Why tech companies need to think and act like startups: A CTO’s perspective
11.04.2025
Ramesh Nittur Anantharamaiah
Chief Technology Officer
As technology continues to evolve, companies must find new ways to stay relevant and ahead of the curve. Even as an established business, we can’t afford to become complacent. Embracing the mindset and agility of a startup is crucial, regardless of size or scale. At Azentio, we believe that thinking and acting like a startup allows us to foster innovation, deliver value, and meet the ever-changing needs of our clients in the BFSI sector.
As a CTO, I’m often faced with the delicate balance between leveraging the established capabilities of a large organization and ensuring we retain the speed, innovation, and agility that startups are known for. It’s a balance that can shape how we innovate, execute, and disrupt.
The biggest advantage a startup has is its ability to execute quickly. Startups don’t have layers of middle management or cumbersome approval processes; they move fast. In contrast, established companies, especially large ones in B2B, often struggle with legacy systems, processes, and governance.
But here’s the thing: we have to overcome this. In the tech space, especially with BFSI customers demanding rapid digital transformation, there’s no room for slow, drawn-out cycles. To compete with the agile startups, we need to break free from this inertia. We can take cues from lean startup methodologies, implementing shorter development cycles, rapid prototyping, and MVP-driven releases. This means we need to prioritize speed while still ensuring that we don’t compromise on the quality and security that our BFSI clients depend on.
For me, I encourage my team to embrace concepts like continuous delivery and automated testing, tools that allow us to ship software faster and with greater confidence. The more we can minimize friction in our deployment pipeline, the more agile we can be. Startups succeed not by trying to be perfect, but by getting products into customers’ hands quickly, iterating, and adapting.
Startups are known for having close-knit teams that collaborate seamlessly, and that’s something we often lose sight of as we scale. While we’re still agile in many areas, the larger we grow, the more likely we are to encounter the kind of silos that hinder true collaboration.
In today’s tech world, true innovation is born from collaboration across domains. Whether it’s DevOps working closely with security teams or data scientists teaming up with product engineers, fostering a culture where cross-functional collaboration is the default is a must.
To facilitate this, I’ve pushed for the adoption of microservices architectures, where different teams can own and operate independent modules, and interfaces are clear, enabling faster iteration and integration. We can’t afford to have developers working in isolation anymore. It’s about making the entire development lifecycle more transparent and creating workflows that break down barriers, allowing innovation to flow freely across teams.
Moreover, the increasing complexity of client needs, particularly in BFSI, demands a multidisciplinary approach. Financial institutions don’t just want a piece of software; they want a solution. And these solutions require expertise from fields as varied as AI/ML, cloud, cybersecurity, and compliance. If we can bring these different expertise areas together, like startups often do, we stand a far better chance at creating truly disruptive technologies.
Startups have the advantage of starting fresh, they get to build their tech stack without worrying about legacy systems or legacy thinking. As a larger company, this is where things get tricky. We often inherit systems and architectures that are decades old, which can severely hinder our ability to adapt quickly.
However, it’s crucial for established companies to continuously modernize their tech infrastructure. But it’s not just about adopting new technology; it’s about changing how we think about technology.
For instance, we leverage containerization and orchestration tools to ensure that we can scale efficiently. But scaling isn’t just about adding more compute resources; it’s about creating a truly flexible, distributed architecture that can handle unpredictable loads and allow for real-time changes in direction without massive overhauls. This approach enables us to move as quickly as a startup, even though we have a complex set of products and clients to manage.
Moreover, embracing a data-driven mindset is vital. Startups often innovate because they can leverage data to inform product development decisions. As a B2B company, we must do the same, collecting data from every part of our product ecosystem and feeding it back into our development cycles. We’re embracing AI to not only offer smarter solutions to our clients but also use it internally to optimize everything from software performance to customer support.
Startups thrive on experimentation. It’s often said that the “fail fast, fail cheap” mentality is what gives them their edge. They launch, gather feedback, iterate, and move forward.
For an established company, however, failing fast can feel like a risky endeavor. But in my experience, it’s a critical mindset that tech companies, especially those in B2B, need to adopt. The world is moving too quickly to hold onto ideas that don’t work.
At Azentio, we encourage our teams to launch products and features in limited, controlled environments (think alpha and beta testing). We take calculated risks with our innovations, and when things don’t work, we learn quickly, course-correct, and move forward. It’s about embedding the “fail fast” mentality into our culture, while also ensuring we have the technological framework in place to minimize the impact of failure on customers.
We’re doing this by constantly measuring the performance of our features, collecting user feedback, and monitoring system metrics in real-time. This allows us to not only make data-driven decisions but also respond to potential failures before they impact the broader customer base.
Startups are known for their relentless focus on customer needs. But as tech companies grow, they often become disconnected from that immediate customer feedback loop.
At Azentio, we’re embracing a customer-centric product development process. For example, our teams are in direct communication with BFSI clients, understanding their pain points in real-time and responding to feedback almost immediately. We’ve embedded customer feedback loops into every phase of development, allowing us to pivot when necessary, improve features, and ensure we’re building solutions that directly address client needs.
Leveraging data is key here. We track every interaction a client has with our product, understand where they experience friction, and use that data to continuously refine our offerings. It’s about making sure that we’re not just delivering features but actually solving the right problems in the most efficient way possible.
To further embrace the startup mentality, we prioritize a few key principles:
The tech industry has no room for complacency. Whether you’re a startup or an established company, the principles that drive innovation and success don’t change; they just need to be adapted. At Azentio, we’re embracing the startup mentality not just because it’s trendy, but because it allows us to innovate, stay agile, and ultimately deliver value to our clients in ways that disrupt the status quo.
It’s time for us, as tech leaders, to continually question how we work, how we build, and how we think. Because if we’re not constantly pushing the envelope, we risk being left behind. And just like startups, we have to remember: failure is an option, but inaction is not.
Ramesh Nittur Anantharamaiah
Chief Technology Officer
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