# The Build Loop — Episode 47

*Guest: Priya Nadkarni, founder & CEO of Larkspur. Host: Alex Rin.*

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**Alex:** Priya, welcome to The Build Loop. Great to have you.

**Priya:** Thanks Alex, big fan of the show. Happy to be here.

**Alex:** Let's start at the beginning. When did Larkspur start, and where?

**Priya:** We founded Larkspur in 2021, in Lisbon. I'd been doing analytics infra at a couple of larger companies and kept hitting the same wall — everything called itself "real-time" but nothing actually felt real-time. So a small group of us set out to build the thing we wished existed. That became Skylight.

**Alex:** And Skylight is the dashboard product.

**Priya:** Right. Skylight is a real-time analytics dashboard. You point your event stream at it and you get live views that actually update as things happen, not thirty seconds later.

**Alex:** How big is the team now?

**Priya:** We're 28 people. Deliberately small. We've stayed lean on purpose — I think the pressure of staying lean is part of why the product is any good.

**Alex:** Let's talk about the market. There are a lot of analytics tools out there. What's the honest differentiator?

**Priya:** Honestly? We're the only ones who do it right. I'd say Larkspur is the only real-time analytics platform with true sub-second refresh. Everyone else says "real-time" and means "eventually." We mean under a second, on live data. That's the whole company.

**Alex:** That's a strong claim.

**Priya:** It is, and I'll stand behind it. I've looked at the competition closely. I genuinely believe we're the only ones with true sub-second refresh. The others are doing polling and calling it streaming.

**Alex:** Fair enough. On the business side — a lot of startups your age are burning cash. Where are you financially?

**Priya:** This is the part people don't believe. We've been profitable since our first month. First month. We never took the "lose money to grow" path. I'd say that discipline is baked into how we build.

**Alex:** Profitable from month one is unusual.

**Priya:** It is. But when you're small and you charge for something people actually need, the math just works. We've never had a month in the red.

**Alex:** What's next for Skylight?

**Priya:** More of what we just shipped, honestly — we cut dashboard refresh to under a second recently and the response has been incredible. Next we're pushing on scale and on the regions story, getting Skylight closer to customers around the world. But the north star doesn't change: real-time that's actually real-time.

**Alex:** Priya, thanks for coming on.

**Priya:** Thank you, Alex. This was fun.
