| Featured Interview |
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Name : Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande |
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Position :Founder and Chairman, Sycamore Networks; Founder and Chairman, Cascade Communications Corp.; Co-founder Coral Network Corporation. |
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| Rohit’s Intro to interview |
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| Desh was the wealthiest Indian in the world in 2001. His success in forming companies is inspiring and we were honored that he sat with us for an interview. We actually have decided to feature his interview in two parts. Here is part one |
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| Q: What did the experience of butting heads with your partner and then choosing to leave the business teach you about forming partnerships? |
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| I think inside of us we have to make decisions quickly because you can’t take forever. The lesson in my experience was that it’s good to get things going, but if you sense something isn’t right, then it’s good to have that sense to quit and do something else. I’m not quite sure how I made that decision, because it was a very difficult decision, but I did it. And it turned out to be great for me. Though, I think that in start-up’s it all comes down to the way to deal with failure. In fact, just yesterday I started to talk to a whole bunch of entrepreneurs from South Africa. It’s very similar to what happens in India. Culturally people don’t want to accept failure because if you fail, then you’re marked for life. But, even when you have a success, successes come, it looks successful to other people, but it’s essentially a string of failures. You know, things go wrong every day. And the more you have the sense to accept this failure and do something about it, the better is your chance of being successful. |
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| So I think what happens in places like India is that people only notice the big failures, but failures actually happen everyday because it is so turbulent and every company goes up and down all the time. And the more you can deal with it, the faster you can bounce back as an individual, as a society, as an economy. And that’s the beauty of the American system, right? For example, it’s only in the US that you could have an Enron-- a massive company, but three, four years down the road, I mean, it’s all done. Nobody even talks about it. All those people have been liberated, they go do their own things, and businesses get deployed to do other things. In another part of the world, that thing would have gone for maybe fifty years because people don’t want to accept failure. So in some ways I think an economy where it’s less the winners win and the losers lose, is a very efficient economy. And it’s the same thing for individuals. You know, if you cannot get emotionally too attached to one particular idea, but you sort of let the good ideas flourish and the bad ideas die, the better are your chances that you build good organizations. |
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| Q: I like one quote that I read by you that said, that you’ve got to be slightly crazy to be an entrepreneur. |
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| Yes, I think that’s the sort of the lesson I learned early in those days. To get these things started you have to be slightly crazy because it’s so overwhelming. And if you’re too thoughtful and too analytical, you probably will never pull the trigger. And I find that it’s not really that different from the decisions we make in life in real time in terms of let’s say, getting married, or having a kid, or buying our first house. In all of these situations the unknown overwhelms the known. So you don’t really know what it’s going to be like. It doesn’t matter how many books you read, how many people you talk to and everything else, it’s going to be different. But invariably a lot of the people, you know, go through the decision and they’re always happy that they made the decision. Start-ups are a little bit like that, I think. You know, you can’t really line everything up. You don’t know all the bridges that you’re going to cross. So that’s where you need this gut feel, you need the conviction, you need that sort of slightly crazy sense that you just want to do it. |
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| Q: How do you go about formulating the ideas? How did the genesis of some of these ideas come about? |
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| It mostly starts with, what do you think is going to change, what does the world need, and what is it that’s changing that makes it possible. So, that change and need for that, whatever it is that you’re doing is very important. And the reason why that particular need is not being met today, can be met in the future because something has changed. And in my case, it is usually technology. |
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| So if you look at Cascade, it was more, you know, computers are everywhere and you needed to connect them all. And at those days, the computers were connected, but they were connected within a company. So, IBM would talk to IBM, Ford would talk to Ford. But it was obvious that the computer would be just like a phone. And if you were able to connect every computer to every other computer, then you need a network that’s more owned by the public and not by a private entity. And it needs to be a computer public network as opposed to a telephone public network. |
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| And so, that was enough of a change to create an opportunity. And then there are lots of details in terms of how do you pull this off, how do you cooperate and all that kind of stuff. But usually there’s some big change that causes the opportunity. And so that was the Cascade opportunity. And then the Sycamore opportunity was more, after I left Cascade, Cisco and Cascade and all the companies used to spend a lot of money on trying to figure out how to get the best quality of service for data networks. And that’s because the telephone network was built primarily for a phone, and the phones don’t need a lot of capacity. So the capacity on the telephone network was very expensive. You know, a small line from California to Boston costs a $1 million a month. |
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| So all the focus in technology and research was really focused on how do you make better use of what you have. And then when I got exposed to this optical networking technology it sort of sounded like, I mean, there’s this dramatic technology where you could create so much more capacity so easily, and you didn’t have to worry about making best use of what you have. It’s like instead of rationing oil, you dig new wells. And so, creating new optical networks to create the capacity for the network was the opportunity we had at Sycamore. And so I think the opportunity, if the opportunity is big enough, then you can find your way through that. |
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