Where starting a company isn’t crazy
Rohan always knew his calling, but he didn’t know what the journey would look like, or the surprising paths he’d cross along the way.
Growing up in the Bay Area in the 90s, his family was among the first wave of Indian families to move to the area to work in tech, which at the time was primarily semiconductors. Here, in the heart of Silicon Valley, starting a company wasn’t unusual; it was almost expected. “The game you play when you grow up in the Bay Area is go build a startup,” Rohan says, looking back on his childhood.
He spent hours immersed in RuneScape and Age of Empires. Rohan says as he reflects on it today, that it all makes sense. “I think the reason I liked those games so much is that you had to get good at a lot of different things. You had to figure out how to build up capital, gather resources, grow armies, whatever it was. That just scratched an itch in my brain. I really enjoy building something valuable that pulls together a bunch of different skills.”
In high school, he joined various business clubs, knowing already that’s what he wanted to study in college. He was laser-focused on his interests, but academically, it didn’t translate. Of all the universities he applied to, his only acceptance was to Berkeley. “Getting in felt like a fluke, and it was a game-changer. First, I met my wife there. And second, being at a school like UC Berkeley really sets you up for everything happening in Silicon Valley. The networks are incredibly valuable. And it was the same mindset I’d had all along, wanting to learn all the mechanics of how a business works.”
Startup mindset in big tech
After graduating from Berkeley, Rohan had two job offers, one from a management consulting firm and the other from LinkedIn’s business rotation program. He chose LinkedIn for the chance to explore different roles hands-on, instead of advising from the sidelines like he’d be doing in consulting. Joining the rotation program at LinkedIn gave him everything he wanted. “You bounced around to product management, marketing, sales strategy, all of it. I’ve always believed you need to learn all those things to build a company.”
That desire to learn by doing landed him on a team known for launching risky, zero-to-one bets. “I was doing the stuff that was controversial and high likelihood of failure,” Rohan says. The projects didn’t always work out, but what he was learning was invaluable. It gave him a front row seat to what it looked like to build from zero.
Kunal, who was the Director of AI at LinkedIn at the time, noticed. While his job was to optimize massive algorithms at scale, he found himself drawn to the scrappier work Rohan was doing. Launching products that broke things, challenged assumptions, and often failed. “Kunal loved that. He liked working with me because we were doing the contrarian stuff that was fun. So we started collaborating. Eventually, I left LinkedIn to start a company, and we kept in touch.”
Struggling to work on small ideas
After leaving LinkedIn, Rohan gave himself space to experiment. One of the first projects was a career coaching service, a small, bootstrapped idea that could maybe turn into a lifestyle business. But after a few months, the risk vs reward wasn’t making sense. “Building a business is hard, period. Whether you’re aiming for $100K or $1B in revenue, it’s almost the same level of effort. You’re living and breathing it, losing sleep over it. So you might as well think big.” Rohan says, looking back on those early idea days.
Today, with the ink still drying on his deal with Salesforce, he says choosing a market where outcomes can be big was one of the first major lessons he learned. From then on, he started asking a new question for every idea he explored: could this reach scale?
During that time, Rohan was catching up with Kunal every few weeks and sharing progress for what he was working on. He admired Kunal for his technical ability, integrity, and product sense, and saw in him an ideal co-founder.
After he quit the career coaching service idea, Rohan set his sights on consumer retail, imagining a space where Polyvore-style outfit boards met the rising wave of fashion marketplaces like Depop and The RealReal. After nine months of working on the idea, building a prototype, and getting users, he brought the idea to YC, where Michael Seibel didn’t hold back. “And then he just paused and said, ‘Why are you doing this? You were a Product Manager who worked across all of LinkedIn’s businesses. Why are you building an app for lazy college girls to sell their clothes?’” The words stung, but they stuck. Rohan started to defend the idea, but halfway through the interview, he wasn’t even convinced.
“That’s when I kind of realized, okay, the market matters a lot. I probably shouldn’t do this. And it’s scary, because you don’t know what else to do. But in that moment, you know this probably isn’t it. Over time, I’ve come to really appreciate that what you choose to spend your time on is the single most important deciding factor in anything.”
YC told him to keep in touch, but he wasn’t going to get in on this idea. It was an abrupt and painful end to something he’d put a lot of time and effort into, but it pushed him to start looking at markets he understood, with real scale and users he genuinely cared to build for.
Founder-market fit isn’t BS
After killing the resale clothing marketplace idea, Rohan turned back to a market he knew well, B2B sales. It wasn’t flashy, but it was a space Rohan knew from a brief stint in Sales Ops at LinkedIn, and Kunal offered insight from being an early engineer at RelateIQ. As their wedge, they talked through a lightweight tool that plugged into a company’s CRM, tracked customer job changes, and surfaced them as warm leads. People who loved your product at one company were likely to buy it again at their new one. It gave sales teams a high-intent signal with little conversion effort.
The roadmap was still evolving, but this time, when they brought the idea to YC, the partners saw something different: domain expertise, conviction, and founders obsessed with solving the problem. It was enough to get them into YC. Rohan and Kunal joined the W23 batch with an all-in mindset.
Rohan is frequently asked about his time at YC from other founders, and he tells them, “What they’re really doing is psychologically wiring you to believe that people like Brian Chesky were in your shoes ten years ago. That all these founders you admire had the same tools and funding you have now. They’re not different from you. And if they could do it, so can you. All the Bookface articles, the funding, the networking events, it’s all there to push you to realize, this is your shot. If you’re not going to go for it now, why are you even doing this? That was really powerful.”
The company, now named Bluebirds, went from zero to $81K ARR in eight weeks during the batch. In hindsight, the difference wasn’t just the numbers, it was founder-market fit. Reflecting on how he feels about it today, Rohan says, “I thought it was a concept designed for VCs, and no matter what it was, you just grind it out, and figure it out.” But after bouncing from consumer ideas they didn’t fully understand to a B2B sales space they knew, the contrast was hard to ignore. “When we moved from a space we didn’t belong in to one we deeply understood, everything started to make sense.”
Rohan still doesn’t believe founder-market fit is everything, but he thinks first time founders are dismissing it. “You can absolutely brute force your way into a space, but the question is, do you want to spend two to three years getting up to speed, or start in a place where you can actually hit the ground running?”
For Rohan and Kunal, it was the difference between jogging in circles and finally hitting stride.
Zeroing in on mid-market
Graduating YC with $81K ARR and a $5M Seed round from Lightspeed, it looked like momentum was on their side, but shortly after the batch ended, things got quiet.
For the next 18 months, they shipped constantly and tested every hypothesis they could think of. But outbound sales, especially in AI, is a difficult market to break through. “It is cutthroat and there's lots of hype from products that don't actually work,” Rohan says. While competitors raised on flashier narratives Rohan and Kunal didn’t believe in, they kept experimenting and learning. The numbers, though, didn’t move. “ARR was $250-300K at this point. We’d been pretty flatlined.”
Now, on the other side of it, Rohan says that in the future, he might not report ARR so early on. “Every one of those 18 months where we hovered between $250k and $300k caused unnecessary stress.”
He also says in the next company he builds, he’ll cut ties with misaligned customers faster. “As a founder, it’s a privilege to have customers. But the flip side is also true, it’s a privilege for a customer to have founder attention on something. Looking back, if I hadn’t been so focused on reporting ARR and chasing small wins, I would’ve been much stricter about saying, ‘This isn’t personal, but we don’t have conviction in the direction you hired us for, and our time is the most valuable thing we have. So we’re going to refund you.’”
Clarity finally came in Q4 of 2024. Rohan and Kunal realized that mid-market and enterprise buyers were incredibly underserved. It was a segment they understood well, and one that could really benefit from a solution like theirs.
Knowing that most people buy software around year-end, they buckled down. “We grinded super hard, redefining the product, changing the positioning, investing in marketing. I was ramping up a ton on founder-led sales.” Finally, the stubborn flatline they’d been stuck in started curving into rapid growth.
A Series A raise becomes an acquisition
By May 2025, Rohan and Kunal knew it was time to raise their Series A. The product was working, the thesis was clear, and ARR was climbing quickly. Rohan was also getting married in a few months, and he wanted to nail down the fundraising before or wait until after. They decided to go for it.
They quickly got a strong term sheet from a great firm. At the same time, what was supposed to be a casual intro to Salesforce's venture investing team got rerouted to corporate development instead, and before they knew it, the conversation turned toward an acquisition. “We were really bullish about what we were doing, and we had no intention of selling the company at this stage. We were excited to keep going,” Rohan says.
But the more they talked with Salesforce, the clearer the opportunity became. No other company had the reach, resources, or reputation to take what they had built and scale it to millions of salespeople worldwide. Salesforce wasn’t just a category leader, it was the category.
Suddenly, what they thought would be an easy decision to accept the Series A raise turned into a tough conversation. “You work so hard to get to that point,” Rohan says. He and Kunal never anticipated having to choose between two paths. As they talked through outcomes, they found themselves leaning more and more in one direction. Joining Salesforce wasn’t about stepping away from their mission, it was about giving that mission its best possible home. It meant contributing to a product that could make a meaningful difference at massive scale, backed by the most trusted player in the space.
Carrying Bluebirds’ vision into Salesforce
Now, they're bringing what they created at Bluebirds into the full Salesforce ecosystem, with the scale, reach, and resources to make it accessible across all market sizes. And they’re loving what they’re doing, still driven by the same instinct that first pulled Rohan into games, business clubs, and ultimately the startup world. The thrill of building something lasting and valuable from the ground up.