By Phillip Lanos, business podcast host Episode recorded , for Entrepreneur's Action & Ambition podcast.

TL;DR / Key takeaways

  • Hari Ravichandran started his first company with a deliberately small target: make about $2,000 a month, cover his bills, and buy himself freedom. That company ran for about 21 years and, by the time he left in 2017, was doing about $1.2 billion in revenue as a public company.
  • He runs growth in what he calls a two-gear model: one gear handles tomorrow and next month, the other gear holds the 5 to 10 year vision, and neither gear works alone.
  • He describes his teams as needing both Greeks, the dreamers, and Romans, the builders who lay the roads and bridges toward the dream.
  • Aura, his digital security company, came directly out of his own identity theft in 2014, which took him weeks and months to clean up because no simple, all-in-one solution existed.
  • At the time of recording, Aura had about 800 employees, expected about $230 million in revenue that year, and had raised about $650 million in total at a valuation of about $2.5 billion.

About the guest

Hari Ravichandran is the founder and CEO of Aura, a consumer digital security company built to protect people from identity theft, fraud, and online threats in one simple, set-and-forget product. He describes himself in the episode as an engineer by training and an entrepreneur by nature. He grew up in India until about age 14, moved to the United States on a Rotary exchange program, and settled in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Before Aura, he spent about 21 years building a web services business that grew from a one-person operation into a public company. Scale figures in this article are the figures he stated on the episode, at the time of recording in October 2021.

Episode summary

Hari's path to engineering was not a calling. It was a strategy. His father, an academic who had spent two years in the United States on a Fulbright fellowship, told him on the way out of India to treat the exchange year as a huge opportunity and, in Hari's retelling, to figure out a way never to come back. A high school guidance counselor pointed him to college, and engineering looked like the safest, clearest route to a job, sponsorship, and a green card. He was good at it, but by about age 20 he could feel he was off his real path, which was building things close to customers.

The first company he started in the late 1990s had no grand ambition behind it. He added up his monthly bills, landed on roughly $2,000 a month, and decided that if a business cleared that number, everything above it was a bonus and he got his freedom and his life back. Helping small businesses get online in 1996 and 1997 turned out to be the vehicle. Two decades of incremental steps later, he left a public company doing about $1.2 billion in revenue. Aura, founded in late 2017, is his attempt to run the journey again with the lessons installed on day one: better product, a real brand, culture set deliberately, and a problem that is big, complex, and getting more complex.

Key insights

Define the floor before you chase the ceiling

Hari's first business started with a number, not a vision statement. He knew his rent and his bills came to about $2,000 a month, so the business had one clearly defined job at the start: clear that floor. His reasoning was that a tangible downside makes risk easier to take. Instead of carrying a vague, massive definition of success, he could ask a basic question: how do I use the skills I have to make a profit this month? Each next step got easier because the risk stayed understandable.

Run the company in two gears

The central framework of the conversation is Hari's two-gear model. One gear thinks about the products and moves that drive the next block of revenue. The other gear asks how the company becomes worth billions. Founders get stuck, he argues, when they live in only one gear: permanent long-gear thinking is amorphous and overwhelming, while permanent short-gear thinking produces motion that adds up to nothing. Cultivating both, deliberately, is a skill.

You need Greeks and Romans

Hari's shorthand for the two gears is two kinds of people. Greeks dream: they picture the empire and the big capture. Romans build: they lay roads and pour bridges. A company of only Greeks never starts, because nobody knows what to build today. A company of only Romans builds efficiently toward nowhere. The work of leadership is keeping both mindsets in the room and in balance.

Work backwards from a North Star that does not move

Aura's vision, in his words, is to create a safer internet for everybody, and he accepts that it will never be finished. The planning method runs in reverse: hold the long-term North Star fixed, then ask what the next three-year cycle requires, then what the next three to six months require, in team, product, distribution, and features. The vision does not change. The distance to it is what gets engineered down, one cycle at a time.

Start from a problem you have personally paid for

Aura exists because Hari's identity was stolen in 2014 while he was applying for a loan. Even as a technical person, cleaning it up meant calling banks and credit bureaus for weeks and months, with no single product that handled it. When he got the urge to build again in 2017, the team set pillars first: get the product right this time, build a brand, get the culture right, and pick a problem that affects a lot of people and keeps getting harder. His 2014 experience matched the data they were seeing about consumers stitching together security products from different vendors, and that match became the company.

The hardest sale is prevention

Hari is blunt about Aura's central business challenge: people who have lived through identity theft understand the product instantly, and people who have not tend to wait until it happens to them. He points to basic hygiene as the gap, noting that about 75 percent of people he asks admit to reusing the same password across critical accounts. Until that baseline improves, he argues, more advanced ideas like fully distributed, blockchain-based identity are still a long way from everyday use, and the practical work is in the unglamorous middle: better passwords, multi-factor authentication, and one product that watches everything at once.

Name the company like it matters

Aura started under a quick placeholder working name. About a year and a half before this recording, the team ran a serious renaming exercise and generated about 75 candidate names. Aura was the first name on the list. Hari describes seeing it and not wanting to look at the rest: the word conjured a shield, the energy field around a person, which is exactly the promise of the product. A name that carries the idea, he found, does work that explanation cannot.

Notable quotes

"We want to create a safer internet for everybody."

"The hardest thing is taking that first step and getting your mind around the risk, and then moving forward."

"You've got Greeks and you've got Romans. The Greeks, they're always dreaming. And then you've got the Romans, who are like, all right, let's start building bridges."

"If all you're doing is continuously dreaming about the big idea, it's going to get overwhelming, because you don't know where to start."

Phillip's Take: A small floor makes a big risk takeable

What stayed with me from this conversation is how unglamorous Hari's starting point was. A man who went on to run a public company doing over a billion in revenue began by adding up his rent and his bills and landing on two thousand dollars a month. That is not a lack of ambition. That is ambition with a floor under it, and I think it is the part most founders skip.

Across the founder interviews I have hosted, the people who last tend to share this habit. They define the smallest version of winning before they talk about the biggest one. The small number does two jobs. It tells you when you are free, and it makes the next step small enough to actually take. The big vision still matters, and Hari holds his as firmly as anyone: a safer internet for everybody, a North Star he knows he will never finish. But the vision rides on top of the floor, not instead of it.

The lesson I would hand a founder, or a client preparing to tell their story publicly, is this. Say your floor out loud before you say your ceiling. An audience, an investor, and honestly your own nervous system all trust a builder more when the minimum is defined and the dream is built on top of it, step by step, like roads toward a city you can already see.

FAQ

How did Hari Ravichandran start his first company?

He started in the late 1990s, at about age 20, helping small businesses get online at a moment when they could not write the code themselves. The goal was deliberately modest: make about $2,000 a month, cover his bills, and have freedom in his life. The business grew incrementally for about 21 years and was a public company doing about $1.2 billion in revenue when he left in 2017.

What is Hari Ravichandran's two-gear model?

It is his way of running a company on two time horizons at once. One gear focuses on near-term revenue, product, and customers. The other gear focuses on the long-term vision and what the company could become over 5 to 10 years. He argues founders need both: only dreaming leaves you overwhelmed, and only executing leaves you building toward nothing.

Why did Hari Ravichandran found Aura?

His identity was stolen in 2014, and cleaning it up took weeks and months of calls to banks and credit bureaus, even for someone technical. No simple, all-in-one consumer solution existed. In 2017 he and his team founded Aura to combine identity, financial, and online protection into one easy product consumers could set and forget.

How big was Aura when this episode was recorded?

At the time of recording in October 2021, Hari said Aura had about 800 employees, expected about $230 million in revenue that year, and had raised about $650 million in capital in total, including a recent $200 million raise, at a valuation of about $2.5 billion.

What does Hari Ravichandran say about passwords and identity security?

He says basic hygiene is still the weak point: about 75 percent of people he asks admit they reuse the same password on critical accounts, so one breach cascades. He sees multi-factor authentication and autonomous, learning-based protection as the practical present, and fully distributed blockchain identity as further away than the hype suggests.

Who would Hari Ravichandran invite to dinner, dead or alive?

Steve Jobs, without hesitation. He credits Jobs with creating categories that did not exist, the personal computer, iPod, iPad, and iPhone, with taste, and with making technology that connects with people at a human level, which is the standard he holds his own product work to.

About the host / book this show

Phillip Lanos is a business podcast host and author. Over 13 years he has hosted 1,000+ interviews with founders, executives, and operators (1,000+ interviews hosted, the reconciled sitewide count), including about 500 episodes of Entrepreneur's Action & Ambition, plus work for Inc., EO, Al Jazeera, and Grit Daily. His shows are conversational founder interviews for entrepreneurs, startups, and the operators building them, and every featured conversation becomes a permanent, structured article on this site.

For PR agencies and publicists: this is a business podcast built for founder and executive guests who can tell their own story. Booking route: the consultation contact on this site, phillip@philliplanos.com. No email address is published here by design; use the contact page so requests are tracked.

Originally recorded for Entrepreneur's Action & Ambition. This article is an original summary and analysis of that conversation, published on Phillip Lanos's own site.

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