Ajit Gupta had a music collection to digitise, photographs to organise and, at last, some time. Speedera Networks, the internet company he had co-founded, had been acquired by Akamai. He could stop building things for a while. Domestic life, however, proved a less accommodating market than expected. He found himself getting under his wife’s feet. “I needed to launch a business to save my marriage,” he joked in 2012.
The joke supplies a neat beginning for Aryaka, although the business itself began with a less charming inconvenience. Gupta knew what it took to work between India and the United States. He had done it. Linking a branch office to the rest of a company could be complicated, expensive and slow. A business could spread across the world more readily than its employees could share the work.
Gupta’s answer became a company built around a question of ownership. How much networking equipment did a customer really need to buy, install and look after? What if much of that responsibility could belong to somebody else? For an entrepreneur who had already spent years helping internet content travel, the irritation was close to home.
A second act, inside the firewall
Speedera began in 1999. Its business was content delivery: helping websites and online applications reach users through distributed infrastructure. Gupta was its president and CEO. The customer bought better delivery, while Speedera operated the machinery that made it possible. The arrangement would give him a useful starting point for his next networking venture.
In March 2005, Akamai announced an agreement to acquire Speedera by issuing approximately 12 million shares. At the share price on the agreement date, the transaction was valued at about $130 million. The agreement also provided a way out of pending litigation between the companies. Rivals could become colleagues, with a larger network and a broader collection of services to offer customers.
Approximate announced value of Akamai’s stock agreement to acquire Speedera.
A sale can look like a full stop from the outside. Gupta’s subsequent career reads more like a change of destination. With Speedera, the traffic had largely been heading outward, towards consumers. With Aryaka, he wanted to improve the movement of information within a business: headquarters talking to branches, colleagues reaching applications, distant offices behaving a little less distantly.
That distinction mattered. An employee waiting for an application is still working, or trying to. A connection that technically exists can remain a poor connection for the job at hand. Gupta’s opportunity sat in that gap between being connected and being able to get something done.
Fifty conversations before the sales pitch
During the downturn of 2008, Gupta investigated the networking market and spoke to 50 companies. Most, he found, would pay for a service connecting computers across their scattered locations. It was a practical piece of market research, conducted before the proposition had been polished into a grand account of where the industry was going.
Those conversations gave the idea a commercial shape. Mid-sized businesses needed links between offices but could struggle to justify the traditional combination of private connectivity and optimisation equipment. Gupta saw room for monthly subscriptions. His ambition was substantial: by late 2012, he was talking about a billion dollars in annual revenue within five years. That was his target, rather than a result already achieved.
There were people willing to back another attempt. Nexus Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures were among Aryaka’s early investors. In June 2011, the company announced a $15 million Series B round led by Nexus. Its network had reached 25 points of presence around the world. An idea about simplifying infrastructure required a considerable amount of infrastructure behind it.
Three founders, one awkward problem
Aryaka brought together Ajit Gupta, Ashwath Nagaraj and Rajeev Bharadhwaj. Their experience covered different parts of the same problem. Gupta understood content delivery. Nagaraj brought networking and security experience; Bharadhwaj came from applications. The combination helped them think about both the journey and the work waiting at either end.
Years later, Nagaraj recalled Gupta’s premise: “We need to do things as a service.” It sounds almost modest. Applied to corporate networking, it meant asking customers to change how they bought and managed something their companies depended on. The provider would assume responsibility for a shared system, while customers would connect to it.
“We need to do things as a service.”
Ajit Gupta, recalled by co-founder Ashwath Nagaraj
Nagaraj also remembered Gupta encouraging a view beyond daily setbacks. That recollection gives the business proposition a human counterpart. Operating a network requires attention to the immediate problem; building a company requires enough perspective to return the next morning. Gupta’s colleagues remembered that larger view alongside the service idea.
The airport theory of networking
When he explained Aryaka, Gupta reached for airports. A company should be able to arrive at a nearby point of presence and let a professionally managed network carry its traffic onward. It should have access to a transport system without constructing an international transport system of its own. Customers could understand the destination without becoming experts in every connection along the route.
The consequences could be surprisingly physical. Gupta described Aruba’s manufacturing operations in China needing approval from headquarters in the Bay Area before equipment could ship. A delay in communication could mean missing a ship and sending the goods by air instead. A slow exchange of information could arrive on the freight bill.
This was a useful way to talk about networking because it brought the discussion back to an ordinary business decision. The value of a faster connection could include a cheaper shipment or an approval delivered in time. Technical performance became easier to evaluate when somebody could point to the work it enabled.
The cloud still needed a road
Gupta’s argument extended beyond links between offices. In 2013, he wrote about a workforce spreading geographically while applications were being concentrated in fewer data centres or moving into cloud services. People and the tools they needed were heading in different directions. The network had to account for both journeys.
Interactive applications added another complication. Voice, video and remote desktop sessions made delays harder to shrug off. Meanwhile, budgets did not automatically expand with demand. Gupta argued for a global network with optimisation built into the service, capable of reaching users and applications wherever they were located. Smaller offices were part of that argument, too.
He returned to the subject in a 2014 essay about entrepreneurs in Brazil, Russia, India and China. Digital infrastructure, he argued, affected their ability to communicate and collaborate internationally. Founders could have customers and colleagues abroad while still struggling with the connections between them. His commercial interest was clear, but so was the practical question: who could afford dependable access to a global market?
Aryaka’s early channel strategy fitted that view. It worked with resellers, referral agents, service providers and hosting businesses. Sonal Puri, who had worked at Speedera and Akamai, helped develop its sales and marketing. The people selling the service could already know the customer’s frustrations. Gupta’s technical network had a network of business relationships alongside it.
Fast cars, slow trains
Gupta could make a networking interview sound briefly like a conversation about his garage. Asked in 2013 how he unwound, he named his Mercedes SLS. Asked about devices, he described buying Apple products as soon as they appeared. His music included Bollywood, folk, pop and classical selections. He plainly had uses for the time his networks were supposed to save.
Yet when offered a choice between flying, driving and taking a train, he chose the train. Long journeys recalled growing up in India. Speed had its attractions; so did a route that carried a memory. The preference adds a welcome complication to the portrait of an entrepreneur forever discussing acceleration.
He had a similarly playful account of starting again. “Entrepreneurship is like falling in love I guess!” he said in 2012. He described the relief of leaving Speedera’s pace behind, followed by the pull of another startup. Retirement had offered leisure. Building another company offered something he found harder to leave alone.
A service that outlasts the pitch
Gupta’s career also included AAyuja, a technology sales business, and JantaKhoj, a background-verification venture. But the connection between Speedera and Aryaka remains particularly revealing. Both asked customers to entrust difficult infrastructure to a provider that could operate it across many users and locations. His second networking act grew from experience accumulated in the first.
In 2015, Aryaka raised another $16 million from existing investors to expand its sales infrastructure. Years later, colleagues were still returning to its founding service philosophy. The enduring question in Gupta’s work is wonderfully concrete: how much effort should a company spend moving information before it can use that information? He built businesses around reducing that effort. Standing still, it turned out, was the harder assignment.