1996Two colleagues meet at Britannia. Neither works there now, and they had lunch a couple of days before this taping. It is offered as the case against working entirely from home: apprenticeship, problems solved faster, and friends who outlast the employer.
2013Tredence starts with engineering underneath the analytics. Three founders, three tenets (fun, money and meaning), and a name made by swapping the c of credence for a t because the domain had gone. The whiteboard argument of that year is the thesis: analytics cannot scale by throwing bodies at problems, because clients eventually learn to hire those people themselves. The first cheque, 250,000, took fifty or sixty meetings and landed at the end of the runway. Sumit, the third founder and not in the room for this conversation, is the one who believed it would come and closed it.
2013-20Seven years without an outside cheque. Growth was never counted on its own, always against burn and margin. There were months in that stretch when the three did not pay themselves, and two wives with salaries of their own carried the households, including the five or six months a year one founder spent in the US.
2020The first round, from a private equity partner. Chicago Pacific Founders came in to build the foundation for a steeper curve rather than to keep the lights on, and paid for the changes made in the year that followed.
2020-22COVID settles the office question in the middle. Some of the behaviour change is permanent and five or six days a week is not worth beating the traffic for, but they want forty to fifty percent of the team in, on the grounds that you cannot murmur on Zoom.
2022Nine years in, and 500 people become 1,000 in three months. An employee asks from the audience how the startup culture survives that, and the answer is behavioural: keep taking on problems that arrive without a checklist, and have managers work at analyst level an hour a day. A second round was planned before the end of the year, with the funding markets already visibly softening.
