Mr Shankar Krishnamoorthy: Cofounder & CEO of Synergita Software | Startuptalker

StartupTalky is one of the strongest community in India and we have a  lot of professionals who are doing great in their lives. To share their  learnings and inspire as many people as we can, we are interviewing all  the StartupTalkers in our "Know the StartupTalker" series.

Today, we have Shankar Krishnamoorthy as our interviewee. Shankar Krishnamoorthy is the co-founder and CEO of Synergita Software . You will learn a lot  from this story of Shankar Krishnamoorthy in his own words.

Quick Facts

1. Tell us about yourself, your professional background and how you got to where you are today. What keeps you motivated at whatever you do?

My name is Shankar Krishnamoorthy.  I am a co-founder and CEO of Synergita Software.  Gowri Subramanian and Bhoo Thirumalai are the other two co-founders of this company.  We have also co-founded another company, Aspire Systems prior to Synergita.  Aspire is a software services company which has global customers and rated as great place to work for the past 10 years consecutively.

My professional background is a mechanical and CAD/CAM engineer.  Gained good software development experience during the early phase of my career; built several software products for our customers at Aspire.  Our experience in building software products for our customers & instilling best people practices paved way for Synergita.  With Synergita, we are able to help several of our customers incorporate best practices and help them create peopleMAGIC in their organizations.  Seeing their success and opportunity to help them through our product really motivates us in whatever we are doing.  Plus, opportunity to build a great product company.

2. What are your job responsibilities and how they have changed over time?

I am responsible for driving Synergita business and making it a leader in our space.  We currently have about 200K+ users across 100 customers.  We are managing about 2.2M+ goals and competencies for our users on our platform.  So, product is evolving and growing.  5 years back, when we started Synergita, it was a small team – each of us were doing everything whatever we can do.  Now, the team has evolved into multiple streams.  Product management, engineering, implementation, support, customer success, sales, marketing, etc.  Each team is driven by a leader who brings in lot of rigor and passion.

3. Tell us about Synergita

Synergita is an award winning, continuous employee performance and engagement software.  It helps in managing employee goals (KPIs), competencies, have ongoing feedback between managers and their team members, peer recognition, 360 degree feedback, employee engagement survey, etc.  Automates employee performance review process and saves significant time for HR and managers.  Employees love this as they get continuous guidance from their managers and there are no surprises during the appraisal time.  This increases employee engagement and reduces attrition.

We have customers in India, Singapore and the US.  Some of our customers are Capita, Indegene, Brakes India, Lucas TVS, Vedanta Resources, Future Group, Yokogawa, NTUC Learning Hub, American Micro, etc.

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4. What are your plan for the company in 2020?

Our Northstar is “creating peopleMAGIC” for our customers through employee best practices on performance, engagement and development.  We are constantly enhancing our product with newer capabilities along these lines.  This year, we have OKR, deeper employee engagement capabilities in our plan.

We have recently moved to a nice, new open office @ Navalur, Chennai.  https://blog.synergita.com/2020/01/happy-new-start-at-new-location-synergita/)This will help us in better collaboration among our team.

From the customer base front, we are investing on the US geography to get more customers there.  We have local sales presence in Chicago and we are hoping that these investments would produce results in 2020 for us and get new customers, increase customer satisfaction, etc.

5. How do you see the Automated HR processes market growing in India?

It is fast growing.  Organizations are investing in digital transformation to increase employee productivity.  If employees get good care from their company/managers in terms of setting expectations, guiding in their work, their performance will be better.  So, it helps both employee and the organization.  That is what Synergita is doing.

Plus, there are lot of expectations from employees in using better HRTech products for their day-to-day worklife.  People are expecting the same sophistication that your Gmail and Facebook provide in their work as well.

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6. Do you think Employee Engagement & Performance software is a must for every organization?

Yes.  It is a must.  Employees are critical for any organizations’ success and growth.  Lot of organizations put “Employees First” philosophy.  Happy and engaged employees will take care of the customers and hence the business.  If you want to do these, you need a good software which helps in performance and engagement…automates the process, proactively help all the employees in their work, etc.  So, it is a must in our opinion.

On a lighter note, no point in doing performance appraisals manually anymore.  Major frustration for HR is the amount of time it requires to do one appraisal and they are not able to focus on strategic activities.  It is high time they transform their performance management with Synergita.

7. Mention Struggles/Challenges faced in your professional/ startup life and how did you overcome it?

In a startup life, there will always be bandwidth challenges in all angles – be it funding, engineering bandwidth, marketing, sales.  There will be conflicting priorities, lot of things to do in a short time.  You just have to prioritize to meet these challenges and move forward.  Perseverence is the key.  In case of Synergita, we have been fortunate to have a great set of team with us.  Driven and capable team.

8. Which online tools/ services/ apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?

We are a cloud company.  We deliver Synergita as software as a service for our customers.  We use cloud tools for our own requirements such as Freshdesk for customer support, Leadsquared for marketing automation, Amazon AWS for our cloud, Knowlarity for telephony, Wordpress for our content blog, Office365 for our email and team collaboration, Zoom for web conference, etc.

9. Where are your long term and short term goals? What are you doing to achieve that? It is sufficient?

We want to make Synergita a leader in talent management space.  This space is evolving and there are plenty of opportunities in this space.  Every functionality – performance, engagement, development, OKR, compensation, recruitment, etc. are enticing.  With artificial intelligence capabilities, we can do so many things.  We need to do this meaningfully and bring in business sense to grow the product.

As a startup, we are currently focusing primarily on one year goals for us and work hard to reach these goals.  These goals include customer acquisition, product capabilities, funding, etc.  For 2020, we have set 300K as number of users on our platform; add OKR and Employee engagement as product roadmap priorities; focus more on customer success.

Whatever we are doing is not sufficient.  So much to do and so little time and resources 😊.