The Entrepreneur Life

Category: Business (Page 1 of 8)

Matters pertaining to business

3 Ways to Turn Your Job Interviews into Learning Sessions

4 minutes, yep FOUR minutes. That’s all it took, for my interviewer to figure out the limits of my domain knowledge.

Brent Gregory one of the earliest employees at Synopsys was the fella interviewing me for the role of a product marketing manager. 

His R&D team had developed the tech that was going to be productized and I would be marketing it if hired. 

The first six odd years of my career had been in technology development in manufacturing. A job rotation program let me try out a corporate marketing role for six months. I never went back. 

Then business development/sales/marketing roles in two startups overseas before returning to interview for a tech marketing role at Synopsys Inc in Mountain View. 

Earlier that day I’d had lunch with the VP of Marketing, now friend and former boss Sandeep Khanna, with whom I’d had couple of phone calls. We’d hit it off like a house on fire. 

Now came the true test. What will the tech folks feel about me? I’d never had an interview like I did with Brent. Soft-spoken and polite to a fault, he began asking me what I knew about electronic design automation. Since the answer was very little, that was short conversation. 

Without accusing me of modesty, Brent spent a few minutes probing, using direct questions as well as analogues. Once he had a measure of my technical understanding, he spent the rest of the 41 minutes educating me—about the problem, their approach, the current status and his expectations what a marketer would do for them. 

He not only had me excited but I left the meeting a whole lot smarter. Even if I didn’t get the job, I was better off than when I’d walked in the room.

What I learned that day has stayed with me to date and helped me and others in innumerable occasions.

  • Every interviewer can be a different audience with different needs
  • Understand their careabouts (with your own questions) and
  • Shape your message appropriately to address their careabout
    (even if it is to share what you are not a good fit for)
  • While your desired outcome from the process is to get hired, 
  •  Outcomes for each interviewer can and will be different 

And yes, interviews may go well yet employers can ghost you—two ways to benefit are:

  • Treat each interview as a practice run—to understand your audience & hone your message and the stories 
  • Capture your learnings explicitly so you always benefit

What are you favorite interview (good or horror) stories?

Keep the faith and good luck hunting!

Throwing your laptop—not the best negotiating tactic!

“Is this some kind of negotiating tactic?” 

I was in the company pantry, at a major client’s office. They’d licensed a critical software component from my startup which would be bundled with their radio chips to sell to electronic manufacturers.

For the previous half-hour their new VP of Sales, the entire engineering team and I had been in a meeting. Notionally the meeting was between THEIR sales and engineering folks and I was in the meeting as part of the ‘engineering’ team, representing the ‘application’ group. 

The VP of Sales, who had been recently hired for his deep relationships and track record with manufacturers had just returned from a trip to Taiwan and China. We’d been discussing delivery dates and it was clear that the sales vp had made commitments to the customers that there was no way the engineering teams, either the clients or mine would be able to deliver on.  

Yet no one spoke up from the engineering team. Not their VP or any of the project managers. And the VP of sales was not asking but telling what the delivery dates would be. Finally the VP of engineering responded. 

“It’ll take us four weeks for us to be ready, once we have the software.” 

At this point all eyes turned towards me. 

“When will you deliver the software?” the VP of Sales asked. 

Thus far I’d not spoken up in the meeting as I felt it was their meeting. Which it was. But I was not happy! The engineering vp knew that our ability to deliver software depended on their providing us their new hardware and firmware. 

“The software delivery is scheduled for early May. And that’s the best case,” I said.

“Are you friggin’ kidding me?” Their vp of sales lost it. 

I didn’t blame him. I suspect he’d been given optimistic dates by the engineering team and he’d taken them at their word. Worse yet he’d committed things to the customer and was just finding out that we’d not be able to meet them.

I looked at their CEO who seemed happy to let sales tell engineering what they should do. And that too not necessarily in a pleasant manner. When the vp sales continued to press the engineering team and they remained silent, I just lost it. 

“Why am I the ONLY one one telling the truth?” I screamed at their engineering team. “Why aren’t you guys telling him that there’s no way you are going to deliver this in May?”

I then stood up and threw the laptop that was in my hand on to the conference table and said “That’s it—if this is how you want to do business then I don’t want to your business.”

Luckily before anyone else said anything, their CEO intervened.

“We’re going to take a short break. Everybody needs to cool down. Get a drink of water or soda. Or walk around the block. We’ll reconvene in 10!” 

That’s how I found myself in the pantry. That’s when their VP of engineering posed his question, “Is this some kind of negotiating tactic?” 

I looked at him to see if he was serious. And boy was he serious. He was perplexed by my outburst and thought I was trying to play hardball to get the VP of Sales to agree to a new date.

It was my turn to ask a question. “You know there’s no way we are going to be ready. Why aren’t you pushing back?”

When we got back into the conference room, I first apologized for my outburst. Then I made my case that we need to both communicate better while being realistic! 

“Folks I know we’ve all worked so hard this past year and a half. I don’t envy the job sales has to do. Trust me, I do.  But I don’t think we are helping them by not being realistic. Worse yet we’ll hurt their credibility and burn bridges with our customers, which I don’t think any of us want.” 

We then began to have a productive meeting.

Surprisingly the vp of sales and I ended up becoming really good friends, so much so many years later he offered us the use of his cottage in Tahoe when I had family visting. We found we were both similar in being plainspoken and blunt. We both angered slowly but cooled down fast. 

Both our companies ended up being acquired by different buyers and all of us have learned much from one another, prior to that and since. 

I share this story with other clients, entrepreneurs that I advice or mentor and my students for a variety of different reasons

  • The need for clear communications to avoid misunderstandings
  • Being aligned internally before making customer commitments
  • Things that I’ve done that I’m not to proud of
  • How not to handle or resolve conflicts  
  • When do you walk away from a client (or not)
  • – How company culture can hinder or help success
  • Just because we speak in English doesn’t mean we are hearing the same thing
  • Even in prospecting calls as an illustration of how we’ll hold them accountable (of course without the throwing laptops around part!)

I’m sure you have many such stories that you tell. Question is do you have them handy? Written down even if it’s just four or five words? And do you repurpose and reuse them for different audiences, places and purposes? I’d love to hear from you. Share your favorite one!

If you tell stories (and who doesn’t) and want to be a better storyteller check out the upcoming cohort of our course “Personal Success Through Persuasive Storytelling” on Maven.

Crafting Powerful Stories in Tech Marketing

It doesn’t need any marketing. The technology sells itself.” 

That was our CTO at a nearly billion-dollar firm talking to our sales folks. This was back in 1999. The marketers in the room, including me, looked at one another and tried not to roll out eyes.

As Don Draper famously put it “Technology is a glittering lure!” So it is easy to fall into the trap that customers will be just as enamored of it. 

Ok, here’s the bad news. Technology does not sell itself. 

Stories are what sell whether the brand, a person, a product or a service. 

Good stories usually have a protagonist that the customer can identify with.

It can be someone the customer relates in their present role, whether as a project or sales manager or parent. Or aspires to be such as an athlete or leader or awesome human. 

Great stories are ones that they can make their own and retell!

Don’t get me wrong. Stories, however great, aren’t going to create sustainable demand without real substance in your product, service or offering. 

The customer should not only benefit but it needs to be apparent to them how they will benefit.

And they shouldn’t need a 1-unit college course to get it! 

This is the power of well-crafted stories. They meet three needs:

  • Relatable through empathy with the customer and their problem or need, 
  • Relevance how they will benefit and a vision of what the future is
  • Reason addresses why you are the right companion for the journey from here to there 

As you’ll see in the famous scene from Mad Men where Don Draper pitches to Kodak why their product isn’t a wheel but a carousel!

The Japanese Salad that nearly broke our team

“I can’t believe that you praised that da*n salad!” My colleague and engineering manager was furious. His team mate joined right in, “It’s one thing to be polite, but to go overboard like that!”

We’d just spent the whole day in a conference room at a Japanese customer’s divisional headquarters. My colleagues and I had flown in from India.

We’d then taken the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka. Then a local train and finally a cab to get to the village outside which their factory and offices were.

As we were scheduled to spend two days in discussions and negotiations our hosts had kindly arranged for lunch to be served in the conference room. Not just that, but they had accommodated our needs as vegetarians by preparing a special meal for us. 

It was this meal that had made my colleagues mad! No strike that. It was my praise of this meal that had made them mad.

The meal that was served in rather large bento boxes had vegetable tempura (not unlike Indian pakoras) and a variety of colorful and green salads with sauces. Having spent the previous two decades in California, I found the salads to be exquisite—fresh, subtle and tasty. 

My colleagues on the other hand found the experience most dissatisfactory—“as though we were chewing on grass” in their words. They ate the tempura and had politely made as though they were eating the salads, which were left largely untouched. I was oblivious of their travails whilst busily tucking in!

When we got started on the post-lunch session, our ever considerate hosts enquired how we’d enjoyed our lunch, whereupon I’d waxed at length how amazing it had been! 

I must admit I like my food and do tend to get carried away. 

By the time we returned to the hotel, my colleagues were not just hungry and grumpy but absolutely livid with me.

“Because of your dang praise, they are now going to serve the same da*n lunch tomorrow!” 

And they were right. 

My colleagues did eventually forgive me but never failed to share this story with anyone who was willing to hear it. 

Nowadays we get a good laugh out of it and even share it with customers and partners, who in turn get to share their own stories.

Each of us have stories like this – personal and professional, sometimes funny other times poignant or even sad. Stories allow us to connect with others and build relationships. Business at the end of the day all about relationships.

What stories do you have? And find yourself telling frequently?

If you’d like to learn to be a great storyteller, join us at the upcoming cohort-based Success Through Persuasive Storytelling course.

Delighting customers – how one packaging team did it for me!

TL;DR We bought an Anker SoundCore 2 Bluetooth wireless speaker and many of the small, yet thoughtful and nice design touches by the Anker packaging team delighted me. Hence this blog post.

Over the summer our younger daughter’s constant use of a Bluetooth speaker made it evident to my wife and I all that we were missing. Earlier attempts at using a Bluetooth speaker were marred by a cheap freebie we received when signing up for a membership. So this time we were determined to get one for ourselves, so we didn’t have to sneakily borrow our daughters while she slept in late.

Of course the Indian parent in me had sticker shock when I set out to buy a 10W Bluetooth wireless speaker. Fortunately the earlier bad experience ensure that I did not go in for the cheapest one but nor did I want to splurge multi-hundred dollars on one that also did a seemingly variety of things (of course despite 9-years of college, I could not understand a whole lot of features the high end ones boasted of, but that’s a story for another day!) Thus we ended up with the SoundCore 2.

Once I got the speaker itself out, setting it up and getting it going was straightforward. As I decided to put away the box, I saw it still had a small blue box inside. I assumed it was for the charging cable. It was. But it also contained a little card with the single word question ❇︎ Happy? on it. And on the back it had the question ❇︎ Not happy?

As you can see in the pictures above, the direction of text on either sides of the card was flipped, intuitively reading the right side up, depending on whether you choose Happy or Not happy! Most importantly, inside the card it told you what you can do, in case you were not happy and nudged you to share if you were.

Whilst there can be any number of nitpicky things around features (pairing with more than one device) that I could potentially quibble over, I must admit as a marketer feeling happy at the thought that has gone into this packaging delighting me as a customer. A great example of how customer delight does not have to be contained only within the product. Great job, Anker packaging (product?) team.

The big role luck plays in our lives

4-leaf clover

One of the topics that we don’t talk a whole lot about in entrepreneurship is the role of luck. Luck of course can mean very different things to each of us. While commonly people tend to think of luck as good fortune, something over which we have no control, others view it as a matter of being open and responsive when new opportunities present themselves.

“Always say Yes!” I heard Andy Billman, the former president of Worthington Cylinder say this to my class at the Ohio State University back in 2017. Since then I’ve heard him repeat, even exhort folks to say yes, when an opportunity presents itself, such as a promotion or a move to a new location.

Two weeks ago I had a guest speaker Ellen Desmarais come in to speak to my Advanced Concepts in Entrepreneurial Studies class. Ellen in recounting her professional journey recalled that in her first job at a large credit card company an opportunity arose for her to move to a new business being set up in London. She jumped at the opportunity (as though she’d heard Andy Billman’s voice encouraging voice) and found herself at a ‘startup’ with all the freedom to experiment and but with the safety of a large organization backing it. As the years passed and new opportunities, jobs and roles arose, the lessons from that era of a rapidly growing new business continue to serve her.

“It’s a great example of how luck at some point will factor in your life.”

In my own career, luck has figured in a multiplicity of ways. The common one was often of poor timing—such as when we conceived and built an Apple Watch equivalent in 2004 (battery life, interoperability were not ready for wearables), pitched a GPS-powered game scenarios in 2007 (which eventually we saw Pokemon Go make happen).

Other times we’ve had the good fortune of customers sharing with us creative ways in which they’d put our technology to use. A customer from Korea, played Desert Rose by Sting on wireless headphones they’d built around our Bluetooth technology. This was an idea my engineers had pitched repeatedly to an non-receptive me. That chance encounter in a San Jose hotel persuaded me to finally agreeing to focus our entire company on wireless stereo music the led to the eventual acquisition of our company. Of course a great deal of smart people had to put in an enormous amount of effort, yet if that chance encounter hadn’t happened or I hadn’t said Yes, as Andy would have surely told me, I wonder how many other dead ends we’d have run down.

Thank you, Ellen for sharing your journey and insights.

Here are some other interesting takes on the role luck plays in entrepreneurship.

How Can the Privileged Help Redress Inequity?

I have always been curious about leadership and what makes for good leader. Leadership as with most other things is easy to talk or read about but harder to demonstrate in action. The events of this last week, since the murder of George Floyd, have enabled me to see some good leaders in action. Most notably, President Aoun of Northeastern University, who not only addressed the issue directly but declared a day of reflection in response to the injustice toward black people.

“We will join together in unity with those all around the world who are grieving and angry over persistent injustice toward African American citizens,”

Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern,

Of course, as a privileged brown man, the response of the local community to #blacklivesmatter brought to fore the question of my own responsibility to address both anti-blackness within the Indian-American community or caste oppression in India.

Meeting author, Dalit scholar and amazing human Suraj Yengde, who posed the question whether we will [ever] see upper caste / Brahmins come out in support of Dalit struggles the way we’ve seen white people show up for black lives. Talking about caste or discrimination even within families (mine or any other desi) is a challenge; I know I’ve failed miserably many times in WhatsApp groups of even my peers. Yet what we as privileged folks face is mere irritation, relative to the every day mayhem Dalits face (beatings, murder, rape).

Suraj’s own sustained campaign for Dalit liberation in the face of sustained abuse in the social media sphere and his outreach across caste lines which at times draws fire from fellow Dalits is yet another lived experience of leadership in action.

So where do I start and what can we do? As Jane Elliot says in the video below, we can start with education.

I’d urge you, dear reader, to start with these two resources:

A bonus: Suraj Yengde’s Caste Matters

For those who have read this far, take a look at this video of anti-racism activist and teacher Jane Elliot. If we were to replace white people with upper-caste, and race with caste wouldn’t it be just as true?

Does Your Innovation Make Things Worse for Your Customer?

In a class that I teach on innovation, the students and I typically run through an exercise of “Who’s the customer? -> What’s her pain point? or need?” -> “What is our innovation to solve this?” Sometimes we do it the other way, starting with our innovation, what pain point it solves and who is this a pain (or need) for?

So when it was time to talk about LED bulbs, as an innovation, the class easily had a plethora of answers for who and what (longer life, lower cost of ownership, environmentally conscious.) When I asked “What if we add Bluetooth to the LED bulb?” the answers came on just as fast and furious—”I don’t have to get out of bed to turn if off,” “I can control at home remotely”.) So the consensus was clear that this was an innovation (ie “creates new value” for one or more target segments)

Now came the question, “How do we reset such a Bluetooth-enabled LED bulb to its factory settings?” (never mind, nearly 20 years since we began using BT we still need to periodically reset things, cause their state gets messed up).

Here was GE Lighting’s solution to this problem—this is their actual video and not a spoof, of which there are several built based on this real video.

How to Reset GE’s Bluetooth-enabled Light Bulb

Watching this video even the first time was painful and for the nth time (with each section of the class I teach) it required some measure of teeth-gritting. Yet, as an optimist I sought the silver lining—they were clear what the pain point their (paying) customers faced, but the cure seemed just as bad as the disease. While some commenters on YouTube felt this was engineering (within GE) wreaking vengeance on marketing (or product management) not allowing them a reset button, it is the customer who has to pay the price. Some takeaways for me include:

  • The original solution (or specification) not accounting for end-user resets (should this be even required?) tells me that the use cases (certainly corner cases) hadn’t been thought through
  • The sheer complexity (not to mention mind-numbing) nature of the solution makes it clear that end-user inputs or consideration were not taken into account
  • While a good deal of engineering creativity (& cost) I suspect went into this solution, likely due to product design or legacy constraints, the sheer number of spoof videos shows that the brand (and likely product adoption) has taken a hit, that far outweighs any of the cost considerations that may have limited either the original design or the subsequent reset sequence.

Innovators too need their own version of the Hippocratic oath, “…I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.”

Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast

Both in startups and large companies—heck in any company—culture is critical to success. This is something that I’ve been waxing about for close to 20 years now. And the criticality of storytelling in businesses is another favorite and recurring topic in this blog. So I was tickled this morning, to come across an interview of Paul Teshima, CEO of Nudge (and formerly of Eloqua) being quoted saying

culture eats strategy for breakfast, and business culture can be built through storytelling.

Paul teshimA

What was particularly gratifying about this was his assertion was made in the context of marketing and sales. Sales folks have always understood that relationships are critical to their success. However their challenge has been to quickly identify and nurture the most promising ones, as they balance their need to deliver on results on finite timelines with the lead times of building meaningful relationships. Good marketers recognize that their job is to help sales shorten their selling cycles, by getting qualified leads to them consistently. Storytelling is a powerful to achieve this and a culture that promotes such consistent storytelling to customers and serving sales’ needs will always will the long game.

Hear Paul tell it in his own words here.

Paul Teshima of Nudge.ai on Sales Pipeline Radio

Pitch Deck Advice from 2 VCs I Admire

Yesterday when I wrote about what can make your pitch deck sizzle, I alluded to the fact that there are excellent pitch decks out there. Rather than have you search for them, I’ve compiled two actual decks from AirBnB and Home61 here as well as templates recommended by two venture capitalists that I admire. Hope you find them useful.

Mark Suster is one of my favorite writers who delves deep in all matters entrepreneurs and VCs. His How to Create a Pitch Deck that VCs will Love is on the longish side but is where I’d start.

Brad Feld, another of my favorite writers/venture capitalists also provides a counterpoint, namely focusing on the pre-deck face-to-face pitch. In his words:

Feld often prefers more of a free-flowing conversation. So how do you spark an investor’s interest in that conversation? “The pitch should be very clear about what you are doing, why you are doing it and why I should care,” said Feld. “If you can cover those things quickly and precisely, it’s easy for me to decide whether I want to spend more time with you or not.”

How to Create a Killer Start-Up Pitc

Now here are two pitches AirBnB (2008) and Home61 (2018)


And if that’s not enough, here’s a whole slew of them from Forbes and Konsus (50 decks). Have at it.

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