When India’s Pied Piper was short of cash, the founders ran the startup from a car

You know that ragequit feeling you get when you’re trying to send or store a file and it’s just too big? Big companies have that problem too, but for them, it’s not just an annoyance – it costs them a lot in money and energy. In 2013, content searches cost employees an average of US$14,000 per worker. Two developers from Google Developers Chennai think they’ve solved the problem.

Former Apple iOS engineer Karthik K and Swaathi Kakarla’s partnership began in Chennai at GDG DevFest. Karthik serves as the manager of the Google Developers Group chapter in Chennai. Swaathi serves as the group’s woman lead.

The two had mutual interests and geeked out about code quality. By December 2013, they had founded a startup together called Skcript. Swaathi was still in university.

The founders were throwing around some ideas, but nothing was sticking. In June 2014, they got the call that put them on the right track.

They were sitting inside Karthik’s car, he recalls. “We got a call from one of our IT friends. He said: We have been spending a lot of money on buying storage space and handling the data explosion that had been happening.” Karthik and Swaathi decided that they wanted to help.

Three weeks later, they had a prototype file compression tool and sent it to Karthik’s friend, who agreed to pay him in advance for the true product, which solved their funding problem. When it was ready, Karthik and Swaathi said the friend could have it for free.

While the founders were working out the computational algorithms, the HBO show Silicon Valley had come out and inspired them as well. Silicon Valley is a comedy that follows the lives of the developers in a startup company in, well, Silicon Valley. The show’s fictional startup, Pied Piper, also compresses files. In three months, Karthik and Swaathi found the right formula for their product. Their file compression product for businesses, Shrink, launched two months later at GITEX 2015, a tech event in Dubai.

Shrink uses machine learning and compression algorithms to minimize files to, ideally, the smallest possible size. Shrink’s system can also learn from previous compressions to continue making files smaller and smaller. For example, a file originally sized 5.85 GB can be shrunk to 230.8 MB, which is 96 percent smaller. The system can also decompress files during retrieval.

Karthik reports that because of his solution, his friend’s company began to spend per year what they were spending every three months.

Bootstrapped pride

The Pied Piper race