The Company That Crashed: The David & Goliath Origin Story Nobody Expected
How Kishore Kothandaraman and Palash Soni Built Build Goldcast into a $100M+ Valuation While Competitors Raised Billions
Written by: Phoebe Gill
Summary
- First big customer's event crashed after 30 minutes, branding them as "that company that crashed" at Harvard Business School
- Two immigrants with zero connections faced visa deadlines and raised $2M while competitors had $500M
- Built from $40K to $10M+ ARR by obsessing over speed—shipping fixes in days while competitors took months
- Self-aware leadership philosophy: "Make yourself useless after the company grows" by hiring people smarter than you
- Dreams of ringing the NASDAQ bell like fellow Indian founder Girish Mathrubootham, aiming for $100M ARR and IPO
Introduction
Imagine securing your first big customer. They’re paying you $20,000 to build a video hosting product for a freshman onboarding event. You spend weeks perfecting the product, getting everything ready, and then, in their own words, “on the day of the event, the product worked for the first 30 minutes. It completely crashed.”
For Goldcast founders Kishore Kothandaraman and Palash Soni, this was their first big break, and they blew it.
Instead of being known as the cool tech startup on campus, they were branded as “that company that crashed.” Every conversation between students seemed to circle back to the disaster, not exactly great PR for a budding startup.
A public failure at Harvard Business School could have been enough for any fresh entrepreneur to give up and walk away with their tail between their legs. But not for Kishore and Palash. For these co-founders, it marked the beginning of a multimillion-dollar startup with big goals.
“Nothing is given on a platter. You have to earn it.” — Kishore Kothandaraman, COO & Co-Founder of Goldcast
David Meets Multiple Goliaths
If you haven’t heard of Goldcast yet, you soon will. It’s an all-in-one video content and event platform built for B2B marketers. From virtual events and webinars to podcast recording, branded hubs, and automatic AI-powered repurposing, Goldcast does it all. It’s designed to scale event production and content creation seamlessly, integrating directly into customers’ CRM and analytics systems.
The ultimate goal for Kishore and Palash is to take Goldcast public, and they are currently on track to hit their next milestone of $100M in ARR. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, and that first $20,000 public failure turned out to be a preview of the many challenges they have faced.
Kishore and Palash aren’t two well-connected frat guys with investors on speed dial. They’re two immigrants who met at Harvard Business School, and before they could even get the company off the ground, they were battling issues most founders never have to think about.
“One is we’re immigrants. And because of that, we couldn’t get the visa to start the company,” Kishore recalls.
“I was single and I had just met someone, now my wife, and then Palash had a family.”
Visa deadlines aren’t hypothetical, they’re ticking clocks with real consequences. If they couldn’t solve their visa conundrum then they’d be forced to move countries. It sounds lighthearted now, but the reality was harsh.
“Our backup plan was to move to Canada because of the same time zone,” Kishore laughs.
Remarkably, they figured it out just in time, only to be faced with their next challenge.
“We didn't know anyone to raise capital from,” Kishore says. “Since we are new to the country, investors usually like to take calls with people that they know and they get warm introductions from.”
He summarizes the struggles by stating, “We were trying to figure out a lot of things on our own.”
In Silicon Valley, those warm intros are often the currency of fundraising. Without them, getting a meeting is nearly impossible. Kishore and Palash didn’t have family friends in venture capital or former bosses who could open doors.
They persevered and leaned into their immigrant background, as Kishore says, “People want to do business with people they are comfortable with and familiar with. Our first investor was actually an Indian-American. Because, you know, he thought we will do something, we are sort of scrappy and we will get there”
For their first round of funding, they closed with $2M. This would be a respectable amount for most small startups, but for Goldcast, their competitors had already raised $500M. Goldcast was entering the market at a late stage, and they were on the backfoot.
Couple this with their lack of industry experience, and they were facing an uphill battle to grow the company. With established competitors dominating the space, it was tough trying to get people to even try their product. All while figuring out how to even run, let alone scale, a startup.
Considering the stacked odds, it’s almost incredulous how far Goldcast has come. Together with their last funding round in 2023, they have raised over $38M altogether, taking the company valuation to over $128M. Not bad for two Indian immigrants with zero connections.
The Immigrant Equation: When Nothing is Abundant
Kishore grew up in a small town in Southern India called Neyveli, home to just 2,000 people. His father was a civil engineer and his mother a teacher, both working for a government-owned company.
Although comfortable, it was far from a luxurious life. Kishore watched his mother stretch the household food budget by shopping at multiple supermarkets to save just a few cents. That mindset of resourcefulness and sacrifice left a lasting impression. “Nothing is given on a platter. You have to earn it,” he explains.
At 13, Kishore had to grow up fast when his father was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. The experience was difficult, but it instilled in him a resilience and perspective that shaped how he approached challenges later in life.
“I saw that and how he overcame that. That helped me eventually to overcome small obstacles, not take things too seriously. If things don't go the way you think they should, life could change without warning, so make the most of what you have.”
Although Kishore’s family supports Goldcast today, there was a time when they weren’t so enthusiastic about his choices. Like many Indian families, his parents expected him to pursue one of two “respectable” paths: doctor or engineer.
His sister became a doctor, and Kishore began following the other track, studying engineering at the prestigious IIT in India. Inspired by seniors who had gone on to study in the United States, he applied to Harvard Business School.
On the surface, it looked like Kishore was destined to follow a conventional path. But deep down, his ambitions were broader.
“I always thought I'd become a CEO of a large company. I'll join a company, rise up the ladder, become a CEO of a company and lead the company through transformational initiatives and projects and make it something bigger.”
Meeting Palash changed everything. As the two began collaborating on business ideas, Kishore felt inspired. When their side project started gaining traction, he realized it was time to choose.
“We can't do multiple things like juggling school and building on the side. Let's just give it a full swing.”
So, they dropped out, much to his parents’ dismay. For a family that had celebrated his acceptance into Harvard as a once-in-a-lifetime achievement, it felt like a betrayal of everything they had worked for.
“You know, I came to the US to study at one of the most prestigious institutions out there and it was a big moment for the family, but since I didn't complete it, they were pretty upset in terms of ‘why did he even do that?’”
The disappointment did weigh on him at the time, but Kishore pressed forward. However, the results speak for themselves.
“I think now they're fine with it because, you know, we have shown some progress. The company's scaling a little bit. So, in that way they feel a little safe, but once in a while they ask me, ‘Hey, are you going to go back and finish the degree that you left, right?’”
Goldcast co-founders Kishore, Palash, and Sumir Chadha
Building Trust as Outsiders
Once you know Kishore’s backstory, his resilience makes the rest of the journey feel almost inevitable. He had learned to push through adversity, and that instinct carried straight into Goldcast’s earliest days.
When Kishore and Palash first started working on their idea, they didn’t even have a product to pitch. Instead, they began with conversations.
“What my founder and I did was that we reached out to 200 people who are actual buyers of the product and had one-on-one, 30-minute chats with them to understand what their pain points are.”
Those conversations confirmed the opportunity but also exposed a deeper challenge of trust.
Why should buyers believe in two relatively unknown founders with no track record in the events industry? Especially when established players were already circling the space?
It didn’t help that they were late to market. Competitors were better funded, better connected, and often faster to reach potential customers. And they weren’t exactly launching at an ideal time: April 2020, during the peak of COVID.
Kishore is the first to admit that getting those early customers was brutally difficult. “I would say so far in my life, getting those early 10, 15 customers is the hardest part I've done.”
Convincing customers to choose Goldcast over more established names meant putting everything on the line. Kishore is unwavering in his belief that winning those first few customers was integral to their success.
“Overcoming that initial barrier and really putting your heart and soul out to convince a few people to try the product out and ensuring that they are successful becomes a very important part of the initial lift.”
I find it remarkable that Kishore and Palash learned everything on the fly, from pitching investors to marketing a startup. Their mix of self-belief and maybe even a touch of naivety kept them moving forward when others might have stopped.
As first-time founders with no industry experience and no connections, they leaned hard into what they could control, the execution. If someone gave them even the smallest chance, they made sure the experience was flawless.
One pivotal moment came when Drift, a fast-growing tech company known for its bold marketing, ran an event on Goldcast. It went well and the CEO’s reaction was immediate and glowing. “He wrote on Slack that I’ve not ever been part of an event like this ever before in my life,” Kishore remembers. That single comment felt like more than praise, it was validation to fuel the fire.
“I would say so far in my life, getting those early 10, 15 customers is the hardest part I've done.” — Kishore Kothandaraman, COO & Co-Founder of Goldcast
Finding Weapons in Weakness
Kishore and Palash leaned hard into their strengths, constantly studying competitors and asking themselves how they could do things better.
Kishore’s own work ethic set the tone, waking up at 6:30 a.m. and finishing his day around 10 p.m. He knows what he needs to do to stay on top of his game and he’s always aware of Goldcast’s relatively small size compared to powerhouses like Zoom.
With no capital to fall back on, speed has become Goldcast’s superpower.
They realized early that while they could never match their competitors’ piggy banks, they could out-execute them in real time.
“There is always an urgency inside the company,” Kishore explains. “Can we get this done tomorrow instead of next week?”
And this applies to everything within the company, from product development to customer support, even hiring. When a customer raised feedback, the team didn’t log it for the next quarter’s roadmap. Instead they often shipped a fix within days. While a competitor could take months to roll out a feature, Goldcast can deliver an iteration in weeks. Velocity itself became a competitive differentiator.
This agility has carried them as the company has grown to more than 90 people. As Kishore puts it, the ability to “get things done becomes a lot more important than capital.”
For Kishore, even potential weaknesses can be reframed into strengths, and the ultimate motivator has always been the customer. Kishore regularly checks Slack groups and LinkedIn to keep a tab on the public sentiment surrounding Goldcast.
“Nothing can get better than just real customers who are paying for your product, talking very positively about your company and your brand to other folks who are evaluating a similar product for their own needs.”
“It's better to hire people who are much smarter than you.”
— Kishore Kothandaraman, COO & Co-Founder of Goldcast
The Self-Awareness Superpower
Kishore walks a careful line between knowing his strengths and acknowledging his weaknesses. This is where he leans on his co-founder and CEO, Palash. Together, they balance each other out.
“He's just an incredible leader because he's very balanced in how we approach his things.”
And Kishore is candid about his own limitations, “One thing I've learned about myself is that I can't be a CEO of the company because I think CEOs have to be very pragmatic but also have a long-term thinking towards growing the company.
You need to be able to balance both of these things very, very well. I am more towards execution, like I'm just incredibly good at execution but I think I need to sort of grow my skill set towards thinking of a long-term picture, that's what my other founder brings to the table, he is able to articulate what he should do 10 years down the line.”
Ask any self-made billionaire and they’ll tell you the same thing—the best entrepreneurs know growth depends on building a great team. Kishore understands this instinctively, explaining, “I've learned that you just have to make yourself useless after the company grows.”
He’s talking about his own journey within Goldcast, where he started by leading sales, hustling to land those first few dozen customers. But once the company started to grow, he recognized he wasn’t the person to scale it past 40 customers, so he hired a full time sales exec.
“I have this philosophy that you should be very quick to realize that you can't do this and there is not enough time to learn this. So, it's better to hire people who are much smarter than you.”
It seems Kishore has a knack for surrounding himself with the right people, like his wife, who he met when Goldcast was just an idea.
“I think I've always underappreciated her role in the whole journey, and I'm sort of lately realizing how important of a role she has played over the last year or so.
“She has been incredibly supportive, making sure that I enjoy things outside work and have a different perspective. She gives me that balance. I feel very fortunate.”
The Current Reality and Future Vision
In just a few short years, Goldcast has gone from the scrappy startup that crashed on its first big event to a company of 90 employees, split evenly between the US and international offices. Community is important to Kishore, who makes sure to meet with the remote team a couple of times a year to cement that sense of connection and motivation.
Serving more than 200 customers, their client list reads like a who’s who of modern enterprise, from big players like GitHub, Pure Storage, Zora, and PTO to smaller unicorns like Drift, Gladys, and ThoughtSpot.
The growth has been staggering, from $40K ARR to $10M ARR+, and now the team is aiming for $100M in ARR. But the dream doesn’t stop there. Kishore ultimately hopes to take Goldcast public.
That goal is personal to Kishore. He recalls watching Girish Mathrubootham stand on the NASDAQ stage with his family and team.
“He was one of the first founders from India to actually build a software company that went public, and it happened a year or two back. I would love for Goldcast to be like that, but time will only tell if that's the case. But that's my long-term dream for any company I start.”
For Kishore, that visualization of ringing that bell isn’t about status, it will be about celebrating alongside the people who’ve been there since the beginning: his co-founders, team, family and investors.
Spiraling Up: The Journey to Become Unicorn
HubSpot for Startups and LinkedIn collaborated on Spiraling Up: The Journey to Become a Unicorn—a three-season documentary series that told the story of various startup founders on different parts of their respective journey scale their business to unicorn valuation (a private investment-backed company worth $1B or more). Kishore's story was featured in season 2, episode 2. Watch the full episode below.
Author: Phoebe Gill
Phoebe is an SEO specialist, content marketer, and host of The Beginner's SEO Podcast, based in Sydney, Australia. She spent her twenties traveling across South America before settling in Sydney, where she’s spent the last seven years helping businesses grow. When she's not talking or writing about digital marketing, you’ll likely find her at a dance class or soaking up the sun at one of Sydney’s many beaches.
