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.”
“Steve Jobs was perhaps the most innovative and creative guy of the last 100 years! Nobody else could have had that title. He was unbelievably focussed on what he wanted to do and was very clear about what he didn’t want to do. I haven’t seen that kind of clarity in most managers. As managers, we tend to hedge a little bit. With Steve, there was no question of hedging. He was absolutely sure of himself. It cuts through a lot of things. All of us have difficulty in saying ‘No’. With Steve, he perhaps said ‘No’ more often than he said ‘Yes’ which was one of the most powerful things [about him]! He had the capacity to say ‘No’ often and be right about it! The third thing is he was intensely private! His life was about his work and his family and nothing else.”
(This story appears in the 02 December, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
Ram Shriram's emphasis on being a grounded individual is truly inspiring. He himself is a embodiment of a grounded and stable personality that to after achieving so many great things life.
on Dec 15, 2011Though I do not understand the interview at all, just read it for Ram S. A simple man, with a heart of gold. 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 !!
on Nov 21, 2011I do not agree to the comment that "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.
on Nov 20, 2011Good thought, Agreed!
on Oct 23, 2013