The little object at the center of Bharath Varma's product philosophy is not a stage, a badge or even a video stream. It is an attendance CSV. After months of planning and a burst of human activity, that drab file is often the only durable thing an event platform hands back. It knows that somebody came. It forgets almost everything else.
Varma finds this absurd in a specific, operatorly way. A person might attend five webinars, ten field events and a pair of conferences with the same company. Their questions, interests and encounters form a useful history. Yet each event tends to live in a different tool, leaving marketing operations to export, clean and reconcile the pieces before sales can act. By then, the room has emptied and the lead has cooled.
His line is compact enough for a poster: “Events are a goldmine of information. Event platforms need to arm you with the shovel.” It also contains the story of Zuddl, the company he co-founded and runs. The premise was earned backstage, where elegant experiences are assembled from inelegant systems.
First dollars, loud rooms
Varma says he always wanted to be an entrepreneur. He studied economics, earned a bachelor's degree and decided that the conventional corporate ladder would not give him the pace of learning he wanted. Money was not the primary lure, he has written. The attraction was faster growth and the chance to make an impact.
College supplied the experiment. He organized events and festivals, discovered a knack for the work and noticed that an events agency made a plausible first company: the startup cost was manageable and prospective customers were plentiful. It was a practical reading of a market by someone already carrying a clipboard inside it.
By 2014, he was publicly identified as managing director of Phoenix Live and helping produce RESET, an electronic-music gathering born in Hyderabad. The event paired Indian DJs with the sort of sound, lighting and visual production intended to make local talent feel properly framed. Varma spoke about creating something audiences did not anticipate. For a young operator, surprise was part of the product, but it had to arrive through disciplined production.
One early project captured his speed. At the opening of a new karting circuit near Hyderabad in 2015, Varma said an idea had moved from handshake to finished international-level track in three months. The sentence sounds less like a boast than the occupational dialect of live events: dates do not negotiate, doors eventually open, and reality must be ready.
Three hundred rehearsals for a software company
Phoenix Live grew into a team of more than 60 people across four cities. It produced more than 300 conferences for multinational companies including Microsoft, Google and Deloitte. Those numbers matter less as trophies than as repetitions. Every production was another tour through the same peculiar terrain: registration, invitations, speaker management, venue coordination, vendors, show flow, audience engagement and the desperate hope that useful information would reach sales afterward.
The software covered surprisingly little. Varma has described conventional event platforms as registration technology dressed in a broader title: a landing page, a form and a few emails, while most of the organizer's work continued in spreadsheets, inboxes and notebooks. In his rough accounting, the tools touched perhaps 10 percent of the job.
The hidden cost appeared when Phoenix Live hired. A capable new employee could spend a month learning the platform maze. One system handled large conferences, another webcasts, another hybrid programs and still another field events. The sprawl was accepted because execution consumed every available minute. When a show is approaching, philosophy is a luxury and the next checklist wins.
“The number one rule for events is have a plan B.”Bharath Varma, Backstage with Zuddl
That background explains Varma's unsentimental advice. Keep a Plan B and sometimes a Plan C. Decide on a format change early. Tell attendees, speakers and sponsors quickly. Reliability matters because an experiment that fails in public does not remain an internal learning exercise. Event people acquire this realism one opening time at a time.
The room disappears
In May 2020, the physical room disappeared almost everywhere at once. Varma and Vedha Sayyaparaju, a longtime family friend with a product and engineering background, started building Zuddl. The timing was theatrical: an experienced live-event operator began making event software just as live events became impossible.
They began building in May, formed the company around June and launched a minimum viable product in September. Zuddl joined Y Combinator's summer 2020 batch and raised a $2 million seed round from Y Combinator, GrowX and others that October. The initial product helped enterprises create branded online conferences at a moment when “virtual event” had moved from niche format to corporate necessity.
The company reported 20-fold growth from September 2020 across the following six months. By June 2021 it said it served more than 50 customers and had powered over 200 events. Varma told The Economic Times that the newly opened United States market was already contributing about 65 percent of revenue. In January 2022, Zuddl announced a $13.35 million Series A led by Alpha Wave Incubation and Qualcomm Ventures, with existing investors GrowX and Waveform Ventures participating.
The pandemic gave Zuddl an opening, but Varma's thesis did not end with virtual venues. He argued in 2021 that enterprises had long run hybrid events, even if the old version was simply a live stream with weak interaction. Virtual reach and physical attention would remain useful in different combinations. Zuddl's scope widened across in-person, virtual and hybrid programs, then toward one operating layer for conferences, field events and webinars.
Count the handoffs
Varma's recent writing has moved upstream from features to organizational friction. Ask why a dinner event takes two weeks to launch, and he counts the queues. A designer must prepare the branded page. A marketing-automation administrator owns the registration form. IT must code the change. None of them reports to the event marketer, who coordinates the relay while the calendar advances.
His proposed standard is “zero handoffs.” If brand rules already live in the platform, a designer need not touch every page. If the same system creates the registration flow and campaign context, the form does not wait for a specialist. If an event marketer can publish a change, there is no IT ticket. The point is not to make each queue slightly faster. It is to give the person responsible for the event enough context and control to avoid the queues.
and queues
context
faster learning
There is a moral hiding in this bit of workflow design. Organizations often mistake waiting for rigor. Every queue has a sensible owner and every handoff has a tidy explanation. Together they turn a straightforward event into a minor diplomatic mission. Varma's operator instinct is to look at the whole run-of-show and ask which dependencies are genuinely protecting quality.
He applies the same plain thinking to attendance. On a Zuddl podcast, he recommended sending calendar invitations rather than relying on an “add to calendar” button. He also argued that a reminder five minutes before a virtual event can work better than one sent an hour ahead, when the recipient has time to begin another task and forget. Speaker videos should explain, concisely, what the audience will learn. None of this is glamorous. All of it respects the distracted person on the other side of the registration form.
A company built from backstage memory
Varma now describes the larger gap as the difference between registration software and event orchestration. The future he sketches includes knowing whom to invite, coordinating venues and vendors, keeping records across every event and handing sales useful context before interest fades. Zuddl has added page building, registration flows, onsite tools, mobile experiences, lead capture, analytics and integrations around that ambition.
The aspiration carries the fingerprints of his first company. An agency remembers through people. The producer knows which vendor calls back, which speaker needs prompting and which small failure tends to become a large one at 8:59 a.m. Software can make some of that memory durable, searchable and available to the next person without requiring a month of initiation.
Varma's story is therefore less a leap from events into technology than a change of instrument. At college festivals, RESET and Phoenix Live, he assembled temporary systems that had to work for one consequential day. At Zuddl, he is trying to build a permanent one for the people who assemble those days.
The attendance CSV remains the perfect villain because it is so harmless-looking. It sits obediently in a downloads folder, all rows and no memory. Varma wants the software to remember the room: who came, what mattered, what happened next and what the team should do before the chairs are stacked. A decade backstage taught him that the show ends. The useful context should not.