How One Serial Entrepreneur Built A Billion-Dollar Web Business, And Is Doing It All Over Again

What does an entrepreneur do after building a billion-dollar business? In most cases, the answer is probably to retire and kick back. 

Not for Hari Ravichandran. 

The Indian-born web entrepreneur founded a small web hosting business in 1997 and grew it into a major international enterprise worth $3.5 billion. Now, he’s building and growing Aura, a cybersecurity startup on a mission to make the internet a safer place. 

Here’s his story. 

From College Dropout to Billion-Dollar CEO 

Ravichandran was a grad student in electrical engineering at Stanford when he decided to launch his own business. It was the late ’90s and an atmosphere of euphoria had Silicon Valley in its grip. It was the height of the dot-com boom. 

“Yahoo and Hotmail had just started out of Stanford,” Ravichandran recalls. “It was like a dynamic, exciting, wonderful time to be part of the Silicon Valley culture. I really got the bug, and at that point, I thought, ‘If they’re able to do it, I ought to be able to do it too.’”

He founded BizLand, a web hosting company that focused on helping small businesses get online. It grew rapidly, and by the time the dot-com bubble burst a few years later, Ravichandran had been planning to retire. 

When the crash hit, he had to adapt: “It was a very challenging time. We had a six-week window where we were going to run out of money, and we basically had to convert our entire business model from advertising focus to just what it was in the early days to a subscription business.” 

In the end, he succeeded. BizLand was renamed Endurance International to reflect the storm it had weathered, and went on to thrive over the next two decades. By 2018, it was worth well over $3.5 billion. 

It was then that Ravichandran decided to circle back to his startup roots and launch Aura, a decision inspired by personal experience. 

Experiencing Cybercrime – Finding New Business Inspiration 

The idea for Aura had come to Ravichandran in 2014, in the midst of navigating the aftermath of having his identity stolen. 

“I was denied a mortgage, and I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. My credit had always been good. I paid my bills on time. But, it turns out I was hacked, and it caused my credit to plummet,” he explains.

While dealing with the fallout, Ravichandran also went looking for ways to protect himself from cybercrime in the future: “I wanted to make sure that something like this never happened again, so I looked for a preventative solution. I ended up with seven or eight different products, and I still had vulnerabilities,” he explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.  

Where other people would have accepted an unsatisfying situation, Ravichandran scented a business opportunity: “I looked at this experience and thought, ‘If I can’t solve this, there are probably millions of people who can’t figure out where to start.’”

In response, he decided to launch Aura, aiming to offer a comprehensive internet security solution. It covers all the technological bases you’d expect – antivirus, VPN, an automated password vault. Going further, though, it also provides parental controls and protection against spam calls, financial fraud, and identity theft. Basically, it’s a one-stop solution to frustrating cyber criminals. 

Leveraging Decades of Business Experience to Supercharge Aura 

Ravichandran’s perception of the need for such a comprehensive solution turned out to be spot-on. Since Aura was founded in 2018, it has rapidly expanded its user base, who are happy to pay a monthly subscription in return for all-round online protection. 

Plus, Aura has also attracted an illustrious catalog of investors, including giants like Warburg Pincus, General Catalyst, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. As a result, its value now lies at $2.5 billion, giving the startup unicorn status. 

A large part of Aura’s success is due to Ravichandran’s long business experience and insights into the factors that matter most in building a lasting basis for growth. 

“The thing that really sets great companies apart from good ones is culture. It is the foundation of everything businesses need for success,” he explains. “I’m talking about values, standards of interaction with people, codes of conduct, and modes of operations.” 

Aura’s values and the company’s mission is fundamentally shaped by his drive to leverage technology to help make people’s lives easier. It’s why its services are tailored to the needs of individuals, not corporations. 

“Our mission became to create a safer internet,” he says. “I’m a dad; I’ve got three kids, and I’m seeing them grow up as digital natives. I want to make sure that they have some security around the devices that they use and that they’ve been born into. In the long term, I feel like what we do is going to leave a mark and make the world safer for people.” 

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