This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Anish Dhar, co-founder and CEO of the in-house developer portal The cortex. Cortex is a project management platform for companies' engineering teams to collaborate and manage their work. Cortex has raised $53 million to date, according to the company.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Cortex. Co-founder and CEO Anish Dhar.
What was your day job (or other sources of income) when you started your job? side hustle returned to the beginning?
When I founded Cortex, I was working as an engineer at Uber. I went to Uber right out of college, started as an intern and stayed for almost five years, working on projects like Uber Eats delivery experience. In the back of my mind, I was always looking for an opportunity to start my own company. I worked at two different startups while at Uber – neither took off, but I kept myself open to my next big idea. My day job actually inspired the idea for my next startup, Cortex.
When did you start your side hustle and where did you find the inspiration for it?
Through my work in Uber, I saw how the coding architecture can become incredibly complex. Engineers would name internal services after video games, and the documentation was scattered across multiple tools, making it difficult to find context.
This meant that when services went down, it would be very difficult to figure out which engineers owned which services, so “level 5” outages became common. Engineers took their historical knowledge with them and no one could find documentation to fix the problems. I became one engineer because I wanted to develop products but spent so much time asking questions or trying to find information. Those real frustrations I had as an engineer led to the development of the foundation for Cortex, an internal developer portal for engineering teams to help understand, operate, and build new software. I started working on the idea in July 2019, and by October 2019, I made Cortex my full-time job.
What were some of the first steps you took to get yours side hustle from the ground?
Once I realized that I had potentially discovered a real problem worth solving—something worth building and that the market might need—I reached out to two close friends who also worked at technology industry. I wanted to understand how their companies handled documentation and service management. They had no choice either; even established companies were struggling with these issues, which proved that there was a huge gap in the market for an effective tool.
We rented one Airbnb for a weekend and dedicated ourselves to a 48-hour hackathon. Without outside distractions, we brainstormed, collaborated and rapidly prototyped solutions. By the end of the weekend, we had developed the first version of what would become Cortex.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during your build? side hustleand how did you navigate them?
I struggled to effectively manage my time between my main job and side hustle. Initially, I found myself devoting more hours to Cortex than my current job. This imbalance was not sustainable in the long term for my career or any semblance of work-life balance. The fact that I naturally gravitated towards spending more time on Cortex became a clear sign that I should double down on the idea. Ultimately, it led to me making Cortex my full-time job.
How did you access funding for the startup? What do growth and revenue look like now?
funding it was a challenge for us in the beginning. Our team was building an entirely new category of developer tools, which meant investors had no comparable companies in the market. We had to prove that the pain points were real and that we were the right team to solve the problem at hand.
We had a big breakthrough when we were accepted The Y combinator with only a prototype and a group of beta users consisting of our friends. During YC, we continued to refine our product based on feedback from potential customers. After we polished the product, we were lucky enough to have Sequoia Capital make a bet on our team before we had our first paying customer.
Since then, Cortex has experienced significant growth. We now have hundreds of enterprise customers, including big names like Adobe and Xero. We recently secured a $35 million Series B funding round and continue to grow our revenue at a healthy pace.
What do you like most about this business?
I love that I'm helping engineers do the work that matters to them, instead of wasting time looking for information. I wish I had Cortex around when I was an engineer.
This may be surprising considering the hybrid age we live in, but I also love it meeting with clients personally. There is something irreplaceable about face-to-face interactions. I'm on the road, traveling almost every week for work. I find that I can better understand the team, their company and their challenges and form deeper connections when we are in the same room.
What is your advice to others hoping to start successful side hustles or businesses of their own?
My advice to anyone hoping to start one successful side hustle or business is believing in yourself and your vision, even when others don't. When we started, many investors told us that our idea wouldn't work and it would have been easy to get discouraged and give up.
When I didn't know if we were going to get funding or get our first customers, my belief in the product got me through the tough times, and believe me, as a founder, there are a lot of tough times. I ignored the investors who didn't get it, focused on the engineers' real frustrations, and accepted FEEDBACK to iterate Cortex into a product that had value. I knew we were tackling a real problem, which motivated me to keep building.
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