Hey, Who is in your team?

Hey, Who is in your team?

BTW Word of Caution – I won’t guarantee any expected flow in the blog and might waver from very disparate fields!!! Please note that I am not an expert in the subject and I will pen my experiences and my perception of the whole topic. Expert comments are welcome – positive, negative – any and all are fine :-)

As they say there is nothing wrong in acting like a big company even if you are not one and I actually go one step further and say there is everything for you if you act like a big company, better a public listed company even if you are not one, remember this adage “Companies die not because of hunger but because of indigestion” – seems so true.

In my initial days of entrepreneurship I always used to wonder why don’t VCs just fund great ideas and I always hear that they care for the composition of the management team rather than the idea itself. I was never able to understand the fact and of course over the period of time was able to digest the whole thing. Let me try to explain this to those who probably in their early part of their entrepreneurship and wondering why like I did few years back.

Let me compare to something to make it more interesting J Assume an investor has to invest money in a bollywood flick – what are the chances that he will invest easily if the cast includes SRK or AK or AB compared to a new comer even if the storyline is really great? Pretty high because movies make money based on the cast most of the times – worse comes to worse they might not be a box office hit but atleast will break even or even make some money. Whereas movies with unknown names might not get the invested money back other than few exceptions. To make oneself safe everyone right from the financier to the distributor to the theatre owner to the person who is investing his time and money to watch the movie prefers with big names; So what different can you expect in VC funding for new companies? Yes the management team matters a lot – as the saying goes between “a great idea and a novice team” and “a novice idea and great team”, VCs might love the former but their money will be on the latter – fact of life.

My confession: Infact I did few “dry runs” to VCs to understand what they look for and I did this when we had atleast one year of cash buffer and an year worth of contracts – as they say – best time to understand all these is when you really don’t need it J The dry runs really helped me to understand the whole VC-Dynamics and I guess I will be lot smarter and well prepared when I actually look for funds.

Keeping the funding aside, let me try and explain why a team is very critical for the success of the company irrespective of whether they are “star” or not. I have seen many companies with one founder who has all the passion and the energy to run the show solo - good start but to sustain and scale and for a very good effective execution, you need a team – a great passionate dynamic team. Yes single entrepreneur companies have done good but up to a point and to grow beyond that point you need a great team as good as initial founders and as good as you the promoters are and to be frank, can be and better be, better than you.

Infosys had seven founders and a much bigger team, MindTree probably had 12 founders I think and however small company we are (S7 Software), we have a team of go getters all are empowered and we all know what is best for the company and we do that and generally all are great decisions and rarely we misread and ends up in failures. Then again those failures are in a way our teachers and they teach us much more than what success teaches us. As Sanjay Anandaram (CEO of Jumpstart) says “What is good for the company is always good for the founders but what is good for them need not be good for the company”. Recent events have proven exactly this!!!! Anyways coming back to the team we have at S7, there is Chandra Shekar, who co-founded S7 Software along with me and who is a tech guru within the office and he generally knows and keeps track of all the technology innovations that happens in the IT world and helps us strategize into what technology areas we need to go into in future and how to align the engineering department so that we gain the technological advancements ahead of time, and then there is Pankaj Kulkarni, who is smart techie from IIT-M but has taken up Sales and marketing and leading out techno-sales to the next level and there is Kumar Rangarajan, another smart techie who takes care of all deliverables, resource allocation and in general the complete engineering department. We have a very smart bunch of core people who are as capable, working on different aspects of the company, Harish taking care of the complete operations along with heading the system administration, Phaniraj, Praveen, Vallabha , Saurav and Faizulla all taking care of different aspects of technology, marketing and miscellaneous office issues independently and to the completion including making sure that we delight the customers, try understanding clients business as it ours and providing them solutions and suggestions whenever apt. It is like an army of people trying to do things what just one could have never dreamt to achieve the same in the first place. When you have people like that it makes my job so easy and I can spend all my time on strategizing, future areas, finance (shoring up the cash for bad times like what is happening now!!!) and how to scale and grow the business, or maybe just spend playing cricket all the time J (We play cricket every Tuesday afternoon @ lunch time without fail – a tradition we have followed for last 10 years and going strong!!)

Remember you can also have a great team but first you should show the will to move from one-man proprietary ship to a team mentality and then get the best people to team up with you who don’t mind telling you wrong when you are wrong (no Yes men’s for sure). Please note that very skilled people with great integrity are not easy to find and every such addition has to be compensated (salary, generous options plan) properly.

Hope this was an interesting read. Please do provide me your feedback and comments as always and I also look forward for the same.

Currently I am reading/analysis two books – one is Nandan Nilekani’s “Imagining India” and “The Great Crash 1929” by John Galbraith; I will surely come out with review of both very soon.

Also I would like to share a piece of good news that I will be one of the official bloggers for the NASSCOM leadership summit to be held in Mumbai Feb 11-13 at Grand Hyatt. Look forward to seeing you all there.

Manjunath M Gowda

S7 Software