| 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. This second part focuses on conviction. During our interview we discussed the need for conviction at length so I decided to dedicate a second featured interview to this. |
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| Q: One of the things that I read about you is that you talked about conviction and how central that is to your success. Could you talk a little bit about that, how you define conviction and how that’s played a role and maybe give us a couple of anecdotes. |
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| Conviction would be attitude that something is going to happen. It’s good to have, like if you take the rechargeable battery company, the fact that you need good rechargeable battery technology to run, hybrid electric vehicles and a whole bunch of stuff, or optical capacity, you need this capacity. So that basic thing that you’re really going after, you really have to have a very strong conviction about that need for it. But as you try to do it, the usual advisors, mentors, and everybody play a difficult issue in some ways, because they’ll either tell you that yes you need it but there’s enough people doing it, or you need it but that’s far away, or yes, sure, it’s being done right now and there’s lots of people doing it. You know, there’s sort of always, people arguing on both sides. If it’s too small a market they’ll say, hey, it’s not worth doing it. If it’s too big a market they’ll say, oh, you can never be a player, it’s too big a market. It’s all been established. |
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| So that’s where you need the conviction, which is strong enough to float through that, precede you through that. But the important thing is to be a good listener. I think it’s okay for you to hear about five hundred reasons as to why it’s not a good thing to do, but if you started five hundred, actually having understood those five hundred reasons, your chances of proceeding through the whole process is a lot better. As soon as you start doing it, you’re going to run through hurdles, lots of hurdles. And the first time you run into trouble, everybody will be coming back to you and saying, see I told you, I told you not to do it. And it’s good to be able to say, you know what, people are objecting because of that 52nd reason, and I already know that that’s not a valid reason not to do it. And so, you’re ability to sort of flow through the challenges improves. If you actually know those objections upfront as opposed to being surprised by them. |
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| Q: So what you’re saying, I think this is a great point, and maybe an action item for the book is, do I ask new entrepreneurs to, when you bounce ideas off people, the objections people raise, document them on day one, and remember your original response to them because six months down the road, two years down the road, that objection will come up again and it’s always good to go back and take a look at why you didn’t believe in that objection in the first place. |
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| Right, right. It’s just analyzing more than anything else. If it came back to you, you’d probably remember them very well, but it’s good to be able to talk to enough people to see why they don’t think, because what happens is whenever you have a connection, a strong connection, you’re always convinced that it’s a great idea. And there’s absolutely no question that that person thinks it’s a great idea. Then there are a couple of things that need to get rid of. Number one, it’s good if you think it’s a great idea, but if you need money or if you need a team, you need to at least convince a few other people that it’s a great idea. And so, a lot of the entrepreneurs I find that they bleed to death from that belief. They think it’s a great idea, that they have $50,000 saved, and number one, they go to the basement and start printing that money and trying to build something so that they can prove that it works and all those kinds of things. And then six months goes by, and then they try to go convince somebody, and then nobody wants to fund them, and then a year goes by and they’re still struggling with that whole thing. |
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| So what people need to do is to be a lot more deliberate about their conviction. It isn’t enough for you to have the conviction, but somebody else has to believe in it. And so, you have to say, okay, I’m going to give myself six months, nine months, whatever the timeframe is, and really push hard to see if anybody believes in it. And if you have a deadline then you tend to push it a lot harder. Otherwise what happens is, as the new entrepreneur, you know, you call a venture guy, a venture capitalist, and he says, oh, okay, maybe I’ll see you next month on the 8th. The entrepreneur gets all excited about it. He thinks the other guy is actually going to write a check. And then a month goes by. And then no venture capital, they all say it’s a bad idea. So just in case, if it turns out to be a good idea they want to make sure they have the opportunity to put money in it. So then all of them say, you know what, it’s a good idea but maybe you need to work on that. And then the entrepreneur will go away and start working on all those things. And so it’s go fetch month, after month, after month, after month. And it never comes together. They need to find a good way to separate their conviction from what anybody else believes in it. |
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| Q: What is the importance of having conviction while remaining flexible? |
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| You have to have strong convictions, you have to be able to push it, you have to be able to sell, but at the same time you have to be able to listen. And you lose in either extreme. You know, if you’re too flexible, then you’ll never get there. You can never build a company by listening to other people, or listening to customers because customers don’t know. I mean, they don’t know what’s possible, otherwise every customer would have a company. And so, you need that leadership. But at the same time, if you hear the same thing again and again, you have to be flexible enough to make a course correction. |
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