Gururaj Pandurangi

CEO & Founder (Acquired by Zscaler)

ThriveStack

Embarking on a mission to address these inquiries:

- Can we make SaaS companies build fast and GTM at scale? At the same time.
- Can we simplify the implementation of PLG for SaaS companies?
- Can we make Growth efficient?
- Can we foster collaboration across diverse departments driving  SaaS Growth through a collaborative, multi-player mode?

CEO and Founder 

Early stage startups

Investing and Advising a dozen+ early-stage startups.
Always happy to connect with great small teams, attempting to solve bigger-than-them problems.

Investor & Advisor

Zscaler

VP, Public Cloud Infrastructure Security

Cloudneeti

• Disrupting cloud workload assurance space with Cloudneeti, laser focused on Continuous Cybersecurity and Compliance posture management.
• Security & Compliance Validation engine for Azure Blueprints like http://aka.ms/healthblueprint, http://aka.ms/pciblueprint
• Global presenter on cloud, security, compliance, and architecture.

Avyan Corp

Avyan Consulting's prime focus is to build upon its expertise in helping medium and large scale enterprises embrace the benefits of Cloud Computing and Big Data Technologies.

Leading a startup organization of multiple global delivery teams, based out in US, India and Eastern Europe, focusing on product engineering and solution development in the following areas 
•	Leading an enterprise scale Azure and AWS adoption by bringing in critical workloads for IaaS and PaaS. Built and led core Cloud Engineering, Cloud DevOps, Cloud Security and Cloud Operations teams. 
•	Led a team of data scientists and cloud engineering – Product recommendation engine using machine learning for a large retail eCommerce store. Increased conversion ratio by 400% and continuing
•	Built and Sold a cloud migration and assessment product to a large ISV.
•	Partnering with a mid-sized Application & Platform vendor along with various key initiatives with Microsoft Premier Services team / Microsoft Azure and Dynamics CRM Online teams in developing and delivering various offerings. 
•	Managing a team of cloud architects & engineers leading multiple cloud migration efforts for two large enterprise customers to AWS and Azure cloud and big-data solutions. 
•	Work extensively with customers (typical personas include VP Engg/CTO/CFO/Developers/Architects/) in providing them services ranging from - advice on managing & running efficient operations (e.g. reduce COGS, improve Performance, Resiliency), building and managing IP/workshops events, partnering with various Windows Azure teams to ship iterations on many services (Product planning, Engineering, Supportability and Marketing teams).

CEO and Founder

Avid, LLC

Cloud Backup and Recovery product. 
BCDR for Virtual machines from Data center to Cloud, Cloud to Datacenter
(acquired by a group of investors)

Chief Executive Officer

Infospace

Engineering Manager, Search and Advertising

Microsoft Corporation Redmond, WA USA

Bing and Azure/RedDog Platform, 
Windows Live Services

Software Engineering Manager

Development Manager

Wipro Technologies

Architect

Moody's Investors Service

Sr. Technology Consultant

Building ThriveStack: Making PLG Easy by Left-Shifting Growth

3x Founder: Engineer turned entrepreneur, exited 2 product startups ($2-10m ARR) and 1 cloud consulting company (150+ cloud consultants). Building my 3rd one, ThriveStack.

My previous startups were partner-led and sales-led. With significant investments in Sales & Marketing (S&M budgets were 60% company spend). Overtime I discovered that product-led startups were out-competing and getting deployed faster than us.

I realized that "We are in the age of self-service". Buyers and Users prefer self-discovery over sales interactions.  Building a self-serve product is very different than building a traditional sales-led product.

Now, building ThriveStack, an modern AI-enabled platform to enable Self-Serve for B2B companies, allowing their users to Signup, Try and Buy their products w/o (less) Sales conversations.

Founder

🚀 Launching the ThriveStack Self‑Serve PLG Scorecard
This Thanksgiving, we celebrate the customers, partners, and growth leaders who shaped our journey.
AI and PLG now move together—and finally tackle the visibility gaps across all 7 stages of the customer journey.
---
PLG teams have a visibility problem - across the 7 phases of customer journey. 

The new PLG Scorecard gives teams a unified view of the entire product-led funnel—Awareness → Acquisition → Activation → Conversion → Retention → Expansion—finally showing where growth leaks, why they happen, and who owns each one.


A few major inspirations shaped this release:
⭐ Wes Bush & Ramli John ⭐️ -  ProductLed
 For championing Activation as one of the most powerful North Star metrics in PLG.

⭐ Brian Balfour, Adam Fishman, Elena Verna and so many folks from the Reforge team

⭐ Andrew Capland — Delivering Value
 For the incredible work on the Growth Operating System.

⭐ Nick Mehta - Gainsight 
For driving home the message that Retention is the strongest growth multiplier.

⭐ Jacco van der Kooij, Dave Boyce  — Winning by Design
For the foundational Bow‑Tie Architecture that reshaped how SaaS companies view revenue across acquisition, retention, and expansion.

⭐ Kyle Poyar
 For highlighting the importance of team and department ownership in scalable growth execution.

This Scorecard brings those ideas together into one unified, actionable growth scorecard.

👉 Try the Interactive PLG Scorecard Demo: 
Link in comments 

Curious to hear from you: What’s the biggest visibility gap in your PLG funnel today — and what should we improve next?

Drop your thoughts here👇

Building ThriveStack: Driving success by left-shifting growth

Recently, we spoke with CMOs, and their primary concern was that 35% of their marketing spend was being wasted due to poor attribution. 

The main problem was simple but painful:
→ They know where the leads come from, but not which channels are driving real revenue.
→ ROI tracking is manual and often inaccurate.
→ Deals and pipeline data aren’t connected to channels.

So every month, budgets were adjusted on gut feeling, not data.

That’s what we’re fixing with “Marketing Channel Performance Analytics” inside ThriveStack.

It brings ROI, spend, CAC, and deal data together in one place, giving teams a clear view of which channels drive revenue in real-time.

Early users have already reduced wasted ad spend by 30% and improved marketing-to-revenue efficiency within a quarter.

👉 Try it here: https://lnkd.in/gyui84Mu

Vibe-coding a pricing page? We did. Read on to know what worked and what did not.

We recently needed a new Pricing page for ThriveStack.
 Simple, right?

So we did what any curious team of builders would do.
We asked every AI vibe-coding product we admire to take a swing at it.
Same prompt. Same goals.

 → Lovable (cc: Elena Verna)
 → Bolt.new (cc: Eric Simons)
 → Replit (cc: Amjad Masad)
 → Cursor (cc: Tony Sidhom)
 → ChatGPT (OpenAI)
 → Gemini 3.0 (cc: Allie K. Miller)

🤖 The prompt was simple:
 ✅ Ask the user 1 smart question to recommend the best plan
 ✅ Show 3 plans: Free, Starter, Growth - with a recommended pill
 ✅ Add a dynamic pricing calculator
 ✅ Explain how we calculate Monthly Tracked Users
 ✅ Include a feature comparison table (with viral loop links to product)
 ✅ Add an FAQ section
 ✅ Create an ROI Calculator and link to the page
 ✅ And a AI chatbot to answer any questions about plans, features, usage, limits etc.

💥 Here's what happened:
All of them got parts right.
- Cursor nailed structure.
- ChatGPT wrote clean, smart copy.
- Lovable understood PLG intent (probably Elena Verna's influence)
- Bolt designed beautifully.
But... trying to make it all work together was painful🤯.

The page had vibe. But no cohesion. The AI chatbot for all, except Google AI Studio, had zero context.
and the worst part - Prompt it to fix one section, all else gets Broken. Routing? Off. Latency to build and deploy? High.

Then we gave it to Gemini 3.0 (Google AI Studio)
It not only built the full experience—
 ✅ integrated copy, UX, chatbot, and FAQ
 ✅ learned from our product docs
 ✅ wrote clean semantic HTML + shipped SEO-ready
 ✅ deployed it on GCP (one click!)
 ✅ and gave page level insights from user interaction flow
All in one go.
 And surprisingly—it was the *cheapest*, Least errors. Fastest delivery.

💡 Hard truth:
"Vibe coding with AI is easy. Shipping something real still takes thoughtful orchestration."

Gemini didn’t just win because it’s smarter.
It won because it understood structure, simplified the delivery process.

Curious? Check it out:
 👉 https://lnkd.in/gBEcqz6j

❝ 
Would love your thoughts. Which tool are you betting on for full-stack product generation?
❞

Tagging the legends we admire:
 Elena Verna Amjad Masad Logan Kilpatrick Baris Gultekin

#AI #ProductLedGrowth #Builders #StartupTools #UX #PricingPage #VibeCoding #Gemini2 #PLG #GrowthHacking

Last month, we onboarded a few SaaS Companies. Three had the same problem with their Freemium funnel:
 40% of signups were fake.
 Not bots. just fake email ids.
 Bad data—polluting funnels, skewing metrics, and burning GTM cycles.

Here’s what was happening:
→ Disposable emails got in
→ Free credits were used
→ Sales teams chased ghosts

Growth teams worried that they were scaling fake growth.

Paid ads brought in users who never intended to convert.
Cloud Hosting (COGS) costs soared.
BUT ---- Revenue didn’t budge.

They had an abuse problem—at the top of the funnel.

This is how to fix it.

Full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/gE4JkuSn

For any SaaS product, fake signups cut ROI by 30 percent and hurt revenue.

The impact was visible across every team:
 → Marketing wasted budget on traffic that never became real users
 → Sales dealt with 45 percent low quality leads
 → Product teams handled extra hosting load
 → CS spent time on accounts that would never convert
 → RevOps ended up doing 45 percent more cleanups

These fake signups inflated metrics, confused growth signals, and made teams think their funnel was stronger than it was.

To fix this, ThriveStack now allows teams to set up automatic abuse detection that blocks fake signups before they enter the system.

Read the full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/gE4JkuSn

I’m excited to share the latest episode of ThriveCast, where I sit down with the incredible Andrew Capland to explore how growth really happens when alignment, activation and accountability aren’t just buzzwords—but the backbone of your system.
👉 Tune in to “The Growth Operating System — Building Alignment, Activation, and Accountability” here: https://lnkd.in/gZcP3zuM
Here’s what we dug into:
Here are the top insights we covered:
1️⃣ Ideas are cheap. Systems win.
 How team alignment, communication, and consistent execution outperform frameworks and playbooks every single time.
2️⃣ The new ladder for Growth Leaders.
 Why moving into growth leadership means influencing peers, managing pushback, and driving clarity—far beyond tactics.
3️⃣ Effectiveness > “Right answers.”
 Great growth leaders focus less on being correct and more on persuading teams, prioritizing under ambiguity, and keeping momentum.
4️⃣ AI is a multiplier, not a replacement.
 Tools can generate ideas—but timing, context, judgment, and cross-team communication remain deeply human.
5️⃣ Build your Growth OS before you scale.
 From rituals to scorecards to decision frameworks (yes, including RACI), we break down how to make growth repeatable, not accidental.

If you’re building or scaling a growth function in SaaS — whether you’re in product, marketing, revenue operations or leadership — this episode is for you.
🔗 Give it a listen, drop a comment with your key takeaway, and if this resonates, let me know and I’ll send you the full episode guide with all the frameworks we covered.
Thanks for being part of the ThriveStack journey—let’s turn your growth from chaos into a system.

#GrowthOS, Delivering Value #B2BSaaS

Open video: The Growth Operating System — Building Alignment, Activation, and Accountability on hybridgtm.com

The Growth Operating System — Building Alignment, Activation, and Accountability

Last quarter, we spoke with 40 SaaS marketers, and 80% of them said they lose track of users after signup, and this gap leads to wasted spend and missed revenue by 35%.

Here is how this shows up in their daily work:
 → They run campaigns without knowing which users actually reach first value.
 → They cannot tell who continues using the product and who drops.
 → They scale channels that bring signups but not paying users.
 → Budget plans look good on paper but do not match real product outcomes.

These issues increase cost, slow growth, and make targeting less accurate.
That is why we added Full Journey CRM inside ThriveStack.

 It connects signup activity with product behavior so marketing teams can see which users move forward and which ones need attention.

Read the full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/gKRGfKk9

A quick shoutout to Rosalyn Santa Elena and her The RevOps Collective community for driving real conversations around data driven GTM.

taplio

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