Google's first investor in love with mistakes
By siliconindia   |   Friday, 05 December 2008, 23:39 IST   |    14 Comments
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Google's first investor in love with mistakes
Bangalore: One may call it 'a revelation of a successful investor.' Ram Shriram, the first Google investor and founder of Sherpalo Ventures talks about his mistakes, 'which he calls Ram's Book of Mistakes', and his journey as an investor. For Shriram, to attain success one has to make mistake throughout his or her career. "If you begin to think that you will not make mistakes, it's a failing right there. In other words, it is good to have an ego but keep your ego in check. By keeping it in check, you are able to listen. When you listen, you learn. And when you learn, you act, with the better judgment," he says. According to him, a lot of mistakes that go on in the life of the company have to do with people judgments. And that is important as, for instance, one has got to hire the right people, who are able to take the company from a particular stage to the next stage of growth. A wrong judgment will not do any good in such a context. When Shriram says about his involvement with Google, he looks more humble and down to earth. "The Google success, of course, I cannot say anything other than that I was an advisor; not the person executing on the ground. It was a different role than at Netscape. I was sort of the old man there, trying to go through life stories and say don't do this or do that or this is how you deal with PR," he says. According to Shriram, two big applications that the users cared about, on the internet, were essentially mail and search. And that is why he chose to bet his fortune on Google. "If you look at your time spent on the Net, you are mostly doing those two things 80 percent of the time. The other 20 percent of the time, you could be doing other things," he says. On innovations at individual level in a company, Shriram has an interesting point to drive home; for him all the employees may consume only 60 to 80 percent of their time and they can use the 20 percent of their time for other creative pursuits within their area of knowledge, which may help them to come up with new ideas. "You do need to unleash creativity by not hamstringing or putting an employee in a narrow compartment and saying, this is all you need to do and this is all you need to focus on," he says. Shriram, known for his consumer centric approach in terms of investment, spent the first 10-15 years of his career focusing on corporate customers. "The consumer opportunity came about when IP became pervasive. When there were enough PCs and all the PCs were networked, all the opportunities were out there, like the opportunity to download software. In fact Netscape was the innovator in coming up with the new way of distribution, which is 'download Netscape directly on the web.' And in consumer businesses, you have the ability to actually both impact and influence people," he shares. To some degree, he concludes, learning from what winners built in terms of process for success, is quite valuable. Source: Extracted from an interview published by mint.

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