Ravi’s Blog

As I mentioned in the post here, i wanted to think through about some guiding principles for the ideas i am planning to work on. It’s not that i don’t have any ideas that are worth working on, or i have some writers block. I do think that i have some very interesting and compelling product ideas. I am very excited by the possibilities and how these products can improve people’s daily lives. Add to that, there’s real, meaningful (100M+) revenue opportunity and while these products may or may not make that much money, big market sizes attract investment.

On my last day at yahoo!, I got the opportunity to spend a bit of time with James Slavet. James is a VP at yahoo! and a rising star. While the title of VP is obviously official, the rising star tag is my own. I had the good fortune to work closely with him and learnt a lot from him in a short duration. Coming back to my last day, the first thing he asked me in our short meeting that day was my definition of success. I stuttered for a response and he went to tell me how he was asked by someone he respects (Let’s call him James++) that same question. Upon an unsatisfactory answer from James, James++ proceeded to say that he was succesful in life. James++ was successful because he has a happy family, great grand children and they all have really good relationships amongst them. The point was to look at success as something beyond prosperity. Just as paul graham pointed out that money is not wealth, prosperity is not success. This was a great insight, simple but something that we don’t pay attention to in the daily rat race.

I was thinking more and more about what would be success for aXooba (pronounced uh-zooba). Building a product, building a product that’s useful, raising money, making revenues, being profitable, selling the company for a good profit for all involved, and a list of other simiar things, don’t quite seem to hit the mark. I suppose ultimately, everyone and every company should determine the definitions of their own success. Since, aXooba is me at this point, I’ll use my definitions of success. I also know for sure, success is not a milestone, it’s a process, a path. It’s not a stage that a company reaches, but a path.

Once i started looking at various companies’ mission statements, i quickly realized that quite a few of these profit making machines are sensitive. All the companies listed there have some sort of vision, mission, that reflect their definition of success and give insight into their values. Of course, some of them (like kellog) just have a set of values posted. Google, of course, did not even get into the semantics of vision/value/principle, but just posted ten things. Google’s mission statement, is quite a lot more succint. Yahoo’s mission statement , also lists out core values. Reading all those, really no company ever comes out and says that their primary and most important goal is to make ton of money. I guess no surprises there. I think the question to think about is, to what extent that company and it’s employees continue to understand and reflect the values.
The important thing is though, is to clearly state those principles and philosophies what ever they might be, early on in the company’s lifecycle. This does not mean that they are not adaptable. It just means that stating the values upfront means you have better chance of attracting people who agree with that philosophy and overall a better chance of sticking to the values.

For aXooba, I don’t know if I have 10 things or 6 core values. I know for sure that not only do i have to set principles, they have to be tied into clear actionable policies/programs/activities company undertakes.
The first one is about customers. The 2nd about giving back.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 26th, 2006 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Business, Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.