NoBroker CTO Akhil Gupta reflects on what are the typical technology challenges for a start-up.
What are the technology issues that CTOs of fast growing start-ups face?
“The biggest challenge before new age companies is how to scale,” says Akhil Gupta, CTO, NoBroker, India’s first unicorn in the unlikely area of real estate, or proptech, as it is fashionably called.
And a lot of that challenge directly translates into how technology is managed and planned. “Initially, start-ups focus on agility. They do not necessarily have to go for extremely heavy tech stack. As you figure out things are moving, they start focusing on things like architecture,” says Gupta.
“Take the classic case of NoBroker. When we started NoNroker, I just used the technology stack that I used in Oracle, because I knew I would be able to build it faster,” he admits.
But that is not scalable for a B2C business.
“It was a monolithic architecture, with which we started. But now, it is an ocean of microservices which is there at NoBroker. So, transitioning from monolithic to microservices architecture; transitioning from monolithic to a cloud, in a multi-cloud environment; how to use data lake to our advantage, which cloud to go for, why and what should be your cloud strategy…these are typical questions that you have to answer, things that you have to consider,” he says.
Gupta also emphasizes the need for security, as operations becomes larger and architecture becomes more complex. “Security becomes extremely important as you grow up,” he adds.
But the biggest challenge he identifies is not a pure tech challenge.
“The single biggest thing is hiring and retaining people on the technology side,” he says echoing an opinion that today most CTOs are agreeing.
He says nothing prevents technology managers in India to learn from peers in larger new age companies or successful companies in the Silicon Valley. He believes the right people in technology companies too can help the technology managers in showing the direction where technology is growing.
Launched in 2014 by three friends—Amit Kumar Agarwal, Akhil Gupta and Saurvav Garg—NoBroker became a unicorn in 2021.
