On World Entrepreneurs’ Day (August 21), our Founder and CEO Sekar Vembu sat down with ET Now’s Leaders of Tomorrow for a wide-ranging conversation, one that touched on funding, AI, cybersecurity, engineering talent, and what it will actually take for India to build software companies the rest of the world has to reckon with.
Watch the full interview: Leaders of Tomorrow Season 14 | Sekar Vembu | Vembu Technologies | Ritwika Gupta | ET Now
Here’s a recap of what he had to say.
Talent isn’t the bottleneck. Domain depth is.
Sekar said India has plenty of software talent, but that alone doesn’t produce globally dominant companies. What’s missing is depth: the kind of complex domain knowledge that only comes from staying with a hard problem long enough to actually understand it. That takes patience and a long-term view, and it also takes proximity: entrepreneurs learn fastest when they’re close to the customers they’re building for, which is easier when the domestic market itself is mature enough to support that kind of learning. His one bright spot: AI is already compressing this curve, letting founders build domain expertise faster than they could have a decade ago.
Why he never wanted to build to sell
Vembu Technologies has grown without chasing the venture-backed playbook that’s defined most of the last decade in Indian tech: raise big, scale fast, exit. Sekar was candid about why that playbook took hold in the first place. Cheap capital and a debt-fuelled financial system made big fundraises fashionable, and India, still catching up economically, largely followed the West’s lead.
His problem with the model isn’t really about the money. It’s about what comes after. You sell the company, you make your return, and then what? Start over and do it all again? His answer is to skip that cycle entirely: pick a problem worth sitting with for ten, twenty, even thirty years, and keep building.
The MSP opportunity hiding in India’s MSMEs
India’s millions of MSMEs are digitizing fast, but most can’t justify a dedicated IT team on their budgets. Sekar sees that gap as one of the bigger opportunities in front of Indian software vendors right now: affordable, purpose-built software for this segment, and a real opening for managed service providers to become the outsourced IT arm these businesses can’t otherwise afford. AI adds another layer to that opportunity. As IT itself gets simpler to run, MSMEs need less in-house IT staff and can lean more heavily on MSPs instead. It’s a shift we see up close every day through our own MSP and partner community.
Cybersecurity has stopped being just an IT problem
This is the part of the conversation closest to our own work, and Sekar didn’t soften it: a single successful attack can cripple a business, and with AI now in attackers’ hands, prevention alone isn’t enough anymore.
His point was less about fear and more about preparation. What actually protects a business is data protection and fast recovery: everything backed up, including configuration, with a real path back online, and multiple copies spread across on-prem, off-site, cloud, and tape. Restoring a business quickly after an attack isn’t a technical detail anymore. It’s a continuity question, and leadership needs to treat it that way.
Where AI is actually changing backup and recovery
Looking five years out, Sekar described a shift happening on both sides of the fight. Attackers are already using AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities faster than before. Defenders need AI-powered detection and response to keep pace, but that kind of defense isn’t cheap, especially for smaller organizations, which pushes backup and disaster recovery further into the spotlight as the fallback that has to work.
He named a few things he considers non-negotiable now: immutable backups, isolated recovery environments that stay clean of whatever compromised the original systems, a lower Mean Time to Recover, and recovery workflows that are automated or at least clearly guided. One trend worth watching, in his view, is a partial return to air-gapped, offline backups. As AI-driven attacks get more capable, more organizations may want at least one copy that simply can’t be reached over a network at all.
On AI’s role inside backup itself, he was measured. Use it where it genuinely helps: spotting anomalies in backup behavior, speeding up troubleshooting, guiding administrators through a recovery. But full autonomous recovery, in his assessment, isn’t practical yet and might not be for some time. Business judgment still has to be in the loop. It’s a philosophy that lines up closely with how we think about backup and DR ourselves.
Software engineers are turning into product people
Sekar’s advice for founders building for global markets started with a warning: the software industry today is far more mature than it was twenty years ago, and customer expectations have risen to match. The old approach of launching early and iterating in public isn’t a safe bet anymore. His advice instead: find a niche, get genuinely excellent at solving it, and win that niche before trying to expand. Spreading too thin, especially with the current economic uncertainty, is a good way to end up nowhere.
That same pressure is reshaping what a software engineer actually does day to day. At Vembu, the team no longer calls people “software engineers.” They’re “product engineers,” because engineering, product thinking, and understanding the customer’s use case have effectively merged into one job. AI is part of why: it helps engineers learn faster and opens up far more use cases than before, but the skill that actually matters now is knowing the customer’s problem well enough to point that capability at the right solution. Engineers who stay purely coders, in his view, are the ones most exposed to being replaced by AI. Engineers who move toward product thinking aren’t.
Three things that haven’t changed in thirty years
Looking back at three decades of building companies, Sekar identified three habits that, over time, become part of a company’s culture rather than just a leadership approach.
Ownership. He calls it the 2 AM call: the people you can trust to pick up the phone at 2 AM and actually handle it are the people worth building a company around.
Simplicity. Complexity, in his words, is what kills companies. Keeping things simple isn’t something that happens by default. It’s something you have to protect deliberately as you grow.
Continuous improvement. There’s always distance left between where a company is and where it could be, and staying honest about that gap is what keeps a team sharp.
Software exports, 2047, and the one piece of advice he’d leave founders with
Looking ahead to India’s ambition of becoming a developed economy by 2047, Sekar sees software playing a major role, but only if the country shifts from exporting services to exporting products. He also sees an opportunity closer to home: an ecosystem of products built for the Indian market itself, not just companies chasing customers abroad, along with real potential in IoT and in bringing AI into manufacturing automation. Software, he believes, is genuinely within India’s reach in the coming decades. Manufacturing and deep tech, in his view, are less certain, and more economic liberalization would help push all of it along.
When asked for one piece of advice for founders hoping to build something that lasts decades, Sekar kept it simple: keep building, patiently, without running out of money. That, more than any framework or funding strategy, is the whole game.
Watch the full interview: Leaders of Tomorrow Season 14 | Sekar Vembu | Vembu Technologies | Ritwika Gupta | ET Now
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