Sachin Jain is the founder and CEO of Requestly. They help companies ship quality software faster with their tool used by over 200,000 developers to build, test, and debug web applications. 

They’re backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital India & Southeast Asia (aka Peak XV Partners). 

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👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

I am a front-end developer at heart and at Requestly we are building an open-source platform that empowers developers to build, test, and & debug web applications 10x faster.

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🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

I always wanted to build something of my own. At the age of 9, I built a magazine that contained hand-drawn images, self-created stories, and self-thought jokes and sold that one copy for INR 2.

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🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

I started Requestly as a side-project to solve my own problem and I could see suddenly my team started using it, my QA team started using it and it gained a lot of organic traction.

I continued building Requestly over weekends for 7 years before taking the leap of faith and starting to work on it full-time. Immediately after the leap, we were fortunate enough to go through Y Combinator (W22 batch).

The biggest highlight of my career is how Requestly unfolded from a simple weekend project to a product and now an open-source company empowering around200,000 developers across the globe.

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🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

I think entrepreneurship has become trendy in the Eastern world as well which is a good sign. More people trying to solve problems in different spaces.

One trend that I observe is people leveraging AI to solve everyday problems…be it writing better emails, generating better marketing copy, or generating Images. LLMs have added a new dimension to how we work all together.

This is very similar to tailwinds that we have seen in the past like the dotcom era, which is when people were thinking about what they could build on the Internet, then the Mobile revolution came and many apps were flooded in the app store.

Companies were thinking about what they could build on Mobile. Then there was BlockChain and Web3 and, now,it is AI.

OpenAI and Bard have made AI models a commodity so now it's up to the builders on how they leverage the APIs, fine-tune for specific use cases, and solve problems.

We are going through a very interesting time in human history.

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💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry? 

Don't start a startup for the sake of starting a startup.

We get a lot of energy from the problem statement, mission, and customers. So, it is really important to spend time with your customers and deeply understand the problem.

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🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours? 

Education.

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🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show? 

Mahabharata. It's an Indian epic. It might be thousands of years but still relevant and teaches you a lot about your duties.

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🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

Vanilla ice cream with a brownie.

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FYI. We've edited this interview for clarity.