This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Anish Dhar, Co-Founder and CEO of the internal developer portal Bark. Cortex is a project management platform that lets engineering teams in firms collaborate and manage their work. Cortex has raised $53 million so far, in response to the company.
Image Source: Courtesy of Cortex. Co-founder and CEO Anish Dhar.
What was your day job (or other sources of income) when you began your side hustle-turned-startup?
When I began Cortex, I used to be working as an engineer at Uber. I went to Uber right out of faculty, began as an intern, and stayed for almost five years, working on projects like the Uber Eats delivery experience. In the back of my mind, I used to be at all times looking for the opportunity to start out my very own company. I worked on two different startups while I used to be at Uber—neither one worked, but I used to be open to what my next big idea could be. The idea for my next startup, Cortex, got here from my day job.
When did you begin doing this and where did you get the inspiration?
Working at Uber, I saw how complicated coding architecture may very well be. Engineers called internal services video games, and documentation was scattered across multiple tools, making it hard to get context.
This meant that when services went down, it was very obscure which engineers owned which services, so “level 5” outages became common. Engineers took their historical knowledge with them, and no one could find the documentation to repair the problems. I became an engineer because I desired to develop products, but I spent a lot of time asking questions or trying to seek out information. These real frustrations I had as an engineer led to developing the foundation for Cortex, an internal developer portal for engineering teams to assist understand, support, and build latest software. I began working on the idea in July 2019, and by October 2019, Cortex had grow to be my full-time job.
What were the first steps you took to start out your side hustle?
Once I noticed I had potentially discovered a real problem value solving—something value building and something the market might need—I reached out to two close friends who also worked in technology. I wanted to grasp how their firms were tackling documentation and service management. They didn’t have a solution either; even established firms were struggling with these issues, confirming that there was a significant gap in the market for an effective tool.
We rented an Airbnb for the weekend and threw ourselves into a 48-hour hackathon. Without outside distractions, we brainstormed, collaborated, and quickly prototyped solutions. By the end of the weekend, we had developed the first version of what would grow to be Cortex.
What were the biggest challenges you faced while building your side hustle and how did you overcome them?
I had difficulty effectively managing my time between my foremost job and my side hustle. Initially, I put in more hours on Cortex than I did on my actual job. This imbalance was not sustainable in the future for my profession or any semblance of work-life balance. The incontrovertible fact that I naturally gravitated toward spending more time on Cortex became a clear sign that I should double down on that. This eventually led to Cortex becoming my full-time job.
How did you approach financing a startup? What does growth and revenue seem like now?
Funding was a challenge for us at first. Our team was building a completely latest category of developer tools, which meant that investors had no comparable firms in the market. We needed to prove that the pain points were real and that we were the right team to resolve the problem.
We had a big break when we got accepted to Y Combinator with just a prototype and a beta group of our friends. During YC, we continued to refine our product based on feedback from potential customers. As we refined the product, we were lucky enough for Sequoia Capital to speculate in our team before we even had our first paying customer.
Since then, Cortex has experienced significant growth. We now have tons of of enterprise customers, including major brands like Adobe and Xero. We recently secured a $35 million Series B funding round and proceed to grow our revenue at a healthy clip.
What do you want most about this business?
I like that I get to assist engineers do the work that matters to them as a substitute of wasting time searching for information. I wish I had Cortex when I used to be an engineer.
This could also be surprising given the hybrid era we live in, but I also love meeting clients in person. There’s something irreplaceable about face-to-face interactions. I’m on the road, traveling for work almost every other week. I’ve found that I can higher understand their team, their business, and their challenges, and forge deeper connections when we’re in the same room.
What advice would you give to others who would love to start out their very own profitable business or do something else?
My advice to anyone hoping to start out a successful side hustle or business is to imagine in yourself and your vision, even if others don’t. When we were first starting out, we had a lot of investors telling us our idea wouldn’t work and it could be easy to get discouraged and quit.
When I didn’t know if we’d get funding or get our first customers, my belief in the product got me through the tough times, and imagine me, as a founder, there are a lot of tough times. I ignored the investors who didn’t get it, focused on the real frustrations of the engineers, and took the feedback to iterate Cortex into a product that had value. I knew we were tackling a real problem, and that drove me to maintain building.
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