He made starting a U.S. company about as hard as ordering takeout. doola handles the LLC, the bank account, the bookkeeping and the taxes — so a founder in Lagos or Lisbon can build like one in San Francisco.
The fastest way to understand Arjun Mahadevan is to watch what he deleted. He took the single most universal rite of passage in entrepreneurship - the slow, expensive, paperwork-choked act of forming a company - and turned it into a button. That is doola. Not a law firm with a website, not a filing service with a chatbot. A Business-in-a-Box for people who want to build something and would rather not spend their first month deciphering registered-agent requirements in a state they have never visited.
doola does the unglamorous parts of starting up: it forms the LLC or C-corp, gets the EIN, opens business banking, keeps the books and files the taxes. The customers are spread across more than 175 countries, and a great many of them have never set foot in the United States. That is the point. A founder in Berlin or Bangalore can now own a U.S. company without a U.S. address, a U.S. lawyer, or a plane ticket.
Arjun runs the company from New York, where doola keeps its office on West 27th Street. The team is around ninety people. The pitch he repeats, in podcasts and on stages and in a newsletter read by a large weekly audience, is four words long: talent is everywhere, opportunity is not. doola is his attempt to close the gap on the second half.
He did not arrive here by accident, and he did not arrive here from a position of comfort. He arrived because the paperwork burned him first.
“Talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not.” Arjun Mahadevan
Both of Arjun's parents are physicians. They uprooted their lives, moved across an ocean to America, and redid their medical residencies from scratch to practice again. He watched what people will trade for access to opportunity, and the lesson stuck.
Out of the University of Pennsylvania - a dual degree spanning Wharton and the College of Arts and Sciences, statistics and mathematics - he landed at Dropbox. Data and analytics first, then product manager on the growth team. It was, on paper, the dream. At 24 he decided it wasn't. He left because he had the itch to build.
When Arjun and co-founder JP Pincheira tried to start their own U.S. company, they discovered the process was complicated, expensive and slow - made worse by the fact that they were a distributed team, with Arjun in the U.S. and JP in Germany.
That friction became the product. doola launched in 2020. The company went through Y Combinator, raised a seed round, then an $8M+ Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners, and later a strategic round that brought in HubSpot Ventures and angels including Codie Sanchez and Graham Stephan.
Before you can go 0 to 1 and reach product-market fit, you have to go from 0 to 0.1.
Growth by a thousand cuts. You're chipping away, filling the bucket, and then you look at it and go - oh, it's working.
Everyone has some idea inside of them. It's really a matter of time before they turn it into something real.
Many folks are surprised that you can form a US company as a non-US resident.
On Deck was an incredible forcing function for me to actually work on an idea and get it out the door.
Keep on climbing cringe mountain.
Arjun is loud about founder-led content - the idea that the founder, not the brand account, is the channel. He has put that theory to work building doola's audience in public.
In this talk he breaks down how doola scaled its reach without a traditional playbook, the same growth-by-a-thousand-cuts approach he applies to the product.
► Watch on YouTubeFormation is the front door. Arjun wants doola to be the whole house - expanding past incorporation into education, legal and financial services, so the administrative friction of running a company quietly disappears and the founder gets to do the part they actually care about.
The thesis underneath it never moves: opportunity should not depend on a passport or a zip code.
His podcast is built around a constraint: founders are busy, so it's the 15-Minute Founder.
doola is styled with a lowercase d and sells itself as a Business-in-a-Box.
He's a Boston sports fan.
He frames startup growth as a thousand small cuts that suddenly add up.