In 2017, soon after his first company was acquired, Arvind Parthiban went to a tattoo parlour. The words he put on his arm were an instruction to his future self: “Die with memories, not dreams.” Zarget’s sale to Freshworks had given him what founders are supposed to want - an exit, a strong team, financial security, a corner office. Parthiban understood the danger. A comfortable life could turn his intention to build again into a story he kept telling rather than a thing he did.
The reminder worked. He spent the next few years at Freshworks, leading marketing work and helping stage the kind of campaign that becomes conference folklore: a blimp floating over San Francisco during Salesforce’s annual gathering. Then he left. In 2020, with longtime product builder Jayakumar Karumbasalam, he started SuperOps and returned to the software category where his career had begun.
It was a peculiar second act. IT service management is full of tickets, device inventories, patches, contracts, documentation, and alerts. The work is essential and usually invisible when it goes well. Its tools rarely attract a crowd. Parthiban saw precisely what made the category worth another decade: people did not merely try this software. They lived inside it.
The job he found by telling the truth
Parthiban studied computer science and engineering at SMEC, affiliated with Anna University. He has called himself an engineer by accident. The original plan was to take the GRE and go to the United States. While waiting, he applied for a part-time job at AdventNet, the company now known as Zoho, and told his interviewer that coding was not his strength. He did, however, understand technology.
The interview ran for two hours. The conversation wandered deep into routers, switches, and the practical workings of systems. Girish Mathrubootham, who conducted it, offered Parthiban a job in pre-sales: demonstrate the product, help customers implement it, and translate between technical machinery and the people buying it. Parthiban had found the lane that would carry him through the rest of his career.
He estimates that he completed close to 150 implementations. That meant moving through customer offices, cultures, airports, and a reliable blur of Holiday Inns. By 2008, he was tired of travel and asked to return to India. Zoho moved him into product marketing for the same service-desk software. There was no established India-to-the-world SaaS playbook waiting on a shelf. The team tried things, watched what happened, and tried again.
“I adopted a ‘learn by doing’ approach, where even failure was acceptable because it provided valuable learning experiences.”Arvind Parthiban on learning product marketing
That sequence matters. He met the customer before he marketed the product. He watched tools enter real environments before he wrote campaigns about them. For a founder who would later make loud, visual bets on brand, the apprenticeship underneath was quiet and operational.
The first company taught him what could be thrown away
Parthiban left Zoho in late 2014 and co-founded Zarget with Naveen Venkat and Santosh Kumar. The product gave smaller businesses A/B tests, heat maps, funnel analysis, and other ways to improve a website. Customers got value. That was also the problem. A small company might optimize its site, reach its goal, and have little reason to return until the next redesign. Parthiban later described the pattern as “use and throw” software.
Zarget raised venture capital from Accel, Matrix, and Sequoia and found customers around the world. In 2017, Freshworks acquired it. Parthiban joined the buyer and went back to marketing at scale. The exit delivered a useful lesson without requiring him to romanticize it: a product may solve a real problem and still sit too far from the daily heartbeat of a business.
When he chose his next market, he moved toward software with a different gravity. Managed service providers, or MSPs, run technology for other organizations. Their technicians open tickets, monitor remote devices, install patches, record time, manage contracts, and keep documentation current. Their operating platform is less like an occasional tool and more like a workplace.
Customer archaeology before production code
The market looked frozen in time. When Parthiban compared notes from 2009 with the landscape a decade later, many of the same vendors still dominated. Their suites had often grown by acquisition, leaving MSPs to manage seams between ticketing, monitoring, documentation, accounting, and remote access. Yet old software was difficult to displace. Technicians had trained on it. Businesses had wired years of process and dozens of integrations around it. Switching carried technical, professional, and emotional costs.
SuperOps began by inviting customers into the design room. The founders recruited about 150 MSPs through Reddit, personal networks, and investor connections before writing production code. Calls could run for hours. Operators shared screens and walked through manual steps, awkward workarounds, and the systems they had stitched together. The team eventually spoke with hundreds of MSPs while shaping a unified cloud product.
Affection did not guarantee adoption. Early partners could like the interface and still refuse to move because one essential integration was missing. The lesson arrived feature by feature over months. A platform replacing a working stack had to account for the whole job, not merely present a cleaner version of its most visible screen.
“Till now, products have been built and forced on you. We want to listen to you and build for you.”The early SuperOps pitch to MSP design partners
The company turned rejection into a product instrument. A closed-lost board allowed salespeople and prospects to log the missing capability behind a failed deal. The team weighed those entries against community demand and competitor coverage. Sales received a vote, not a veto. The method gave product decisions three angles and made the roadmap legible to the people waiting on it.
Watch the workflow
Ask customers to share the improvised steps around the product, not only the feature list they say they want.
Log the lost deal
Treat every rejection as structured evidence. Name the missing capability and count how often it matters.
Use three signals
Compare sales losses with community requests and the market before moving a feature up the roadmap.
Test the engine
Friendly buyers create momentum. Product-market fit appears when strangers arrive through a process that works again.
The quiet system behind loud marketing
Parthiban’s definition of product-market fit is stricter than a flattering customer list. A founder’s network can create the first burst of revenue. It cannot prove that a company knows how to generate leads, convert unknown buyers, and repeat the process. He looks for predictability: a sales and go-to-market engine that can be explained, measured, and run again.
He applies the same long clock to brand. If product takes a year to build, recognition and organic demand need their own head start. SuperOps began publishing and participating in the MSP community before launch. This did not eliminate paid acquisition. It reduced the risk of entering a mature category as one more unfamiliar logo asking for attention.
Then comes theater. At Freshworks there was the blimp. In August 2025, SuperOps unveiled an agentic AI marketplace, built in association with AWS, under a 200-drone light show in Las Vegas. The stunts fit Parthiban’s playful public style, but they are not substitutes for the operating system underneath. One creates a moment. The other gives customers a reason to return on Monday.
Kirk, Spock, and the permission to turn
Parthiban describes himself through Star Trek. He leans toward Captain Kirk, making decisions from instinct when the map is incomplete, and tries to surround himself with Spocks who are more logical and analytical. The analogy carries an admission that confidence can become a trap. A CEO has to see beyond personal attachment to an idea and accept the ordinary fact of being wrong.
His career includes a relationship that began the same way: with difference. Mathrubootham saw the technology translator inside a computer-science graduate who said he could not code. The former interviewer became a friend and adviser. On a 2008 trip to London with Facilio founder Rajavel Subramanian, Parthiban took both men to a Chelsea match. Chelsea won 7-0. Mathrubootham declared himself a supporter. Years later, an autographed photo of Rajinikanth and a signed John Terry jersey shared the wall of Parthiban’s Chennai office.
Those details make his version of enterprise software less austere. He enjoys a show, a football story, a sci-fi metaphor, and the physical reminder of a tattoo. He also talks about a founder as the captain of a ship in uncharted water: make an assumption, discover the mistake, correct course, continue.
The second act gets larger
By January 2025, SuperOps said it served about 1,300 customers across 104 countries, with North America producing nearly 70 percent of its business. A $25 million Series C led by March Capital, with Addition and Z47 participating, brought reported funding to $54.4 million. The plan was to move beyond smaller MSPs, build for mid-market and enterprise providers, extend into internal IT teams, and deepen research into AI, endpoint management, and security integrations.
Parthiban frames AI as foundational technology rather than an ornamental feature. SuperOps’ Monica system is intended to use the context already inside IT operations: the device, ticket, documentation, and prior work surrounding a problem. The longer aspiration moves from summarizing and automating toward prediction, recommendation, and agents that can carry out bounded work.
The geographical ambition is equally personal. Parthiban grew up around Bengaluru and Hosur, calls Chennai home, and now lives in San Francisco. He has described Zoho and Freshworks as the institutions that made Chennai’s SaaS ecosystem possible, then spoken of taking the baton and helping build a global software company from India. SuperOps is a bridge between those worlds: product building in Chennai, customers across the map, and a founder living close to the market that accounts for most of the business.
The tattoo still provides the neatest summary, but its meaning has changed with use. The dream was not merely to start again. It was to return with better judgment: choose a daily problem, listen before building, measure the losses, and let an old category carry a new company. The blimp can drift away. The drones can land. On Monday morning, the tickets keep arriving.