Chini Krishnan and the art of removing a step

A website can lose you in the space between two clicks. Chini Krishnan has spent much of his career working in that space: the awkward distance between wanting to do something online and actually getting it done. Early on, the obstacle was trust. Later, it was a process that kept sending customers somewhere else. The machinery changed. The irritation was familiar.

In 2018, he described a particularly unlovely piece of web choreography. A customer began on one website, moved to a government site to confirm eligibility, then returned to finish. Two redirects. Different screens. Another opportunity to wonder whether the whole thing was worth the trouble. His company, GetInsured, was preparing technology that would let the customer stay in one place.

Software people have a vocabulary for this sort of improvement. Everybody else has a simpler ambition: finish the form and get on with the day. Krishnan's career becomes easier to understand when viewed from that second position. He keeps returning to the practical question of what stands between a person and a completed transaction.

Before the form, the question of trust

His full name is Srinivasan Krishnan; Chini is the name he uses professionally. He studied computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, then at Duke, where he earned a master's degree in 1991 and a doctorate in 1992. The academic training preceded a career in which technical problems would repeatedly become business opportunities.

At Enterprise Integration Technologies, he worked in product marketing and participated in the release of an early secure browser. The distinction matters. A browser could make the internet accessible, but commerce needed a reason for people to entrust it with something valuable. Security was part of the product's usefulness, however little a customer wanted to think about it.

Then came ValiCert, where Krishnan was founder, chairman and chief technology officer. Its work involved public-key infrastructure and digital credentials. A credential can establish who someone is; a functioning system also needs to handle the moment when that credential should cease to be trusted. Revocation is an unglamorous word for a consequential problem.

Cryptographer Paul Kocher remembered working with Krishnan on precisely that problem. In Kocher's account, a broader business idea exposed a smaller piece of infrastructure that other people could use. That component became the basis for ValiCert. The episode offers a useful way to read Krishnan's later choices: pay attention when a necessary, awkward piece of plumbing has no satisfactory solution.

A public listing, followed by harder arithmetic

ValiCert went public in 2000 and merged with Tumbleweed Communications in 2003. Those two dates can look tidy in an executive biography. The years between them were much less accommodating. The company experienced slowing sales after the dot-com boom, and its management confronted the ordinary, uncomfortable arithmetic of expenses outrunning revenue.

Work shifted toward India, but the experience revealed how much software development depends on communication, familiarity and continuity. A lower wage did not automatically produce a simpler operation. Teams had to understand the products, the customers and one another. Distance made that coordination harder. Krishnan described the motivation for the changes as “pure survival.”

The lesson available in that episode is fairly stern: an organization cannot be reduced to its cost spreadsheet. Moving a task also moves the conversations that make the task possible. The skill of a particular manager, or the knowledge accumulated by a particular team, can be expensive to lose even when it is difficult to price.

The merger closed one chapter. Krishnan's next company would give him another chance to connect technical infrastructure with a customer problem, this time through software that other organizations could use under their own names.

A company behind somebody else's screen

Krishnan and Shankar Srinivasan founded GetInsured in 2005. The company began with a consumer website, then shifted toward supplying cloud-based marketplace software to states. That change altered the audience for the sales pitch and the shape of the business. The person using the service might never encounter the vendor's name.

In a 2020 conversation, Krishnan explained the appeal of replacing older, individually built systems with a shared software platform. States could retain differences in policy without commissioning every piece of technology afresh. Configuration would carry some of the variation that had previously demanded a separate construction project.

This is a less photogenic version of entrepreneurship than launching a consumer brand. The product has to fit inside another institution's obligations. Reliability, flexibility and the ability to make changes become central parts of the offer. A bright new interface can earn attention; a working system must earn another day of use.

He also described an enterprise business model built around contracts that tended to have fixed prices. GetInsured had been founded in Bessemer's offices, with institutional backing. Krishnan's connection to the firm extends beyond being a portfolio-company founder: Bessemer lists him as an operating partner as well as Vimo's founder and CEO. His career spans both building a company and participating in the venture ecosystem around company builders.

The pleasure of one fewer detour

The 2018 redirect problem makes the business tangible. Each individual handoff could have an administrative explanation. Together, they created an experience that asked the customer to keep starting again. Krishnan's description concentrated on the discontinuity: changing appearances, repeated information and time consumed by the journey.

Keeping the transaction on one site required coordination behind the screen. That is the appealing paradox of useful software. The simpler experience can depend on more sophisticated work elsewhere. The customer should not have to become an expert in the system's internal organization to finish a task.

That same preference appears in his later discussion of marketplaces as tools for discovery. People arrive with circumstances and preferences. The system should help translate those into understandable choices. The work involves arranging information so that a decision becomes possible, then making the next action available while the person is ready to take it.

Leave a little room for the reader

There is a quieter detail in Krishnan's account of office life: books left around for employees to pick up. The team also curated four or five books during the holiday season for friends and partners. A company library makes a rather different statement from a wall covered in motivational instructions. A book allows the recipient to disagree at leisure.

His own interests run toward science, history and culture. He singled out Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene as a book that stayed with him, while making clear that personal fascination and professional usefulness were different things. Reading did not need to justify itself by producing a management technique before lunch.

He has described approaching business with a sense of adventure. Alongside that appetite sits a work philosophy drawn from the Bhagavad Gita: concentrate on the effort, recognize limits to control and resist becoming too attached to personal credit. It is a demanding arrangement for a founder, whose job routinely requires both conviction and the willingness to revise it.

“Do good work, know what I can control”

Chini Krishnan, 2020 interview

AI still has to answer the telephone

In March 2024, Krishnan set out his position on artificial intelligence in an essay about human interaction. He argued for automating repetitive work and giving people better information while preserving room for judgment, empathy and collaboration. His stated ambition was to give workers more capacity to deal with the people and problems requiring their attention.

It is an operational test for a technology often presented in abstractions. Does a tool clear a backlog? Does it give a representative useful context? Does it make a conversation easier? Those are questions a working team can investigate. They also connect his newest interest to his older concern with what happens between a person's intention and the system's response.

Customer assistance remains part of the company's business alongside its software. For the 2025 enrollment period, GetInsured reported handling more than 796,000 calls across four state operations, with an average wait below 11 seconds. The figures are company-reported operational measures. They put some scale around the very human matter of being kept on hold.

New work keeps bringing the same design questions into different institutions. In September 2025, GetInsured announced an Oregon contract combining a configurable platform with an integrated call center. One planned feature was a common internal account dashboard for representatives. The resident's experience would depend partly on whether the person answering could see the necessary information.

Today the wider business presents itself as Vimo, with work extending into public benefits, child and family services, and agency operations. Its current website describes cloud software, process redesign and automation as parts of the same undertaking. Krishnan remains CEO and co-founder. The company that began in 2005 has acquired more institutional responsibilities along the way.

He returned to Duke for a leadership conversation in 2022 and participated in its computer science anniversary program in 2023. The student who learned to investigate computational problems had become a founder discussing how to build organizations around them. Somewhere between those roles lies the persistent attraction of an ordinary improvement: the form completed, the question answered, the customer spared another detour.