Rehan Jalil came to the U.S. to attend graduate school, then took a job at Sun Microsystems, accidentally assuring that the Silicon Valley would become home base for the young immigrant for the rest of his career.
Recognizing that he wanted to make a positive impact on the world, Jalil started his entrepreneurial journey by founding WiChorus, which focused on enabling 4G technologies.
After it was acquired by Tellabs, Jalil went on to look for new problems to solve. Elastica was formed to develop cloud application security. It was acquired by Blue Coat in 2015.
In this interview, Jalil tells the story of how, after raising Series A funding for Elastica, a large customer told him that they would not buy Elastica’s product.
Hitting pause on the company’s plans, Jalil reassessed his products, his team and himself to see what was the issue.
That struggle with the company’s initial customer became the crucible from which Elastica’s latest successes sprang.
“Struggle is, to me, actually trying, stretching your limits and doing things that you are out of your comfort zone. And then not always you can persevere through some struggles, but if you do, that makes you a lot better. In fact, great things come from struggle,” Jalil said.