (Amazon Web Services), Cloud became the new operating system for software applications.
What’s the story behind Qrvey?
Like any other domain, the software industry is getting specialized over time. As a result, successful software companies increasingly focus on building what they are good at and choose to embed the technologies outside their core competency to save time and money.
Qrvey is a pure OEM play that offers modern building blocks to SaaS companies that need to beef up their no-code analytics capabilities in a matter of weeks and go to market with smarter products before the competition.
What was the most difficult part of your experience in the early beginnings?
It is always building the right team. Every successful software startup needs to maintain the four crucial elements: people, plan, process, and money. All four pillars need to be solid to carry the weight of a robust business; however, it starts with people. Everything else is meaningless without a dedicated, trustworthy, and trusting team that shares the same mission and is capable of planning and executing the plan to make the best out of the resources available to them.
Most people may not realize that founders and founding members are practically the best magicians as they create things out of nothing. Most people join the companies and help them when the business is gliding in the sky, but the most challenging moments are when the business takes off the ground without losing the balance and before the end of the runway!
What are you most proud of regarding your business?
We usually measure success by the apparent metrics such as revenue or the customers. However, for someone who has created and grown software businesses several times, I mostly pay attention to the underlying culture that fuels the company’s enduring financial success and growth and provides people with an enriching experience. My definition of people here is inclusive of our employees, who work hard to get things done, our customers, who put their trust in us and buy our products, and our investors, who partner with us and support us to make our vision a reality.
I am most proud of the solid culture we have cultivated and nurtured at Qrvey.
What is your vision for the future of Qrvey?
We believe software and technology more than ever will be impactful in advancing human beings, and Qrvey will be part of every smart SaaS product. Qrvey is redefining and modernizing the old way of embedding business analytics. By infusing Qrvey, SaaS companies will offer products faster, easier, and richer than ever before.
What’s your advice for the businesses that are trying to adapt to this economic climate?
Make it challenging and even impossible for others to compete with you by focusing on what you do best and making it better and better. So my top three advice to all entrepreneurs and businesses are the focus, focus, and focus!
Please name a few technologies which have the greatest impact on your business.
At Qrvey, we don’t reinvent the wheel and instead leverage great technologies that already exist. We make those technologies effortless to use by adding a No-Code layer on top. A good example would be AWS big data, AI, and ML services that help users to gain insight out of any type of data (including documents, voice, and images) for any size of data.
What books do you have on your nightstand?
Assuming I can cheat a bit and include Audible books as well, I am listening again to “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” and it is so fun to listen to it.
I also recently read “Super Founders” by Ali Tahmaseb and found it interesting and insightful. Additionally, I’d like to mention “More Money than God” by Sebastian Mallaby, with fascinating stories and history behind the creation and concepts of hedge funds.
Because of the current economic climate our publication has started a series of discussions with professional individuals meant to engage our readers with relevant companies and their representatives in order to discuss their involvement, what challenges they have had in the past and what they are looking forward to in the future. This sequence aims to present a series of experiences, recent developments, changes and downsides in terms of their business areas, as well as their goals, values, career history, the high-impact success outcomes and achievements.
