Position : Chairman and CEO, Keynote; Founder,Chairman and CEO, Gupta Technologies,VP and General Manager, Oracle Corporation
Rohit’s Intro to interview
Umang learned early on the importance of collaborating and working with a team to build companies. He also bootstrapped his first company which is a great lesson to all entrepreneurs.
Q: Can you talk a bit about starting something collaboratively with a partner versus by yourself and how you weighed that benefit?
Well there’s no way that I could personally have started a company in that stack by myself because I didn’t have capital to be able to invest in it. It was all based on my sweat equity and I didn’t have the personal skills to personally build the product on my own. I had the sales and marketing skills to sell it, to conceive of it, to support it and to technologically understand where it should go, to architect it but not necessarily to physically program. Bruce, on the other hand was the programmer, and on the other half he didn’t have the marketing skills so the combination of the two was actually perfect.
Q: Can you discuss the early funding for Gupta Technologies?
Most companies get started by the business manager going out to raise venture capital. We didn’t. We had no venture capital for four years, virtually from 1994 to 1998 we bootstrapped the company. It sounds odd to me but was quite normal. And we sold the early versions for our technology. For a few months we literally lived off of our savings.
We didn’t raise capital until four years later. By the time we reached about $400 in sales and about 40 people is when we said, if we want to grow this business we better go out and raise some capital. We had offers to buy the company. GM and I remember Lotus wanted to buy the company at that stage, they wanted to buy it. We said no, we want to build it out.
Q: How have you created innovative products?
The innovation process was alive and well all the way through. First it was just two of us and then as we hired new guys and there was always, how do you build a better product? And always the innovation was just fine tuning of what we wanted to build versus what the customers were asking us for. Because interestingly enough you can always do the product for someone else but when you do the danger is that you’re not really innovating, you’re just imitating or you’re doing what a customer wants you to do. At the end of it you can end up as a great consulting organization but there’s no product equity. The trick here is to build a product where you retain the equity but where the customer feels they’ve got value in it and they aren’t paying you on a time and materials basis like a consulting job but for a real product that they want. An in this case that’s where I think the combination of Bruce and I really worked.
I mean you can tell Bruce I want to do this and I want to build it this way and he‘s the fastest to develop it; he’s just amazingly good at building stuff. But I would listen to what the customer wanted and they would tell me we want this feature, we want this feature, we want this feature. And then we’d say are you sure that’s the feature because you know what, if nobody else takes this great feature nobody else will build it and we think you should have this feature because this is the way you’re going to compete better in the competition. So an understanding of the competition, understanding of where the market was going and the ability to persuade the customer to essentially pay for features that you’re going to sell to everybody else is part of the kind of innovation aspect of building a product as opposed to simply asking the customer, doing what the customer says. Because it’s the difference between custom tailoring a suit versus building clothes for the rack and custom tailoring a suit you can make money but ultimately there’s only so much custom tailoring you can do. But building them for the rack and manufacturing them requires you to understand product, fit, sizes, and what people want.
