Board Member, Advisor and Recovering CEO
Mudit: Request Vikram to just kind of introduce himself and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Answer: Yeah, no, thank you, Mudit. It is a small world, Mudit. We went to high school together. I think that’s right around the time when dinosaurs roamed, back in the early ’80s. I believe the last time I physically saw you was probably in the early ’80s. We lost touch and reconnected just in the last few months. Anyway, a little bit about myself. I have three degrees in electrical engineering. The first one is from the Florida Institute of Technology, then the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and finally, Stanford. I left Stanford to help start a company. This was in the early days. We helped initiate a company to track cargo containers around the world, which eventually became the global standard for cargo containers worldwide. It’s actually cited as the first example of the Internet of Things.
I still maintain that I came up with the name “Internet of Things” in a bar, but Kevin Ashton from MIT took credit for it. Well, that’s a conversation for a different day. From there, we built the company up. There were 30 of us. We then sold it to Texas Instruments. Two of us were the key owners, along with an angel investor, and we sold it to Lockheed SRE to Texas Instruments back in the mid to late ’90s for over 30 million dollars.
A few years later, during a major upheaval in corporate America, where a portion of Texas Instruments was merging with Raytheon, we found a way to buy the company back for well under $10 million. We raised money from several well-known backers, including Xcel Partners, which was a primary funder of Facebook. We raised money from Temasek, the government of Singapore, from Hutchison Whampoa in Hong Kong, from UPS, Oracle, and many others. Six years later, we sold the company to Lockheed Martin for well north of $400 million. So I became a president at Lockheed. My role at Lockheed was to commercialize technologies.
I worked with the government of Singapore, specifically Nanyang Technological University, to commercialize nanomaterials. I worked with the government of the UK on seabed mining polymetallic nodules in the ocean surface. I focused on LIDAR technology, which was a lot of fun at Lockheed. As I was getting ready to retire, I joined a few boards. I joined the board of a company called Ray Systems, which we helped turn around and sell to Honeywell. I also joined the board of a company called Eight by Eight.
Eight by Eight was a voice over internet protocol provider, primarily a chip company. We helped grow the business from about 100 million in revenue to about 550 million in revenue and increased market capitalization from about 700 million to right around 2.3 billion. We also grew the employee count from about 400 to about 1700. I exited in December of 2020 from a paid position. Afterward, I was approached by various companies to join their boards. I joined the board of a company called Ping Identity, which was recently sold for $2.8 billion to Thoma Bravo in the cybersecurity space.
I also joined a few cybersecurity and supply chain companies. Additionally, there’s a fascinating company I’ve joined called Genesis Digital. We essentially offer the ability to manage your entire business from customer acquisition to billing and support for any physical assets for small businesses. It’s been fulfilling mentoring and working with people, helping them grow. That’s been the challenge and the fun of my life.
Mudit: Tell us more about what motivates you and what gets you going every day.
Answer: Hello! Personally, I’m a rather straightforward individual. It’s just my wife and I, no kids. We made a conscious choice early on. I have a few hobbies, but primarily, I’ve found that I enjoy working and building. I’ve had my fair share of screw-ups over the course of my life. So, I think part of what I enjoy is helping people avoid making the same mistakes I did while building a business. I live in Los Altos Hills in California, and I also have a place in Santa Barbara, so I split my time between the two. Other than that, as I mentioned, I’m a fairly unremarkable person.
Mudit: What did you learn and what advice would you give to people looking to get into startups? What works in organized companies? What are your perspectives?
Answer: Absolutely, and this is paramount: regardless of the size or location of the business, it all boils down to the people. If you find good people, you’ll enjoy the process, and more often than not, you’ll be successful. A strong team can elevate a mediocre business and still yield a reasonable return. They can also take a good business and turn it into a thriving one. Conversely, if you have the wrong team, it’s stressful, and you’re more likely to face challenges. So, it’s always about people, people, people, and then some more people. From the very start, it’s crucial. Another important aspect is being brutally honest with yourself about the strengths and weaknesses of your business.
As founders or CEOs, we often fall into a reality distortion field, which is necessary to some extent, but be careful not to deceive yourself. The third critical element is having a clear plan for value creation that isn’t abstract. Understand what value you’re offering your customers. It’s easy to talk about customers in a vague sense, but pinpointing exactly what value you’re providing and validating it step by step is crucial.
So, to sum it up: people, acknowledging your company’s strengths and weaknesses, and comprehending the value you’re delivering to your customers are the keys to success. With these three things, you might not build the next Facebook, but you’ll certainly create value.
Mudit: So tell us about your early days. You were studying, accumulating degrees, and involved in startups. What led you to take that leap into business?
Answer: While I was at Stanford, I was on a full scholarship, working on the Ph.D. program. I’d completed all my courses. Stanford has a qualifying exam where you meet with 10 professors who can ask you any Mudit, and then they rank you for admission. I was feeling quite confident and next to me sat a young man, the Stanford football team’s running back. He was a Heisman Trophy candidate, indicating he was one of the top running backs in the country. We both took a statistics course that summer, and when midterms came around, I got a shockingly low grade. I asked him how he did, and he nonchalantly said he got a 97. That was a moment of realization for me. I thought, maybe academia isn’t my forte. Perhaps I’m meant for something else. This led me to venture into the business world.
Mudit: So, tell us about your journey of growing that company. How did it all come about, especially for those who aren’t familiar with the startup world?
Answer: The company started small, with just a handful of us and no revenue. We grew it from that stage to reach about $4-5 million in revenue. Eventually, Texas Instruments acquired us because they saw potential in our technology for use in larger systems, particularly for pursuing billion-dollar contracts. Our growth and success came from understanding our niche and providing significant value to our customers.
After the acquisition, we took the technology that initially tracked cargo containers and adapted it for cargo security, especially after the events of 9/11 when securing cargo became crucial. We collaborated with the governments of Singapore and Hong Kong to track cargo containers globally, revolutionizing the cargo security industry. It was all about recognizing a need, understanding the customer, and solving significant problems. A similar approach applied when I worked at Lockheed Martin. We acquired the company back from Texas Instruments, cleaned it up, and expanded into cargo security. The scale and complexity of decision-making at a company like Lockheed were vastly different, but the core principle was the same: understand the mission, provide value to the customers, and focus on solving real problems.
Mudit: Could you share your experiences at Lockheed Martin, a huge corporation? What did you learn there, and how did it differ from your startup journey?
Answer: My role at Lockheed Martin was as President, initially running the Global Cargo Security Division and later leading Strategic Ventures. The biggest difference when transitioning from a startup to a corporate giant like Lockheed is the scale of decision-making and access to resources.
While startups are nimble and operate closely to their customers, corporations like Lockheed have multiple layers between you and the customer. But the fundamental principle remains the same: understanding the mission and delivering value to customers is key. At Lockheed, I had the opportunity to work with government leaders, including Prime Ministers of Singapore and the UK. The critical element, irrespective of the company’s size, is maintaining a deep understanding of what value the company provides to its customers.