K. V. Rao and the Sunday-night problem

Sunday night ought to be a modestly unambitious part of the week. For K. V. Rao, it had acquired a second occupation: preparing for Monday morning sales meetings. The information was there. The confidence was harder to locate. Spreadsheets demanded attention without reliably returning understanding. A coming board meeting could make the same problem considerably more expensive.

Rao would describe that experience when explaining why he started Aviso. He had already helped found Zuora, the subscription software business. He knew the peculiar frustration of having systems full of records while still struggling to decide what to do next. The Sunday-night problem was familiar enough to seem routine. He treated it as a product brief.

That choice says something about the kind of founder he became. His working territory was the space between a technical possibility and a manager trying to get through the week. A forecast needed mathematics, certainly. It also needed to survive an encounter with the people expected to use it.

Before the forecast, the bill

Rao’s route into enterprise software began with an engineering education: a B.Tech at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, an M.S. at the University of Missouri-Rolla, now Missouri University of Science and Technology, and a Ph.D. at Iowa State University. His early career included NASA and General Motors before positions at Silicon Graphics and WebEx. The later business titles rested on a technical foundation.

At WebEx, he was an early employee and director of technology. His work extended into alliances and relationships with large corporate customers. That combination matters: understanding a system and persuading a business to buy it are separate accomplishments. Rao’s career put him in contact with both sides of the transaction.

In 2007, he co-founded Zuora with Cheng Zou and Tien Tzuo. Their previous experience brought together WebEx and Salesforce. Zuora addressed a mundane complication of an expanding business model: companies selling subscriptions needed to manage the billing that followed. Someone had to make recurring payments work after the exciting sales presentation was over.

Zuora’s 2008 launch announcement identified Rao as president and described his role in securing alliances and Fortune 50 customers at WebEx. The founding team was selling practical knowledge of subscription businesses. Its first announced Series A financing was $6.5 million, led by Benchmark Capital.

An old acquaintance, a different kind of bet

By early 2012, Rao wanted to start again. The next business would tackle sales decisions. Andrew Abrahams, who had led quantitative research and modeling at JPMorgan Chase, was leaving finance and considering the startup world. He contacted Rao. They had known one another for more than 15 years.

Their connection went back to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where they had worked with powerful computing resources for quantitative analysis. Aviso reunited two people whose experience had since diverged. Rao had been building enterprise businesses; Abrahams had been working with the mathematics of financial risk.

Their new company borrowed a useful idea from portfolio management. A sales pipeline contains opportunities with different risks, values and possible outcomes. Treating those opportunities as a portfolio could help a manager decide where effort belonged. The proposed benefit reached beyond producing a number for the board: it could help determine what to do before that number became history.

The partnership also gave Rao an occasion to explain his own rules for working with another founder. He grouped them under chemistry, compatibility, commitment and communication. The practical advice was pleasingly untechnical: spend time together, including over meals, before deciding to build a company.

Two years before the curtain went up

Aviso was founded in 2012 and launched publicly on April 30, 2014, after two years of product development. Its launch financing was $8 million. Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital, Cowboy Ventures and Bloomberg Beta were among the backers. Early customers included RingCentral, FireEye, Saba Software, Replicon and Zuora itself.

The original offering was called Total Revenue Intelligence. The name was expansive; the immediate task was concrete. Take information already accumulating inside a business, examine possible outcomes and help executives make decisions about revenue. Cloud computing made large volumes of calculation more affordable than they had been in an earlier computing era.

Rao’s launch argument was shaped by the managerial experience that preceded it. Records of past activity could become material for decisions about the future. That required the right mathematical approach and enough computing capacity to explore alternatives. The ambition was to put that work within reach of people running a business.

By August 2014, Aviso had announced leaders across revenue, marketing, engineering, product management and data science. Jeff Yoshimura and Mandar Parikh brought experience from Zuora; other appointments brought backgrounds at Oracle, HP and Groupon. Rao was assembling the people needed to turn the proposition into a working enterprise product.

A number is only the beginning

In September 2014, Aviso introduced Insights, drawing data from CRM and enterprise resource planning systems. The product aimed to help sales managers allocate resources and act on opportunities. Its intended customers were substantial sales organizations: Rao described a minimum annual subscription of $100,000 and teams of at least 50 sales representatives.

One early user was RingCentral president David Berman, who valued being able to examine individual representatives and opportunities. The appeal was visibility while there was still time to respond. A report on a finished quarter arrives with excellent hindsight and rather poor manners. It cannot offer back the days in which a different decision might have mattered.

The product’s early positioning therefore made a distinction between describing performance and helping change it. Historical deals could provide clues about current ones. A manager might use those clues to spot trouble, coach a representative or direct attention toward a promising opportunity. The software was meant to participate in the work.

That intention became more tangible in 2015, when Aviso launched Insights on Salesforce’s AppExchange. The announcement described forecast automation, early warnings and information from CRM, email and calendars. Reaching users through an established enterprise marketplace was a practical step toward making the system part of their normal routine.

The forecast has “happy ears”

Rao had a compact expression for another forecasting difficulty: “happy ears.” In his 2015 writing, it described the optimism that can creep into estimates. A pipeline can look reassuring while vulnerable opportunities receive too much weight and less obvious prospects get too little attention. Consolidating more spreadsheets does not automatically correct the assumptions inside them.

He illustrated the argument with Nutanix sales operations director Rickie Goyal, who ran Aviso alongside an existing spreadsheet process for a quarter. Rao reported that Aviso’s revenue prediction came within four percent. It was a customer example, rather than a universal accuracy promise, and its method of persuasion was straightforward: compare the new system with the familiar one.

His writing also reveals a fondness for popular culture as a way into business problems. One essay moved from Willy Loman to Iron Man. He objected to familiar depictions of salespeople as desperate or dishonest and proposed a more useful image: a capable person whose equipment helps them perform.

The comparison gave the software a supporting role. Sales still involved judgment, relationships and pressure. Machines could examine patterns and trade-offs at a scale a person could not comfortably manage. Rao wanted the person making the call to have better equipment. The outfit could remain entirely free of titanium.

Kirk keeps the captain’s chair

“The magic happens with humans,” Rao said in 2016. He described analytics as a way to check emotional bias while supporting experience and intuition. When the conversation turned to Star Trek, he agreed with the pairing of Kirk and Spock: the captain’s energy benefited from an analytical counterpart.

His test for adoption was similarly human. People needed to verify that a recommendation deserved confidence. They also needed the technology to fit existing business processes. An impressive object left unused was a poor outcome. The work of making analytics useful included making it familiar enough to become a habit.

That concern sits comfortably beside the portrait offered by colleagues. His colleague Itzik Cohen praised Rao’s combination of technical understanding and business skills. Jim Bennette singled out his ability to reduce business issues to their pivotal parts and offer candid advice. These are colleagues’ assessments, but they describe a recognizable bridge between engineering and operating a company.

“The magic happens with humans.”

K. V. Rao · 2016

The bell, and the work after it

In February 2017, Aviso announced that Michael Lock would take over as CEO and Rao would become chief strategy officer. The company also raised another $8 million, bringing the reported financing total at that point to $31 million. The founding chapter continued with a different division of responsibilities.

On April 12, 2018, Zuora went public. Rao joined the occasion at the New York Stock Exchange alongside Tzuo and others connected to the business. Aviso congratulated a company that occupied two places in its own history: Zuora was both Rao’s earlier venture and an early customer of his next one.

Trevor Rodrigues-Templar joined Aviso as CEO in 2019. In explaining his decision, he credited Rao’s founding vision and described a platform that connected forecasting with sales execution. That connection carried forward the original concern: software should help people decide where to go and what action to take.

Rao’s subsequent public record includes founding Chiku and angel investing; Aviso’s current company page lists him among its investors. The career has moved beyond the original CEO job. Yet the Sunday-night episode remains a useful place to understand it. A manager had information, responsibilities and a meeting in the morning. Rao thought the tools could do more of the work. A company followed.