Ram Shriram is The Weather Forecaster
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Image: Tony Avelar/ AP Photo for Forbes India
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Ram Shriram
Profile: Founding director and board member at Google
Insights:
• You have to accept the reality of where you came from. The moment you lose that, you stop listening, stop thinking and become arrogant. Usually, you see that in successful people.
• People become self-destructive when they become arrogant — they over-reach, become over-ambitious and dominating.
So you don’t know who Ram Shriram is? That is because he’d rather have it that way and prefers you know companies like Netscape, Amazon and Google instead. In the first two, he was a core member of the top management team and in the last, he was the one to write a cheque for half a million to the two Google founders even as the Google name itself was not settled and no one really knew what a search engine was all about. Today, that investment alone makes him a billionaire angel investor in the Silicon Valley. But Ram Shriram is reticent about his astounding personal success and does not like being in the news.
We are in his office in Palo Alto; non-descript, except for the raw-silk pata painting on the wall, depicting the glory of Jagannath-Balavadra. I want him to tell me about his early life.
“I was born in Bangalore and raised in Chennai. My father passed away when I was three and I am the only child. I was raised by my grandparents as my mother was only 25 then and she went back to continue her higher education and ended up being a professor of English at the University of Madras. My grandparents were middle-class people and they focussed on giving me a good education. I went through a lot of emotional adversity. I saw all my cousins grow up, they had siblings and they had both their parents.
“In a situation like this, you tend to develop a steely determination in order to succeed. There are two ways to [cope] — you could get really despondent and fall off the wagon or you could focus on your goals. As you grow, the goals develop with you. I was fortunate enough to be sufficiently directed by my elders. To this day, I look back on those humble beginnings as actually a privilege because if I didn’t have that, I probably would not have been as driven and as intensely focussed in doing the right thing. But it has also created empathy for those who are in the same position as I was. This allows me to relive those memories and never lose that grounding.
“You have to accept the reality of where you came from. The moment you lose that, you stop listening, stop thinking and become arrogant. Usually, you see that in successful people, when they stop listening, they stop thinking. You need that rich input in order to be able to think and innovate.”
“As you grew up, did you ever have an inkling of what you would grow up to be?”
“At the age of 12, I had wanted to be a weather forecaster. I was fascinated by clouds, the weather. I was brought up in a cocoon of safety and comfort. I was happy. When you are happy, you can be more creative. I think going through school in Chennai was an experience which did not prepare me for what I was doing here but it certainly prepared me in terms of my personal values.
“The values that I brought with me made a lot of difference. Those values were imbibed in me by my grandparents and my mother through their hard work, honesty and no short cuts. My mother was a disciplinarian and she was methodical. She was brutally organised in everything she did. Today, I am like that. So, I got discipline from my mother and affection from my grandparents.”
We shift the topic of conversation. Ram Shriram and I are meeting just a day after Steve Jobs passed away. There is an overhang of sorrow in the Valley. While Ram Shriram was not a personal friend of Jobs’s, they had numerous professional interactions. They came within millimetres of inking a browser deal while Shriram was at Netscape, only to be nixed by rival Microsoft that offered a cash-strapped Jobs $150 million to use its browser.
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Perhaps, Subroto needs to have more intense discussion and writing than run of the mills type. He can and has done that in his books.
Finally, I wonder why no one says destiny. Have seen thousands of people drop by and few succeed. Destiny has a huge role to play in a person's success !!
"Steve Jobs was perhaps the most innovative and creative guy of the last 100 years!" How can we forget Wight Brothers and their aeroplane, Tim Berner Lee - inventor of the WWW, Automobile was invented in past 100 years, atomic energy was invneted in past 100 years...This is what I call "recency" phenomenon.
