Spandana Nakka

Notable figure recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30 and Forbes AI 50

Spandana Nakka is the Founder and CEO of Pump, a company based in San Francisco that aims to significantly reduce cloud computing costs for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Founded in March 2022, Pump is often referred to as the "Costco for cloud computing," as it enables SMEs to group together to purchase cloud capacity at lower rates, potentially saving them up to 60% on their AWS bills.1 3

Background and Experience

Spandana has a diverse professional background. Before starting Pump, she co-founded Sleek, a company that developed APIs for surge pricing and data collection, which was acquired by Snackpass in November 2021. Her experience also includes working as a Product Manager at Google from 2014 to 2018, where she contributed to projects like Google Fiber and Google Play, and managed vendor relationships across multiple regions.2 3

Education

Spandana Nakka holds a Bachelor's degree in Engineering from Osmania University and has pursued further education in Engineering Management at Stanford University. She has also attended Caltech as an exchange student.2 3

Recognition

Nakka has been recognized in Forbes' AI 50 list for 2021, highlighting her contributions to promising AI companies, and she was also featured in Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Consumer Technology.1 2

Current Initiatives

Under her leadership, Pump has introduced innovative tools like PumpGPT, which utilizes AI to help SMEs better manage their cloud spending and understand their usage patterns, further enhancing the company's value proposition.3

Highlights

Oct 3 · twitter

The biggest open secret in tech:

Nobody knows what "Change Management" actually is, and at this point we're all afraid to ask

Oct 3 · twitter

Our leads were like 90% inbound at the beginning of Pump. Here's how we accomplished that:

Post on free channels. Places like LinkedIn, Product Hunt, the YC network, YC groups, other forums...being active where your customers are is a huge advantage.
A "too good to be true" offer. Pump is free. We don't charge customers anything. That meant people would come to our site and ask:

a) Wait, is this a scam? b) How is this free?

Relentless focus on our website content. "Save 60% on your cloud costs for free" is a great way to bring leads in, but we pushed them all through our chatbot to get quick feedback on what worked and what didn't.

This might not work for everyone, but we scaled past six-figures in ARR doing basically this.