A Day With Swamy Kaushik: Building a Cybersecurity Company From a Hyderabad Apartment
When Swamy Kaushik talks about cybersecurity, there’s no theatrical urgency—just quiet precision. As founder of E42.ai (example — replace if you want a different firm), his workdays don’t begin with pitch decks or LinkedIn posts. They begin with logs, alerts, and systems behaving in ways they shouldn’t.
This interview wasn’t conducted in a studio or office boardroom. It unfolded across a workday in Hyderabad—between coffee breaks, Slack pings, and long silences where actual thinking happened.
9:10 AM — No Morning Motivation Rituals
“There’s no such thing as a perfect start,” Swamy says, opening his laptop.
Cybersecurity doesn’t respect calendars. Overnight incidents dictate the day.
Most of his early hours are spent reviewing system behaviour—what changed, what looks abnormal, what might be an attack that others will only notice weeks later.
“This job teaches you humility,” he says. “If you assume you’re smarter than attackers, you’ve already lost.”
12:30 PM — Hyderabad as an Advantage, Not a Compromise
Swamy never considered relocating the company.
“Hyderabad lets you work without performing entrepreneurship,” he says.
Lower noise, stable talent, fewer distractions. Engineers stay longer. Problems get deeper attention.
Several of his team members come from non-startup backgrounds—network admins, infra engineers, people who’ve actually run systems at scale.
“That matters more than fancy titles.”
4:00 PM — The Unsexy Work
No demos. No growth hacks.
The afternoon is spent fixing something that will never be visible to customers—internal tooling that reduces response time by seconds.
“In security, seconds are everything,” Swamy explains. “But nobody celebrates them.”
This is the recurring theme of the day: impact without applause.
7:45 PM — Why He Avoids Startup Hype
Swamy doesn’t attend many startup events. Not out of arrogance, but focus.
“Most events reward storytelling, not competence,” he says.
Cybersecurity customers don’t care about charisma. They care whether systems stay up at 3 a.m.
“If your product works, your reputation spreads quietly.”
10:30 PM — The Real Risk
Before signing off, Swamy checks one last alert stream.
“The real risk,” he says, “is building for attention instead of resilience.”
In an ecosystem chasing speed and scale, his workday feels almost anachronistic—slow, deliberate, grounded. And perhaps that’s exactly why it works.
Editor’s Note:
This interview wasn’t about lessons or advice. It was about how companies are actually built—away from stages, awards, and applause. Hyderabad’s next generation of founders may not always be visible, but they are increasingly indispensable.
