“I am trying to complete my father’s story,” Arvind Parthiban told me while staring at the green waters of Cancun, Mexico. It was September 2021, and we were quarantining in the city before taking a flight to the US to celebrate Freshworks’ historic IPO on the NASDAQ.
Long after Arvind had left his deck chair to go to bed, I continued staring at the ocean. Even after we grow up, we transform ourselves into children when we speak about our parents and the values they instilled in us. We use those lessons as guiding lights, illuminating our path.
Today’s FWD isn’t the same as all the others, primarily because it’s about two people rolled into one. This is not to say that Arvind isn’t his own man but that so much of who he is is also a result of his father’s ambitions and ideals.
Arvind finally lowered his guard in Cancun almost 10 years after Girish Mathrubootham introduced us at the Goa Project. Girish introduced Arvind as a dear friend and founder. Arvind was polite and reserved yet friendly. We made small talk and parted ways.
We met again a few years later at a two-day event on the campus of a large IT services company. I won’t name it because of what follows. This company’s campus had strict rules on alcohol and smoking. But we managed to sneak some in anyway. We partied hard and ended the night with Arvind passed out on the couch in my room, with one leg resting on a shoe rack.
During the party, Arvind missed no tricks. He had a quiver of retorts, which he shot with abandon. No one was safe from them, including yours truly. The warm hugs and handshakes would tell you that he meant no offense.
We kept bumping into each other at events and started to build our relationship. With each meeting, Arvind would tell me a little more about himself. In one meeting, he told me that his father was an entrepreneur. In another, Arvind discussed how his father’s most significant victory was not the scale of his company but the impact. He proudly told me that even though his father didn’t achieve immense monetary success, every employee, even after his father retired, would speak about their time spent working together as the most gratifying of their lives.
Arvind’s ambition has been to scale his company and replicate his father’s impact on the lives of those he worked with. That was his true north star.
Now, I can tell you that Arvind is a VC magnet. He can raise capital at will. I can tell you he’s charming because he manages to hire some of the brightest minds in the world without effort. But I’ll leave my journalist friends to write that story.
So I asked Arvind about his secret while on our eleventeenth drink in Cancun.
“Empathy,” Arvind told me, “was my father’s secret.” Through the years, Arvind has channeled that empathy at SaaSBoomi, whether by opening his playbook for founders nationwide or stepping up to organise tracks when needed.
In the 2024 edition of Caravan, Arvind decided to own the GTM track. We had been struggling to get quality speakers that would genuinely be able to help founders in a time when capital is hard to come by and AI is disrupting business models. Arvind stepped in, found speakers, curated the content, and ensured that the track addressed the trepidations of young, early-stage entrepreneurs. The NPS of that track was above 90.
Arvind, during the track, was focused primarily on the founders. He picked up body language cues to guide him on improving the track the next time. Arvind felt kinship with founders who were building their companies in volatile times. After the event, he had an unfiltered chat with the founders, encouraging them to follow outlier ideas. No ideas are bad, he told them.
“Either you will become the story, or you’ll have a story to tell,” he told one of my colleagues right after the track ended.
He must know. He has been enthralling me with stories for the past decade. Let’s write a few more together, Arvind. There’s a long way to go, and we just got started.
From the Author:
SaaSBoomi began in 2015 as a small gathering of ~50 founders, and today, with over 500 events across three countries and countless lives touched, we’ve only just scratched the surface.
None of this would have been possible without the unrelenting passion of our 125+ volunteers — the lifeblood of SaaSBoomi.
Their contributions go beyond effort; they’ve built a community bound by camaraderie, empathy, and a shared vision for a Product Nation.
Pay it FWD is my tribute to every pay-it-forward champion I’ve encountered on this incredible journey.
Their contributions to SaaSBoomi and the broader ecosystem have been immeasurable, yet there remains a story left to be told — one that echoes the impact they continue to create.
