Ashok Varma: the life and death of a startup founder

Not all startup success is of the unicorn kind, nor every failure riches-to-rags. Sometimes the highs are modest but impressive, and the lows a reminder that valuations and exits count for little in the larger scheme of things

Ashok Varma founded Report Garden, a SaaS startup that had multiple millions of ARR and thousands of customers all over the world

In 2018, before he was 30, Varma agreed to sell his company to a US-based competitor for millions of dollars

Varma next wanted to do something much bigger and more ambitious than Report Garden, with the potential to become a $100 million ARR company

The two years post the acquisition, however, were filled with grief, as anonymous troll emails derailed his plans and eventually his life

The annals of startup media are largely devoted to covering glorious success stories—sagas of intrepid men and women who braved the odds and won amazing victories to take their companies to unicorn heights. Occasionally, there are stories about mega-failures—riches to rags narratives that are polar opposites of the success stories.

But while such stories dominate the media, in the real world, they are but outliers. The vast majority of startup stories are those of journeyman voyagers—average Joes and Janes plying their trade to earn a livelihood.

Like Ashok Varma.

Varma founded a startup called Report Garden.

AUTHOR

Sumanth Raghavendra

Sumanth is a serial entrepreneur with more than eighteen years experience in running startups. He is currently the founder of Deck App Technologies, a Bangalore-based startup attempting to re-imagine productivity software for the Post-PC era. Sumanth’s columns appear regularly in leading publications. He holds MBA degrees from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management, USA.

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