S12 E8: Satya Mishra, Waylit

0:00So the first MVP was basically Raj and I, Raj is my co-founder, doing the process manually. We met with our customers through our local St. Louis companies. We sat down, this is a problem we're trying to solve, is this something that seems interesting to you. And quite a few of them said yes. We do the tech side, we manage the HR, and then we partner with attorneys to do the cases. And we found this attorney in St. Louis who was willing to work with us. It's a little old school, does everything over paper. We got the process running, we figured out how everything works. And then what we did was we took that and built it into a workflow and Django. I'm Satya Mischa, I'm the co-founder and CTO at Weighted. This is Coast Story, a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. I think six months moonlighting is nothing of the backhand. Who share what it takes to change an industry. I don't exactly know what to do next.

1:00It took many goes to get right. Who built the teams that have their back. The company is it's people. The teams help each other achieve more. Those proud of our team. Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was up there. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve. I took it up to the shelf and tested it off and tried it again. To ride the ups and downs of the startup line. I need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more on Coast Story. I'm your host Noah Labpart. And today, how Satya Mischa made a simpler way for you to handle immigration. Through faster filings, support, and visibility. Today's episode is brought to you by .techdomains. And this one hits close to home. Back in 2016, I was building my startup and went hunting for that perfect .com. And found next to nothing. So I did what every founder does. Settled.

2:00Here's what I wish someone had told me. You're building a tech startup. Just get a .tech domain. It instantly tells investors and customers what you're about. Don't overthink it. Secure your .tech domain today. From any registrar of your choice. This episode is sponsored by Unblocked. Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing. It synthesizes your PRs, docs, slack, and tickets into organizational context that agents actually understand. So they make better plans. Write higher quality code, use fewer tokens, and require fewer correction loops. If you're running clawed code, cursor, or any agent workflow, unblocked is worth a look. Learn more at getunblocked.com slash code story. This episode is sponsored by Mesmo. If your team is collecting large volumes of logs, metrics, and traces, but still struggling to get timely answers, Mesmo can help. Mesmo is an active telemetry platform that processes and enriches observability data

3:02in real time before it's stored or analyzed. That means lower data volume, lower cost, and faster root cause analysis across your existing observability tools. To see how it works, get a demo at mesmo.com slash code story. That's m-e-z-m-o.com slash code story. This episode is sponsored by BrainGrid. If you are building with AI coding tools but your features keep breaking, you need to check out BrainGrid. It is the product management agent for AI builders. BrainGrid turns messy ideas into clear specs, tasks, and prompts that coding agents like cursor and clawed can actually build the right way. Ship real software, not fragile prototypes. Start free at braingrid.ai Satya Mishra was born and raised in India in one of the smaller tech hubs on the eastern coast. He came to the state 25 years ago on an H1B visa working in semi-conductors.

4:03In 2015, he decided he wanted to do something entrepreneurial and set out to do so. Outside of tech, he is married with three kids, which takes up most of his time. When he lived in Colorado, he did lots of skiing and hiking, including snowshoe hiking. Once he went to California, he switched to the beaches. And then finally, when he moved to St. Louis, he took up improv, enjoying connecting with people and thinking on his feet. Satya and his co-founder Raj both went through the immigration process in all of its forms. They realized that no one group owns the process as it's highly specialized and usually fell onto the employee to keep track of. One day, they set out to solve this problem to assist business teams to take ownership of the entire process. This is the creation story of Waylit. The Waylit helps lean HR teams manage their immigration. The thing that we ran into my co-founder, I wrote out from India,

5:06we went through the whole immigration life cycle. In the US, H1B, renew the H1Bs many times, the green car became citizens. And the thing that we found during the process was nobody really was in charge of making sure that everything was getting done on time in a compliant manner. The teams that we worked with, they were lean HR teams. They had a hands-full with regular HR work. An immigration was something that's very specialized to get in and know your details about. Oh, your passports expiring, you got to get your passport done so you can get your visa done. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck somewhere. Or your visa is expiring, somebody's going to make sure that your visa is filed six months in advance because it takes eight months to process them. Whatever you're on the H1B and the H1B is only valid for six years, so you get the next step to get this person on the green car. It usually fell on the employee to figure it out in such HR teams to make sure that they're staying on top of the immigration compliance and everything.

6:07And of course, employees, they should rather be focusing on work. I had a funny story. So my boss said, hey, we need to go to Taiwan for a business trip. I said, oh, sure. Then I opened my passport. My passport was expiring two weeks. There isn't nobody who was keeping track of how I can't go. So I had to postpone the trip, get my passport renewed and make the trip. So those kind of things, that's what we set out to solve. And we built a platform to keep track of all that. And even in a not-so-linear HR team, how they would do this is they would have a spreadsheet and they would regularly review everything and make sure that things are going according to plan. But our platform has a little more smart built-in to it. You put in all your information that tells you when your passport is expiring, when your visa is expiring and alerts you well in advance to renew your visas. And then we take care of actually managing the entire process for the HR team.

7:10So we act like an extension of the HR team of our customers and do the thing at the end to end. Let's dive into the MVP for Wailets, the first version of the product you build. How do I take the build? What sort of tools are you using to bring it to life? So the first MVP was basically Raj and I, Raj is my co-founder, doing the process manually. We met with our customers through our local St. Louis companies. And we sat down, this is a problem we're trying to solve, this is something that seems interesting to you. Quite a few of them said yes. And so we just started doing it manually. We had a great attorney that we started working with. It's about to retire now. And he gives the best advice on how to do things and everything. We do the tech side, we manage the HR, and then we partner with attorneys to do the cases. And we found this attorney in St. Louis who was willing to work with us. It was a great person to work with.

8:10There's a little old school, does everything over paper. So we did emails, we did paper, we got the process running, we figured out how everything works. And then what we did was we took that and built it into a workflow. And Django, Django is our tech stack that we used for our web app. And we so built that workflow into there so we can run many of those. And every time we make sure that the case is done, being done right, and nothing is falling through and everything is tracked. One place for everybody to go get all the documents, case status, whether it's the HR person, the attorney, the employee, or let's say the HR person changes at the company. They don't have to scramble to find out what happened. They can call the platform and everything is right there. Today's episode is brought to you by dot tech domains. And this one hits close to home. Back in 2016 when I was building my own tech startup, I went on the hunt for that elusive.com. Looked high, looked low, and guess what I found? What I did find cost me an arm and a leg.

9:10So I did what every founder does under pressure. Through an extra letters settled for the less than optimal name. And here's what I wish someone had said to me back then. Noah, you're building a tech startup. Just get a dot tech domain, techstartup.techdomain. It could not be more obvious. It tells investors, customers, and anyone who looks at your website really, that tech is at the core of your build. And I've kicked myself plenty since. Especially when I see the clean and sharp names, tech companies have landed on dot tech. Nothing.tech1x.tech Aurora.tech. CES.tech Ultra.tech Alice.tech Neon.tech Blaze.tech Pi.tech. You get the idea. So take it from someone who learned it the hard way. If you're building a tech startup, don't overthink it. Secure your dot tech domain today from any registrar of your choice. This episode is sponsored by BrainGrid. Building with AI coding tools is exciting, until the moment things start breaking. You ask for a small change, and suddenly three other features stop working.

10:11AI gets confused, misses edge cases, and loses track of your intent. The problem is not code generation. The problem is planning. That is why BrainGrid exists. BrainGrid acts as your product management agent. It writes clear specification, maps UX flows, asks the clarifying questions you forgot to ask, and breaks big ideas into engineering grade tasks that AI coding tools can build reliably. It guides cursor, clog code, replet, windsurf, and others, so they deliver features that work and keep working. Founders use BrainGrid to build real AI native SaaS products, without a technical background. If you want reliable features, instead of fragile prototypes, try BrainGrid, for free at braingrid.ai. That's braingrid.ai. So you've got that version built. You went through the process with the old school lawyer, you got the platform built, now the workflow built.

11:11How did you progress and mature the product from that point? And I think to like in that question or to wrap that question in a box, I'm curious about roadmap. How did you build your roadmap? How did you go about deciding that, okay, this is the next most important thing to build for WayLip. When we started, I wanted to build on a foundation that we could build for a while. So I looked around and we had a little bit of experience with working with React and stuff. I thought, yeah, this stuff changes too fast. Whatever was working yesterday is probably not going to work today and I got to pick up. So I picked something called Django. It's a Python programmer that I had known for a while. It's been around for, I think they just did their 18th or 20th birthday. So it's been around for a while. All the things, things have been worked out. And so what we did was they said, okay, we're going to build it on Django. So that's the basic thing. What we build next is whatever is causing the most friction for us. This is taking the longest amount of time. Let's go build that and make sure,

12:12or this is where most of the errors are happening. Let's go build that to reduce the errors, to reduce the time we're putting into the process. And that's the process still today. Oh, this is where things are falling apart. This is where errors are happening. Let's put in more controls. Let's make this a little bit easier for everybody to understand. We get customer support questions like, oh, how do I do this? Oh, yeah, maybe that text will be improved a bit. Maybe we need to retain how this work should work. And that's our basic process for building the product. I'm curious about team, right? So I hear you mentioning other folks in our process. Tell me about how you built that team, and what do you look for in this people to indicate that they're the winning horses to join you. Our entire team works closely together. We meet a few times a week, and we are in Slack all the time, pinging each other. So it's not just tech, right? So we have somebody who understands immigration in a little more legal detail.

13:13That'd be a paralegal kind of person. Then we have an attorney, who actually is in Slack with us all day, even though they're not technically part employees. They have their own company, their partner Genie, but they're super willing to work with us. And we have some sales people, as a customer support person, and of course, Rajinai, being the co-founder, Rajinai, and sales marketing product management, to some extent, and I'm on the tech and product management as well. So we all work very closely together to deliver the product for our customers. And what I look for when I'm hiring is somebody who is curious, willing to work fast, and is not set in their ways. In a startup, it's not, oh, we have always done it this way, and that's how we're going to do it. How we do things changes every day, because we change the platform, we decide not to stop doing some things, and we decide to start doing some things that are more valuable to our customer, and that thing is changing every day,

14:13and not everybody's comfortable with that change. So we had to, unfortunately, make some changes in our team sometimes, the employees were very set in their ways. Initially, it looked like it was going to work, but it didn't work. The pace of change was too much for them. So we had to part ways sometimes. This episode is sponsored by Unblocked. Your coding agents have access to your code base. Maybe you even connected other tools via MCPs, but access doesn't mean context. Agents can't reason across MCPs. They don't know your architectural decisions, your team's patterns, or why the API was shaped the way it is. So agents look in the wrong place and deliver bad outputs. Then you spend time correcting, more loops, more tokens. Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing. It synthesizes your PRs, docs, Slack, and tickets into organizational context that agents actually understand. So they make better plans, write higher quality code, use fewer tokens, and require fewer correction loops.

15:15If you're running cloud code, cursor, or any agent work flow, Unblocked is worth a look. Learn more at getunblocked.com, slash code story. This episode is sponsored by Mesmo. If you're responsible for reliability, performance, or platform architecture, you already know the problem. Telemetry volume is growing faster than teams can manage it. Mesmo addresses this by moving observability upstream. Instead of storing everything and asking questions later, Mesmo processes telemetry in motion, filtering, transforming, and enriching logs, metrics, and traces before they reach your observability back end. The result is cleaner data, reduced ingestion costs, and faster root cause analysis using the tools you already rely on. Mesmo integrates with platforms like Datadog, Dynatrace, and open source stacks, giving teams more control without adding operational overhead. This is especially useful for platform engineers and SREs supporting complex, distributed systems

16:16where context and speed matter. To see how active telemetry works in practice, get a demo at mesmo.com slash code story. That's m-e-z-m-o.com slash code story. I'm curious about scale, right? I'm curious about how you approach scale in the beginning, and then, you know, have there been interesting areas where you've had to fight it as you've grown? And that could be technology, approach people, all the things. We're still running a very lean team. We're not VC-funded or anything. I see a couple companies that are VC-funded in immigration space. We'll see how that works out. Traditionally, the companies here have not been VC-funded. So we have to work pretty lean. So our scaling, there's like a million people in the US in various stages of immigration. So the tech scaling is actually not that hard. There's not going to be like a million requests per second that you're going to answer. But where the scaling comes in is the complexity of things we're handling.

17:18When we started, we were just doing one or two kinds of cases and just US. But we built a platform flexible enough that we could, in two days, we could put up a new workflow for a new immigration process in any country. We talked to the attorneys, figure out what needs to be done. We write up the code, and in two days and sub. And we can start a case. So as a result of that, we can file cases in, I think, probably some of the fastest in the industry. I constantly go to, like, Prince were working for bigger companies and have big law firms as their immigration provider. And say, oh, it takes two months to do an H1B. We do it in about two weeks. So that's the kind of scaling that we have tried to do is set up our processes or handling the complexity on a very small team. So as you step out on the balcony, and you look across all that you've built with Waylit, what are you most proud of? I think the lives we have helped,

18:19we get unsolicited tanks from our employee customers, customers and their employees. And I'm like, oh, you guys are the best. I wish we had worked with an immigration provider like this ever. And that's what brings us back to working on it so hard every day. Satya, let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made, and how you and your team responded to it. And the biggest mistake was hiring. So when we started hiring, operational work was getting rather large for a small team for us to handle. So we wanted to win. We went and hired some paralegal help to do the work and answering customers' questions, running the cases and such things. And unfortunately, as I said, the pace of work at a startup and the law firm are very different. So that's like the biggest mistake that has caused the most heartache. And we now know to focus really well on somebody who's able to keep pace and with the change and the pace of work as well.

19:25Satya, this will be fun. Let's look towards the future. What does the future look like for WALIT, for the product, for the company, for your team, all the things? So we're still focused on providing the best immigration service that our customers can find anywhere. And we'll continue to grow. We hope to be one of the biggest names in immigration service that compete with the biggest names right now. And the biggest names in immigration service have been around for 20, 30 years. And we're much newer. But we're growing. And I think we're solving a real plan point. So we should be right there up there with them in due time. How are you integrating or utilizing some of the latest industry trends into the product? Maybe like we talk about AI or LLMs or things of that nature. Tell me about that. For the longest time, LLMs, we're going to add much value. I know everybody was last year's tier and was everybody was putting in a chat box.

20:26And they're in their Apple. Yeah, this is not really adding any value other than for the sake of where LLMs. But I'm seeing some new opportunities this year with the improvements, especially with the Opus 4.5, 4.6, and opening it as a GPT 5.2. And those things have changed the game where I can almost rely on them as much as I rely on the human to do the thing right. So we're looking to put in some intelligence in quite a few places where LLMs can do an assessment quickly. Not necessarily give the answer to the customer because we still don't trust them to do the different right answer. But surface things quickly for our team to review. So they can do things faster, more accurately with more comprehensible view of everything that's going on for that employee. Internally, we're, of course, using LLMs for developing our code and all that. Satti, let's switch to you. Who influences the way that you work?

21:26Name a person or many persons or something? You look up to and why. Well, the biggest influence would be my mom, I think. She didn't get to go to college, but she worked nights and weekends to get her degrees in undergrad and masters. And that's been my influence. So you want something you're going to put in that hard work to get there. When the kids go to bed at night, I get back to work because I got a thing to get to. Last question. So you're kidding on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it, they can't wait to show it off to the world and can't wait to show it off to you right there on a plane. What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit? The biggest thing I've found in business is the technology is good, but getting it in front of customers and making sure it's solving a problem or the customer is much more important. You've found a great big thing, go talk to a bunch of people and see how it solves their problem

22:27and see how we can get it into more people's hands to the biggest things when we're in a new entrepreneur. Yeah, I think those are fantastic things to point out. Well, Satya, thank you for being on the show today. Thank you for telling the creation story of Weilit. Thank you, and thank you for having me. And this concludes another chapter of CodeStory. CodeStory is hosted and produced by Noah Laphart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the podcasting app of your choice. And when you get a chance, leave us a review. Both things help us out tremendously and thanks again for listening.