About this series:In "30 to Watch," we introduce readers to 30 people in the Greater Lafayette community who we think you should get to know. These are people who’ve made a difference, had a positive impact in the community or just accomplished something really cool. Each day in December (except Christmas Day) we’ll shine a light on someone that we’ll be watching in the year ahead.
LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Last summer, when software development company Passageways secured an additional investor and made plans to add staff to its downtown Lafayette headquarters, Dennis Carson wanted to know why that sort of news didn’t make a bigger splash.
“What’s not to love?” Carson, Lafayette’s economic development director, asked. “High tech jobs. Home-grown business that’s growing. Right in downtown. It’s a great story.”
And it’s one Paroon Chadha, a founder and CEO of Passageways, isn’t shy about telling.
The Purdue graduate’s software business, founded more than a decade ago, is in the process of doubling its size from the beginning of 2018. Bigger yet, Chadha said he hopes what’s happening for Passageways is just a milestone on making Lafayette and West Lafayette a high-tech hub – maybe not the next Silicon Valley, but the sort of Midwest destination Purdue University and Lafayette economic develop leaders are pushing to develop.
Question: Give me your elevator pitch of what Passageways is and what it does.
Paroon Chadha: Passageways was founded in 2003, when I was a student at Purdue with a dream of building a software that allows team collaboration to happen with many different people all working in a portal, a la Yahoo for the enterprise. That dream has now morphed into a purpose to inspire and enable teams to perform better, together.
What that means in practice is, we develop two software-as-a-service products.
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The first is OnBoard, it’s a secure digital portal for boards of directors to prepare and conduct their meetings. … Our second product is OnSemble. It’s an employee intranet. Think about it as the homepage for every organization, when an employee gets into work it’s the first page that appears on their desktop. When they login they will have every document they need to do their job, a place to find and collaborate with their coworkers on documents, everyone’s birthdays and anniversaries. It’s completely customizable and also handles critical functions like timekeeping, help desks and dozens of other functions critical for businesses in 2018.
Question: How did you get started?
Chadha: I met my business partner, Christopher Beltran, while in school. It was during a Burton D. Morgan business plan competition (at Purdue) that we initially had the idea for what would become OnSemble. After the second position in that competition, we really thought we had something, so I began calling around looking for someone who might take a shot on our idea.
One of the numbers I called was to Bill Arnold at Purdue Federal Credit Union. Funny enough, because of my accent, he couldn’t exactly make out what I was saying over the phone, so he invited us in. Long story short, after an in-person meeting, Purdue Federal became seed first investor. We took up shop in their basem*nt in the (Purdue) Research Park branch and got to work, selling mainly to other banks and credit unions. We bootstrapped our growth from there all the way to end up on the Inc. 500 list in 2008.
Q: Why in Lafayette? And, maybe more importantly, why continue to grow in Lafayette?
Chadha: First, having come from India to Purdue for my MBA, I was already there in the promised land called America. The Midwestern warmth truly charmed me to stay put.
Secondly, the talent pool here was clearly underutilized, something I saw especially compared to the rest of the world. There’s a lot of interesting businesses between the research park and Lafayette manufacturing, not to mention the university, but no one had really pulled the people together to do something cool in the software space in town. There’s so many smart people who care deeply about this community, people who have the skills to really innovate in the tech sector.
To really underscore my point, take a look at other flagship universities in the Midwest – Ann Arbor, Madison, Chicago. They have some really innovative tech companies that were born from the university, and they’ve been able to keep talent around to work there. There was no reason that couldn’t happen here – we feel an enormous responsibility to help develop the tech sector here, to be mentors to a younger generation fresh with ideas and a drive to change the world.
Q: This year, Purdue President Mitch Daniels made a pitch for his Brain Gain Initiative, an effort to keep more Purdue grads in Indiana to start or grow businesses. You seem to be ahead of that curve a bit. What are your thoughts on what Daniels is trying to do and where you fit into that?
Chadha: Mitch Daniels has done lasting and important work in establishing Purdue as the place for innovation in the Midwest. I think his Brain Gain Initiative is another strong step in his legacy of ensuring that the best and brightest stay here. And yes, we’ve been actively taking steps to retain talent for years –but when it becomes a policy priority for someone like Mitch, it will mean more resources directed toward this effort. We fit into this, as you would suspect, by actively hiring this talent.
We are now a 100-people team, with over 30 of those hired just in the past four months. We continue to hire, as we are experiencing a significant growth spurt.
But our successes need to be the community’s success –like I spoke about before, we accept a lot of responsibility being the tech leader in the community, and that means actively supporting coworking studios like Matchbox and the Anvil. It means mentoring and personally investing in Purdue startups like Mimir and Socio helping these future leaders make the connections they need to find investment, the courage and talent to make their ideas a reality. Above all, we want to foster an ecosystem of tech talent for all of our benefit.
Q: Can a place like downtown Lafayette sustain software success when so much of the industry is in Silicon Valley and in other pockets across the U.S.? If so, what will it take?
Chadha: One reason Silicon Valley has been such a standout success is the ecosystem, hundreds of companies and workers with a ton of turnover and ideas being shared between companies. I am not sure it’s realistic to duplicate that success in any other place, but what I do think we can do is become the next Ann Arbor. That should be the model, a bedrock research university pulling together amazing minds, and those individuals deciding that this is where they want to set down roots, make companies of their own.
Q: How do you see that happening?
Chadha: What it will take is a healthier startup environment along with the kinds of amenities young professionals are looking for when they graduate. We can’t have companies started in Lafayette moving to Indianapolis – that simply has to stop.
I am really excited about the development occurring on the West Side, but frankly there is hardly any space where a team of 50-plus can explore easily, and just more housing won’t be enough. We need affordable office space, homes close to downtown, affordable parking – lack of affordable parking really surprises me – and more salad bars, coffee shops, etc. That’s what makes for a robust ecosystem that nurtures those new ideas and allows people to stay and move around between startups in most college towns. Between what the university, the cities and organizations like Passageways are doing, we are all working in lockstep to make this the kind of community people want to call home.
Q: Give me a sense of what 2018 was like for Passageways, and what’s next for you and for the company?
Chadha: We grew our workforce by about 35 people so far this year, we’re on pace to double our size early next year from where we started in 2018. That was accelerated by an investment we received in mid-2018 from Five Elms capital, a really wonderful firm that looks specifically at Midwest software companies on the kind of growth trajectory we are experiencing. That was really rocket fuel on our already really amazing growth.
So, we have a lot of new people, and that’s caused all the excitement and growing pains you’d expect –we’ve had to continue leasing out more and more space in the Earl and Hatcher Block, where we are headquartered. We’ve added a whole design department and almost doubled the size of every other department. It’s been really exciting stuff. The cherry on the cake was really when we signed our 1000th customer a few months ago. Every new customer we get still takes me back to our early days. I still get that same feeling. But now, it just happens nearly every day, or often more than once a day.
Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.
