Ganesh Shankar

Ganesh Shankar is co-founder and chief executive of Responsive, formerly RFPIO, whose software helps companies answer requests for proposals, security questionnaires, and other buyer forms from a shared library of approved answers. He grew up in Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu, India, and came to the idea as a product manager pulled into sales paperwork.

A two-room house

His father was a clerk in the agriculture department, and the family home was “10 by 10, two rooms,” he told YourStory. He got his first personal computer at 26. He studied computer science at Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, decided it was “not my cup of tea,” and took an MBA at DJ Academy for Managerial Excellence.

He sold financial products at Indiabulls and Navia Markets until the 2008 crash pushed him out of the stock market, then worked as a business analyst at a Chennai startup.

Unpaid work for the sales team

At the end of 2009 he joined Exterro, an American legal technology company with an office in his hometown, and stayed nine years, moving to the United States as a product manager. Close to a third of his week went to helping salespeople answer RFPs and security questionnaires. “It is almost like a charity work I was doing for the sales team,” he said.

With colleagues Sankar Lagudu and AJ Sunder, he founded RFPIO in February 2015. “We don’t have any typical garage story or a hostel or a dorm room story,” he said.

Knowledge that has to stay current

He argues that AI drafting is only as good as the answers behind it. “I truly believe enterprise knowledge is a living organism. It’s not like one time setup and done, it’ll become junk after a month,” he said. Responsive has taken no outside money since 2018, has been profitable since then, and had 550 employees in 2026.

He counts more than 300 jobs created in and around Coimbatore and lives in the United States with his wife and two daughters. “I think good karma leads to good things,” he said.