I spoke with Sri Chellappa a few weeks after selling his company (Engagedly) to Energage, which runs Top Workplaces. He wanted an analyst to look hard at his deal, not a version where I nod politely and ask about roadmaps.
His exit was not a fortune, and he said so without any decoration at all.
Founders almost never talk about their own money that plainly, so I started paying attention.
The business model underneath all this is simple enough to explain at a bus stop. Eight thousand companies take his survey every year, and it costs them nothing. Winning costs nothing either, which puts this closer to G2 than to any awards racket, and about four thousand pay afterward to show a ribbon.
Merger idea runs on three words, and they are measure, shape, and showcase. Energage names your gaps, Engagedly sells you tools to close them, and next year you win something shiny.
That loop is tidy, and tidy is where I go hunting for cracks.
UKG bought Great Place To Work in 2021 and walked straight into the same wall. When one company owns the scorekeeper and the coach, buyers ask an obvious question. Do I have to buy your software to win your award?
Srikant had a good answer ready and gave it without blinking. Separate brands, no credit for customers, no thumb anywhere near a scale. Then he said one thing that quietly undid all of it. Using Engagedly properly, he told me, will raise your score next time around. So I read it back to him slowly, mostly to hear how it sounded out loud. I can buy my way onto that list by keeping your software people happy. He pushed back hard, and he is probably right about what his company means to do.
The appearance of impropriety is impropriety, and it took me years to learn that properly.
Intent is not what anybody outside his building is going to be measuring. He quit arguing, which told me this conversation was already running inside his walls. That exchange is exactly why an hour like this is worth having. He pushed, I pushed, and nobody walked away holding a soft answer, which almost never happens on a vendor call.
Best moment of that hour came when he talked about his mother, who taught biology in India. India posts student rankings on a wall, so she graded him below what he earned, on purpose, for years, to avoid any look of favoring her son.
He is still a little sore about it, which is exactly how you know it worked. She paid something real to keep her scoring clean, and that is his own answer, owned since he was thirteen. He just has to run that same play at commercial scale now.
Second big idea has nothing to do with awards and everything to do with time, because a once-a-year survey describes a company standing perfectly still. No company stands still now, and jobs inside them are coming apart while we watch. You cannot measure a moving thing with a yearly photograph. Numbers in HR get cleaner as you back away from actual work, which should worry everybody.
Out where work actually happens, absence of data becomes your most useful finding.
He mentioned that former employees keep asking for old jobs back, some of them people he let go. Nobody measures whether people who left want to return, and that is the number I would want. In a shrinking workforce, stickiness after somebody walks out is the real health check.
Risks here are easy to name, and biggest one is a ribbon losing its meaning, because an award you can buy is only advertising with better manners. Challenge is that this tension never resolves, so somebody manages it forever, and benefit is that nobody else owns twenty years of standardized survey data.
Two things look easy from here, and both cost almost nothing to start. Publish a case where a big paying customer lost an award anyway, and explain how that got handled. Then standardize pulse questions until a yearly photograph turns into something closer to video.
I will be watching one thing when Top Workplaces Institute opens later this fall. Does it ever publish anything that makes a paying customer look bad?
Answer to that question is worth more than every slide in his whole deck put together.