B.V. Jagadeesh on "Startup Leadership Lessons Learned"

Summary of a very insightful talk on leadership lessons learned by Mr. B.V. Jagadeesh entitled “Lessons Learned Starting, Leading, and Succeeding at Multiple Startups.”

B.V. Jagadeesh on “Startup Leadership Lessons Learned”

Mr. B.V. Jagadeesh gave a great talk on “Lessons Learned Starting, Leading, and Succeeding at Multiple Startups” tonight at the GITPRO meeting. Mr. Jagadeesh co-founded Fouress (a bootstrapped consulting firm), co-founded Exodus Communications, was CEO at NetScalar (and stayed on after its acquisition by Citrix as a VP/GM), was president and CEO of 3Leaf Systems, and is today president and CEO of Virtela. He is an accomplished entrepreneur (more details on LinkedIn and CrunchBase) and he gave a very candid talk on his entrepreneurial journey starting with his arrival in the United States in the early 1980s to work at Novell.

I have had the privilege of hearing experienced entrepreneurs talk about lessons learned. It’s normally been in a small group, a half dozen or dozen folks in a conference room, or 15 or 20 around a Bootstrappers Breakfast table. This talk had that same sense of practical candor, but there were perhaps a hundred to a hundred and twenty folks in the Oak Room. It was a candid and insightful talk punctuated by frequent questions from the audience. What follows are a few stories that I thought had a particular emotional resonance with the early stages of a startup.

How Much Will This New Job Pay?

Mr. Jagadeesh came from a family of teachers and professors of modest means. They were delighted when he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in engineering and went to Bombay to earn a Master’s degree. When he was able to get a job in America, it was an unprecedented success. His new job allowed him to buy a used car, one of the first owned by anyone in his family.

This made for a difficult phone call when he called his father to tell him he was going to quit his job to start a company. He had tried to work on it on the side with his future co-founder but came to understand that if it were going to move forward, he would have to focus on it.

“How much will this new job pay?” his father asked.

“It’s a startup; once we get clients I will be able to make some money,” was Mr. Jagadeesh’s answer.

Needless to say, his family thought he was making a mistake, but he calculated that he had enough money saved to live simply for a year. He would pursue his dream of his own company, and if it didn’t work out, he would go back to being an engineer for a while.

Exodus went on to spearhead the concept of offsite co-location data centers, changing the model from an on-site data center served by an ISP. It enabled many companies, large and small, to establish a significant presence on the Internet.

Leadership Lessons Learned: Prepare Two Speeches

His tenure at NetScalar saw the company narrowly avoid a shutdown and go on to establish a new paradigm for Internet connectivity management. He had to prepare two speeches for the employees, one where he announced that the company was getting shut down and one where they announced a new round of funding (from Sequoia, as it turns out). He was able to give the second speech and returned 8x to Sequoia when Citrix acquired NetScalar two and half years later.

He had to give the other speech a few years later as CEO of 3Leaf Systems when a key ASIC needed another spin, and he could not convince investors to help. His point was that in both cases, you had to prepare for the likely outcomes and take responsibility as CEO for what happens, doing the best that you can for your employees and investors.

Self-Discipline

One theme he stressed repeatedly was the need to impose discipline on yourself and your team to prepare and act with the professionalism that your competitors will bring to the market. He talked about one team that he is advising that has met with some initial success. They realized that treating their offices as dorm rooms had been OK when there were a few founders, but now that they were growing and had two dozen employees, they needed to establish a more professional tone–without spending a lot of money. So they spent a few thousand dollars at IKEA and held furniture assembly parties. The new look changed both internal attitudes toward the workplace and those of customers and potential investors who visited their offices.

Volunteering

He talked about volunteering to help the IEEE Silicon Valley put on events and conferences while he was still working at Novell. They met over two decades ago in the Oak Room, where he spoke tonight. By volunteering to find speakers, he was able to have conversations with managers and executives at many companies. These conversations enabled him to develop a network that helped as he grew Exodus and NetScalar. He felt a sense of coming full circle: he was now the invited speaker in the same room where he had first started as a volunteer.

SKMurphy Take

It was a candid and reflective talk. Mr. Jagadeesh offered a wealth of practical advice and answered a number of very good questions. He also communicated a fundamental sense of what it means to be a CEO: you need to take action and take responsibility for the results of your actions.

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B.V. Jagadeesh on “Startup Leadership Lessons Learned”