The Making of a Technology Innovator/Entrepreneur

My life is truly amazing and I feel very blessed that I have had such a wonderful life with great parents, an amazing upbringing, a fantastic family, a rich professional life filled with interesting life experiences and most importantly connecting with great people.

In India, we are often given examples of great individuals who are termed Innovators. These individuals are usually heirs of large formidable empires with deep pockets and are able to take a successful empire and keep the Juggernaut rolling. However, true entrepreneurs are those that have risen from the dust and built large businesses and more importantly a culture of success. We have very few examples of such success in India. Silicon Valley and Israel have been able to provide an environment, culture, and a great pool of VCs, entrepreneurs, ecosystem and mentors that fuel the engine of innovation and keep creating a steady supply of new entrepreneurs/innovators. The point I am making is that if you dream of being an innovator/ entrepreneur, find people who truly deserve to be role models and try to learn as much about them and emulate their behavior closely as there are very important life lessons to be learned from them. But, it is important that you use your good judgment in picking these role models. Ask yourself if the person you want to follow has leadership qualities, is personable, is social, has risen from modest backgrounds to create something large, has created an enterprise culture that is designed to win. I will discuss the role of role models and mentors in later discussions but it is important that you start thinking about people who can inspire you to achieve greatness.

Innovators / Entrepreneurs have specific traits that make them who they are. I would like to share my life experiences about such people who rose from the dust and charted their own destiny of greatness and their specific qualities that make them successful.

Attitude is one of the key ingredients of being a successful entrepreneur and is a common thread I have observed in many great people that have touched my life. I have had the fortune of working closely with Satish Dharmaraj (founder and CEO of Zimbra) and who I consider my close friend and mentor and several great personalities in Silicon Valley and India. I will use Satish's example in discussing this very important ingredient of success. Satish grew up in a very modest middle class Indian background similar to my background and many of you who are reading this blog. He did not go to an IIT and did his MS at a decent school in the US but not an IVY league. However, he was on a path of greatness purely because of his attitude. Very early in his career (1995/1996), he became the co-creator of Server Side Java (aka. JSP/Servlets) and led the team at Javasoft that created one of the biggest innovations the world received - Java EE. He then was part of the founding team at Onebox.com which was sold to Openwave for US$850 million in the year 2000 and then the founder and CEO of Zimbra which was sold to Yahoo Inc for US$350 million.

One quality that sets him apart from the crowd is his Attitude. A very strong Type A personality that can mesmerize anyone that he interacts with. Attitude is a combination of many behaviors that a person embodies based on life experiences. The great people like Satish that I have had close relationships with have consistently demonstrated the following positive behaviors:

1. Confidence
2. Passion
3. Openness
4. Integrity

1. Confidence - Confidence in oneself is not the only form of confidence needed to succeed but confidence in others is equally important to be successful.

In India we are culturally taught not to have confidence in ourselves. We have all been raised in a very subservient culture. The English ruled us and treated us as their servants - hence absurd behaviors like calling people "Sir and Madam" even in Corporate India are still very much a part of our culture. In school we are taught to address teachers as "Sirs" and "Madams". In Government offices people refer to each other as "Sir" or "Madam". We are also taught not to dream big. I am sure you have personally experienced this in your childhood - you have a dream to do something great and run to your parents brimming with excitement and tell them about what you want to do and are quickly reprimanded and brought back to so called "Reality". How often have you heard from your parents or peers "arre sapne mat dekho" (Hey, stop dreaming)? Then you are given a lesson in being modest and dreaming of achievable and realistic goals where your ambition is reset quickly to a well treaded path that your parents or peers are familiar with. "Son, study for IIT and then do an MBA which will fetch you a nice job with a package of Rs. 50,000 per month - you will be very comfortable if you earn that kind of money". Even the so called "highly educated" middle class in India is well know for inculcating this behavior.

This behavior is reinforced in many aspects of our life as we grow in the subservient society we live in. All of us need to break away from such behavior of being subservient both in our personal and professional lives. Stop referring to your boss as "Sir" or "Madam" and address them by their first name. If they take offence to it, talk to everyone in your team and have everyone address him/her with their first name. As a team, approach your boss and tell them that you are not going to address them as Sir or Madam. Start by telling yourself that you can be bigger, better, faster than the "role model of your choice".

Most of the great Leaders in the world have immense confidence in themselves. With this confidence, they can challenge people, ideas and thoughts. Followers on the other hand lack confidence and are subservient. The world can clearly see a Leader as they demonstrate the quality of confidence. Confidence helps them communicate their ideas very strongly and people listening pay attention. Confidence is also the key ammunition of a young innovator / entrepreneur as it gives them the conviction to pursue an idea or a dream. It allows them to face all the challenges that they encounter in their life. They are heard and respected by VCs, Customers and Shareholders. Almost all the examples of greatness in the world are of people who have treaded on uncharted paths. I urge all young Indians to follow their dreams and to have the confidence that they can be bigger, better, faster than the next Bill Gates or Narayana Murthi.

I also truly believe that having Confidence in others abilities is also a key quality of a leader. "Rome was not built in a day" - and I would like to add "by one person" to this famous adage. Great companies cannot be built with just one individual. Great Leaders surround themselves with people smarter than themselves and know all the tricks of motivating and inspiring them to deliver their best. However, this requires the leader to trust the abilities of individuals they bring on board to help them on the journey of building great enterprises. Indians are also taught very early in their lives not to trust people easily and to always look at people with a veneer of doubt. It is true that we live in one of the most corrupt societies where a majority of our people demonstrate personal ethics that are less than desirable. However in Corporate environments, not having faith in people that work for or with you just creates an environment of distrust which leads to a several bad habits in the team that eventually lead to under performing teams that don't achieve greatness. In my personal life, when Satish and I started discussing setting up Zimbra in India, I am sure it was a big decision for Satish as he had the ultimate rock star high performance team in the valley and all his attempts to work with outsourced teams in India had only underwhelmed him in the past. Zimbra was also a very well funded startup and did not need an India team to be successful. However, Satish did have immense faith in my ability to deliver. I had worked with Satish from 2000 to 2004 at Openwave and we had built great mutual respect for each other. With this faith alone, he invested in Zimbra Asia Pacific in Pune which in 1 year grew to 30 people (we were a total of 90 between India and Rest of the World) when we were acquired by Yahoo. This team in Pune has the track record of being one of the high powered Software Engineering teams in India. Today, all of the cool, sexy Ajax technology Zimbra is know to have pioneered is developed out of Pune.

Walk with your head high as if you own the world and you will see the world bow down to you!

2. Passion - This is a innate quality I have seen in many of the folks I look up to. Lot of startup guys I meet who have usually worked in the Industry for a few years and felt that doing a startup is an interesting idea as the lame Outsourced software Industry in India cannot afford 14% raises anymore are the ones that lack this key ingredient. When they pitch their ideas you don't feel the hunger in their eyes or the sheer drive to change the world. My thumb twiddles and I look around here and there and cannot focus. The younger startup folks I meet in India seem to be hungry and their sheer drive and passion is infectious. In a recent visit to help my friend Freeman Murray with his iAccelerator startup incubator in IIM Ahmedabad, in mentoring the 8 teams there on Business Plan and Go To Market strategies, I observed that the 2 youngest teams seemed to be the most passionate about what they do and were able to articulate their vision and got me excited. One of these teams is a finalist and only entry from India in the 2009 DFJ Global Business Plan competition. Godspeed to them! The older guys seemed to have lost their mojo along the way.

The greatest example I can give of someone who exemplifies this quality is Steve Jobs. His passion for design is so ingrained in Apple's DNA that I am willing to bet that any innovation Apple comes up with will be lapped up by the masses. I have a personal story about Steve Jobs from the early days of my career which was narrated to me by my first boss at Oracle who went to work for Steve at NeXT Computers. Steve is know to be a extreme perfectionist and when the first prototype of the NeXT Cube was ready, it made its way to Steve's office for the ultimate QA pass :-) Steve rejected the machine and his complaint was that it was too noisy. The entire batch of drives manufactured by a leading OEM was rejected and shipped back delaying the launch of the Cube. Another local example I have heard (this is not qualified but hearsay) is of Vijay Mallya. Quality Control in all of Kingfisher / UB's operations reports directly to Vijay Mallya. I think this is a direct reflection of the intent of the founder to ensure the highest quality of the product or service they want to offer to the market. Passionate individuals who want to deliver the best experience to their customers is a telltale sign of success! At Zimbra, Satish played the same role. He was the first to test any new feature added to the product and played the role of Master Bitch Slapper if something was not of high quality. I think in India where we are all used to the "Santusht" philosophy of accepting substandard quality is unacceptable. Startup founders must embody the passion to design, innovate and deliver the best products in the market and success will follow.

Passion is the secret and vital ingredient of ALL successful startups.

3. Openness - The most successful people I have known demonstrate a level of openness that leaves the person interacting with them humbled. They are open to ideas, concepts, suggestions, criticism and are willing to listen and act on the information gathered. Again culture and upbringing has a huge role to play in how open or closed people are. Many Indians I have met have set and pre-conceived world views on how things should be and are not open to suggestions or feedback. Example: Lot of young startup folks I meet may have never raised a single $$ from a VC but believe that all VCs and Angels are evil who are after un-equitable partnerships with startups. This myth is spread around in the small startup community in India and you suddenly hear this consistently from several young entrepreneurs. What they forget is that the VC is putting hard cash into their businesses and betting on their ability to execute a vision. They are professionals and they evaluate opportunities opportunistically as any "for profit" enterprise behaves. This type of negativity is not helpful. The teams I have seen that have won big have had immense faith in their VCs, Advisors and mentors and are open to accept feedback on strategy and execution and use their reasonable judgment to convert ideas to action. I also see a lot of young engineers who are enamored by a certain technology which may be emerging and want to rewrite something on this new exciting piece of technology without evaluating the downstream effects of doing this. They forget to ask all the important questions such as "is it proven", " can I scale something with this and make it work when I face the scale challenge", "is there a mature ecosystem to support this", "can i hire people with these skills when I scale", "is the company completely de-risked if we make this change" etc. Instead they become closed to feedback from experienced people when asked these questions which is sheer arrogance. In a startup chances are you will be faced with decisions like these very often due to the sheer nature of the bleeding edge work you do. The best startup founders are the ones that have advisors / mentors or informal experts network that they can tap into and seek their counsel at anytime.

Be open and the World will open to you!

4. Integrity - I think a lot of us Indians are forced to live in a world where our personal and professional integrity is questionable. Corruption is rampant in our society and we are all guilty of being party to have indulged in some form of corruption in our day to day lives. This really lowers our moral standards and our ability to be transparent to each other in our professional life. The startup founders that are successful have the highest levels of personal and professional Integrity. Transparency between founders and employees is something that lacks in Indian startups. Founders don't want to share the wealth fairly and equitably with people they bring on. Unless this changes we can never create a Silicon Valley style sub culture in India. Satish my mentor is again exemplary. The core team at Zimbra followed Satish from JavaSoft to Onebox to Openwave to Zimbra. These are some of the most talented valley engineers who companies like GOOG, Facebook etc would have loved to have. However, they all followed Satish to Zimbra. Satish made sure that all the employees of Zimbra shared in the wealth created. Lets us all face it - we will all be part of multiple startups in our lives and we want to work with the best and the brightest. It only takes one act of lack of integrity by the founders of any company to lose the loyalty of all their employees.

My inspiration to start blogging

I resigned on Feb 5th 2009 as the General Manager of the Zimbra Business Unit in Yahoo! which has led me down the path of entrepreneurship once again. One of the people I met during this journey is Rajesh Jain who runs his own blog http://emergic.org/ and is truly an inspiration. If you are a young Indian with dreams of greatness, I highly recommend that you read Rajesh's blog. The last couple of years were a lot of fun building Zimbra from scratch in India and hiring a rockstar team that helped us build value and eventually get acquired by Yahoo! for US$350M. Yahoo! was one of the best companies to work at as a cultural fit for young innovators who are provided with an environment to think independently and express their freedom. However, it fell short of providing an environment for entrepreunership. I have worked for 1 large company (Oracle) and 2 startups (Openwave and Zimbra) that either became large or got acquired by a large company in the last 15 years. My beliefs that "Elephants can't Dance" (Sorry Lou Gerstner - you are wrong) were reinforced in my experience with working at these large companies. I am starting this blog to communicate with young Indians about the experiences of being a high tech innovator, an entrepreneur and a change agent for the New Modern Developed India.