Chetanprakash CP Heda Podcast Transcript
Chetanprakash CP Heda joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is CP Heda. CP Heda is the Founder and CEO of Esstart. After a decade leading critical technology systems for WWE and with personal experience as a Bollywood music DJ and live event photographer, CP set out on a mission to end boring events once and for all.
That’s when he found Esstart, an innovative, experiential platform with the mission to use technology to make events more interactive, memorable, and inclusive.
Well, good afternoon, CP. Welcome to the show,
[00:00:45] CP Heda: Brian. Thank you for having us here.
[00:00:46] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Love this. Love to speak to a fellow technologist, of course, but just really do appreciate you making the time. I know you’re hailing out of the great state of Connecticut at the moment, but again, appreciate the time.
So, CP, we’re going to just jump right into here. Talk about your career a little bit in tech. Originally you were a system analyst. You became a senior executive. You’re an entrepreneur and now the founder and CEO of Esstart. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:16] CP Heda: So, I’ll start with your first question career growth. My story on that is look for opportunities, look for problems, if you’re in a company and you’re looking to grow, companies appreciate employees that create values. How do you create values by either generating more revenue or Solving problems.
And that’s what the second was my focus, which was working with people, solving their problems. And yeah, as at WWE, I was heading business solutions. So solving business problems with solutions. Your second question. Jumping into entrepreneur. So, I think that it was always there.
When I was at WWE, I, besides leading technology, and I had a few side hustles, side gigs, and one of them was event photography and the other was Bollywood DJ and event Bollywood DJ. So I’ve been in the event space and always wanted to as a passion because you started a passion as a photographer and then you start to continue and.
So the passion changed into a profession and then that profession changed into a business. And then from that business it just the H was always there and I would always see these problems when I would go to events. I would see these opportunities that, Hey, people are, want this solution.
They are facing this problem. So that’s where the idea came in that made me jump. I guess it was very natural.
[00:02:44] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I appreciate you sharing, again at the end of the day, we all talk about what really drives us, gets us out of bed, that passion. And I love how you jumped into that.
And being in entertainment obviously is a different whole set of of a career as well, but that’s so exciting. CP, that leads right into my next question here. You spent considerable time on working in entertainment for WWE, what specifically got you to jump into entrepreneurship with the founding of Esstart.
[00:03:11] CP Heda: So, I was hosting my wife’s baby shower, and we had a big number, we had 170 people. Come to our event. And so, we had people from all walks of life, we had we had my friends, her friends, our friends, my family, her family, our family. So, it’s just, it was so many people at the event.
We wanted to make sure that everyone came together. It was not silos of people at the event. So, the best way to solve that problem was to bring people together is by having some activities where we break the barriers and and that’s how so thinking through, we came up with few ideas of games and activities at the event, making sure everyone has a memorable time, everyone.
gets a chance to mingle, meet other people and join the celebration, of course. So, we came up with a few ideas, me coming from events and technology. I wrote some things and after the event, a couple of people kept on following up with me, asking me, Hey, can I use this, your thing that over here, can I use that thing over there?
And that is where I saw that it was not just me who was facing these problems. There are so many other people who are facing this problem of making sure that people are having an awesome time at events. And that I saw that as a calling that, Hey, there’s this opportunity.
I’m solving my problem, but I guess this is faced by others. Why not help everyone solve this problem of making sure their guests are having a wonderful time at their events and they’re creating memories together.
[00:04:45] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And that, again, that comes together, having that passion, but also serving others.
I love the story really do and we all love stories here on this podcast. So, thank you again, CP CP. Tell us a bit about your platform. It makes connections easy for event, producers, hosts, and brands looking to activate and inspire their audiences in a whole new way.
[00:05:05] CP Heda: Thank you, Brian. So the vision behind Esstart is being that one platform that you can go, if you’re hosting a small, a large, an extra large, a wedding, a corporate event, a gala, any kind of event that you’re hosting, or you’re part of, and you want to help people come together, make connections, And, You want to think of Esstart that is the vision of Esstart one platform that offers many products.
This idea comes from this thought that, every event is very unique. You can never, never recreate that event. Every event is unique. Every occasion is unique. Every celebration is unique. So we should offer unique products so that you can based on what you’re hosting, you may say, you know what, this is the right thing for me to do at this particular event.
Let me go to Esstart and get this particular product from Esstart. And that’s the vision of Esstart. Today we offer two products on our platform and we have many more in the roadmap and launching soon. Our first product. Is called Instant Spotlight. It is an interactive photo wall. So, if you visualize this, you are walking into a ballroom, an event hall, and you see a photo slideshow going on and there’s a QR code and you scan the QR code, it prompts you to take a photo and upload it.
Your selfie or your photo, your group photo shows up instantly. That is what Instant Spotlight does. Behind this simple action of you’re taking your photo and showing up what happens is when you see your photo on the big screen, you have this instant connection with the event. It makes you feel you have arrived.
You are here. And now join the event. So it creates this moment of joy or connectedness. That’s our first product. Our second product is called Storybook. It is having a host. So again, I’ll say this. Visualize this. You’re going to some milestone event, which is, could be a birthday, anniversary, And all these milestone events have this thing common where, you want to share the stories you want to share what happened getting to that milestone.
So if it is a 40th, 50th birthday Hey, we want to see those young photos. We want to see where he went. What did he do? La la la. That’s what Storybook enables you. It is one platform that allows you to share photos, videos, quiz. Message wall, everything into one. And even for quizzes that it has many options to gamify the interaction.
Hopefully that gives you a vision of what Esstart is and what our journey is. We are working on a third product and that will be launching soon as well. So that is Esstart one platform that you can come and create these moments of connection and bring your guests into the event and help them celebrate your occasion.
[00:08:02] Brian Thomas: I love that. And I know there’s a lot of use cases for that. Obviously, weddings across the globe, right? And we know weddings are a big event and that would be just something just to highlight would be really awesome to bring people that can’t do this travel in this future technology age post pandemic, right?
So thank you again for sharing CP last question of the day. You’re obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging tech in your tech stack. Is there anything you might be able to share with our audience today?
[00:08:31] CP Heda: Sure. For the technology audience, I would say we are built in 2022 decisions that we made we’re such that help us grow and scale faster. So we natively built everything in cloud so that we could scale to the growth that is going to come to us. Everything that we built was there’s not a physical server. There’s not a physical anything that we are tied to.
We are completely scalable, completely on the cloud. And that’s what we would expect from any new technology. The other things that we really focused on so our use case is events and you go to an event, you’re not expected to use technology. You are expected to network with people. Of course, that is what we are helping them do, right? So we made conscious decisions and we continue to make sure that experience it’s such that it is very fluid. Very simple that anyone from hosting to engaging with our platform that has an awesome experience. So that is what we focused on and privacy of data.
That is another very, very trust and privacy of data. That’s a very, very important factor. So, these are, I think that these are. Common guiding principles that anyone who’s starting or building anything today should think of. Yeah that’s in our DNA, making sure that the experiences are great we are able to scale globally with a lot of ease.
[00:09:56] Brian Thomas: You’re absolutely right. In today’s environment, whatever platform or product you’re trying to sell, you need to be able to scale quickly and be able to handle fulfillment, obviously. But I love the fact that you are leveraging the cloud, being able to work with a partner that allows you to do that scaling and leverage some of the emerging technologies that they have built into their tech stack as well.
So thank you again. CP, it was a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:10:23] CP Heda: Thank you, Brian. Same here.
[00:10:24] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Chetanprakash CP Heda Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
