Kunal Bajaj and Sachin Kumar explain how complementary strengths brought them together to build eSec Forte. Their discussion is a candid account of co-founding a cybersecurity company, learning unfamiliar parts of business, hiring for mindset as well as skill, and using process to navigate both successful and difficult days.
Sachin began eSec Forte after roles with organisations including KPMG and Verizon. Kunal was running a company focused on cloud services and Salesforce after working at Wipro. They met through a friend and recognised a useful contrast: Kunal understood sales, numbers, and business, while Sachin brought deep technical knowledge.
Over coffee, they decided to merge their organisations. The resulting company grew across six cities to more than 100 people and served customers across banking, telecommunications, defence, and other sectors. In the interview, they describe this early merger as one of their most consequential decisions.
The co-founders did not begin with identical backgrounds or try to duplicate each other’s roles. Their partnership worked because each filled an important gap for the other. Even so, they quickly learned that founding a company requires work outside any preferred specialism.
Kunal and Sachin had to deal with finance, human resources, legal questions, operations, and process development. A major project operating across roughly 20 countries forced them to learn logistics, customs, banking, payments, and concepts such as merchant trading while still delivering the technical work. The experience demonstrated that entrepreneurship resembles raising something that needs attention in every area, not simply practising one’s original profession.
Trying to save money by postponing finance, operations, HR, or legal expertise can leave founders carrying too much. The pair eventually built a trusted, experienced team that removed significant operational work from their plates and allowed them to focus on their strongest areas.
Their hiring philosophy puts organisational “DNA” and frequency of mindset alongside functional capability. Someone who is not yet the strongest technical candidate can learn, but a fundamental mismatch in attitude is harder to repair. They also avoid desperation hiring, even if that means waiting months for the right person, and place particular value on retaining the core team that has grown with the company.
Kunal introduces a simple framework called SIP: sleep over it, introspection, and process. On a day when problems arrive from every direction, the founders avoid making major promises or decisions from a low point. Stepping away and sleeping before responding can provide a clearer view.
Introspection means competing with an earlier version of oneself rather than measuring every strength against another person or company. People have different abilities, so progress is more useful than an unfair comparison. Process means doing the work diligently even when the immediate result is failure; a repeatable method supplies learning that can improve the next attempt.
From the technical side, Sachin stresses that a team should first hear and understand the customer’s actual requirement. Repeating a familiar solution because it worked historically can miss the present problem. The right response may require adjusting the approach instead of forcing the customer into an existing answer.
The founders connect this habit of listening with community participation. eSec Forte encouraged team members to take part in groups such as null, share what they had learned, and support the community from which they had benefited.
