This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Anish Dhar, co-founder and CEO of internal developer portal Cortex. Cortex is a project management platform for companies’ engineering teams to collaborate and manage their work.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Cortex. Co-founder and CEO Anish Dhar.
What was your day job (or other sources of income) when you started your side hustle turned startup?
When I founded Cortex, I was working as an engineer at Uber. I went to Uber immediately after college, started as an intern and stayed on for nearly five years, working on projects like the Uber Eats delivery experience. In the back of my mind, I was always on the lookout for an opportunity to create my own company. I worked on two different startups while I was at Uber — neither panned out, but I kept myself open to what my next big idea would be. My day job actually inspired the idea for my next startup, Cortex.
When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
Through my work at Uber, I saw how overly complex coding architecture can get. Engineers would name internal services after video games, and documentation was scattered across multiple tools, which made it difficult to gain context.
This meant that when services would break, it would be very difficult to understand which engineers owned these services, so “level 5” outages became commonplace. Engineers took their historical knowledge with them, and no one could find documentation to fix problems. I became an engineer because I wanted to develop products, but I spent so much time asking questions or trying to find information. Those real frustrations that I’ve had as an engineer led to developing the foundation for Cortex, an internal developer portal for engineering teams to help understand, operate and build new software. I started working on the idea in July 2019, and by October 2019, I made Cortex my full-time job.
What were some of the first steps you took to get your side hustle off the ground?
Once I realized I had potentially uncovered a real problem worth solving — something worth building and that the market might need — I reached out to two close friends who also worked in the tech industry. I wanted to understand how their companies tackled service documentation and management. They didn’t have a solution either; even established companies were struggling with these issues, which validated there was a significant gap in the market for an effective tool.
We rented an Airbnb for a weekend and dedicated ourselves to a 48-hour hackathon. Without outside distractions, we brainstormed, collaborated and rapidly prototyped solutions. By the end of the weekend, we had developed the first version of what would become Cortex.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced while building your side hustle, and how did you navigate them?
I struggled to effectively manage my time between my primary job and side hustle. Initially, I found myself dedicating more hours to Cortex than my actual job. That imbalance was not sustainable in the long term for my career or any semblance of work-life balance. The fact that I naturally gravitated towards spending more time on Cortex became a clear sign that I should double down on the idea. Ultimately, it led me to transition Cortex into my full-time job.
How did you approach funding for the startup? What does growth and revenue look like now?
Funding was a challenge for us in the beginning. Our team was building an entirely new category of developer tooling, which meant that investors had no comparable companies in the market. We had to prove both that the pain points were real and that we were the right team to solve the problem at hand.
We had a big breakthrough when we were accepted into Y Combinator with just a prototype and a pool of beta users made up of our friends. During YC, we continued to refine our product based on feedback from potential customers. Once we polished the product, we were lucky enough to have Sequoia Capital take a bet on our team before we even had our first paying customer.
Since then, Cortex has experienced substantial growth. We now have hundreds of enterprise customers, including big names like Adobe and Xero. We recently secured a $35 million Series B funding round and continue to grow our revenue at a healthy rate.
What do you enjoy most about this business?
I love that I’m helping engineers do the work that matters to them instead of wasting time on finding information. I would have loved to have Cortex around when I was an engineer.
This might be surprising considering the hybrid age we live in, but I also love meeting customers in person. There’s something irreplaceable about face-to-face interactions. I’m on the road, traveling almost every other week for work. I find that I can better understand their team, company and challenges and form deeper connections when we’re in the same room.
What’s your advice for others hoping to start successful side hustles or businesses of their own?
My advice for anyone hoping to start a successful side hustle or business is to believe in yourself and your vision, even when others don’t. When we started, plenty of investors told us our idea wouldn’t work, and it would have been easy to get discouraged and give up.
When I didn’t know if we would find funding or get our first customers, my belief in the product pushed me through the tough moments, and trust me, as a founder, there are many tough moments. I ignored investors who didn’t get it, focused on the real frustrations of engineers and took in feedback to iterate Cortex into a product that had value. I knew we were addressing a genuine problem, which fueled me to keep building.
