Nakul Shah | Founder & Director | Sate Development
The below excerpt is an exclusive interview with Mr. Nakul Shah – Founder & Director of Sate Development.
Kindly brief us about your company.
Mumbai-based, Sate Development is a full-service software development company with a focus on blockchain and distributed ledger technology. It was started by blockchain and fintech pioneer, Nakul Shah. The company is an innovator of blockchain solutions for corporations and enterprises, building custom software for some of the largest institutions in the world. Sate has been named as one of the leading blockchain service company globally, which empowers high-potential organizations to successfully enter and leverage the new paradigm of blockchain.
Brief us about the Founder/CEO, and what was the source of inspiration for your company to be in the Blockchain segment.
Nakul Shah is the Founder and Director of Sate Development. He is a regular speaker at conferences across the globe, on topics like Blockchain, Hyperledger and Distributed Ledger Technology. As a longtime creative thought leader in financial markets, technology and innovation, he has worked with startups and multinationals across the world. Nakul has played a significant role in the adoption and application of technology. He started his career at State Street Corporation in Boston, which is one of the biggest and oldest providers of mutual fund, pension processing and asset custody services. He used advanced statistical and technical tools in the field of socially responsible investment. He also served as a Product Specialist for the wealth management team at Charles River Development. While executing independent consulting assignments, he has advised a leading sustainability firm that helps Fortune500 companies. After acquiring significant years of experience in fintech, Nakul moved his focus to blockchain, which was an emerging technology at the time. His experience and vision have helped Sate grow significantly in the past five years. Besides creating enterprise solutions, he also provides training, consultancy and development services, helping clients de-mystify the technology and understand how organizations can leverage its key features. Nakul has conducted lectures for banks, universities and governments, on various topics covering platforms and use cases of blockchain. He also an author for one of the best-selling books on Hyperledger. Nakul holds a Master’s degree in Financial Engineering from The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, USA.
What are the different products and services provided by your company, setting you apart from your competitors?
Sate Development is a service-based company. We address blockchain and its complementing technologies such as distributed ledger technology and smart contracts. We provide a variety of services to assist enterprises in their journey to achieve trust less consensus based global partnerships.
Sate Development brings its strong expertise in Platform integration and Digital transformation services to combine with blockchain and provide value added services and technology platforms.
We also serve as an end-to-end partner for projects, from exploratory phase, through the design and development, until solution deployment.
What are the key attributes that helped your company overcome the challenges that it faced during its establishment?
Being successful in business isn’t complicated, but the degree of difficulty is hard to explain. As far as attributing the success in business is concerned, especially for a startup, the goal is to connect with as many people as possible and build a strong network. Our interpersonal skills coupled with the marketing team’s efforts have been a cornerstone of our growth.
With the massive tech-enabled advancements, what are the opportunities and challenges evolving with it?
It’s amazing to see how rapidly technology is evolving, which makes new products and platforms available to us every day. The power to retrieve almost any information and communicate in several different ways with buttons at your fingertips is amazing. Something new is always on the horizon, and we cannot help but wait and wonder about the next technological marvel that is about to come.
There are several tech trends in store for 2019. As a service based company, our goal is to stay on top of these advancements and follow a constant path of self-learning and growth in order to cater to this ever changing market. Besides learning a new technology, we constantly try to think about how we can leverage them to assist our clients better.
Share with us your company’s contribution to its sector and how it is helping its clients in their business growth.
In a world where competition consistently claims to be #1, it’s difficult to differentiate and build your own identity. Difficult, but not impossible. We consider effective differentiation as one of the main challenge faced by a business, as we are forced to compete against big companies. We have four ways that helps our business stand out from the crowd. Each one of the following factors has worked well with countless clients that we have served.
Provide Exceptional Customer Service – We treat our customers like royalty. All customers have an expectation of great service. Even from a marketing perspective, the cost to bring back an existing customer is lower than the acquisition cost of a new customer. Thus, exceptional service is an important factor in our company’s success.
Good Communication – Honest communication about our services and project scope helps lay down realistic expectations which ensures that the clients are satisfied with the end result.
Come Up with Something New – We constantly try to improve our offerings by introducing new processes and solutions to provide better service to our clients.
Embrace Corporate Social Responsibility – While most believe that a company’s main responsibility is to take care of its core stakeholders such as customers, employees and owners, we believe that businesses should give back to society as well. As part of CSR, we try to encourage our team to do pro-bono work as well.
How do you motivate creativity and innovation in the workspace while maintaining a healthy work environment?
We follow seven simple rules:
– Make our business a pleasant place to be.
– Be respectful and supportive towards all employees
– Give employees room to grow.
– Share constructive feedback with employees.
– Be honest and transparent with them.
– Offer flexible scheduling.
– Recognize their achievements.
Brief us about the current scenario of Blockchain startups and your company’s future plans.
What began as the basis for tokens, blockchain technology — essentially a virtual ledger having the capability to record and verify a high volume of digital transactions — is now expanding across a number of industries. Blockchain tech has reached far beyond its inception within banking. In 2019, businesses are expected to spend millions of dollars on the technology, significantly more than the amount invested in 2018. Industries from insurance to gaming to government are starting to see blockchain applications. Entrepreneurs now believe that blockchain has the potential to transform many more industries. Ultimately, the use cases for a verifiable, transparent register of transaction data are endless. Blockchain is also resistant to fraud as it operates through a decentralized platform requiring no central supervision.
