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FirstRain India Takes On the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon

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The day of the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon, September 30th 2012, finally arrived; the pinnacle of lots of hard work (or not so hard) for thirteen Rainmakers. The alarm bells rang at 3:45 AM on Sunday morning. It may have crossed our minds to hit the snooze, but the excitement of the marathon was enough to drag us out of bed.

The night before the big day was tough. Most of the participants were nervous, with the fear of not completing the race on time (or at all) weighing on us. We loaded up on both sleep and hydration, downing 4-5 liters of Gatorade in the 24 hours leading up to race day. Well in advance of the starting time, participants lingered near the course with running bibs pinned to their t-shirts and timing chips fastened to their shoes. Some listened to music to relax their minds. The morning was cool and breezy. Varun and Priyankar were the first of the Rainmakers to reach the packed venue. The DJ’s music filled the morning air as people stretched their sleepy muscles and fit in last minute exercises. At last, amid many speculations, our MYSTERY RUNNER was revealed. Nobody could have guessed our mystery runner was Gaurav Chauhan, who had been following a very secret regimen of workouts and an office diet of carrots, almonds, sprouts and apricots.

We gathered at the starting point, where people of all ages had turned up for the mega event. Moving forward wasn’t easy, as thousands of people with the same idea shoved and pushed their way through. The weather gods were not generous at the race’s 6:40 AM start time. As we reached India Gate, the scorching sun made every step more difficult. But each Rainmaker’s mind was consumed by only one thought: to complete the race. From the first stride, a sense of team spirit and competitiveness drove the Rainmakers. In a moment of pure concentration captured by event cameras, Varun and Mohammad Athar ran side by side for a full minute, but didn’t notice each other until reviewing the marathon photos after the race. Along the way, Rainmakers were encouraged by each other, motivated by the sheer number of other runners, and supported by well-organized event facilities. Cooling tunnels, oranges, water points, energy drinks, mobile toilets, and cold sponges at various places aided Rainmakers toward their destination.

Sanjay Shankar, a dedicated competitor from the beginning, finished the race with an impressive 13.10 miles in 2:27:29. His impromptu victory dance at the finish line was caught on camera and acquired Facebook fame. His enthusiasm spoke for all of the competing Rainmakers, who finished the race with complete participation.

Close to 32,000 people, including athletes and celebrities, turned up for the race. The spirit of the marathon is alive and well among Rainmakers. This year thirteen of us competed in the race, and we hope to see our numbers grow next year.

Summer 2012 at FirstRain India

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The hottest summer months in Delhi are May and June, with temperatures going as high as 45 ⁰C (~113 ⁰F)! It only begins to cool down when the ‘First Rain’ of the monsoon season decides to descend and make the days cooler, greener and less dusty.

Besides the hot weather, June has been a busy month. The highpoint was a Kids@Work day that brought in about 20 Rainmaker’s kids, ranging from an age of six months to twelve years. The kids spent a good part of the day at FirstRain India. It was great fun to watch FirstRain parents and non-parents taking care of the little ones. I am very impressed (and proud) by how hands on all the Rainmaker parents are!

Below are some snapshots from the day:

Current and future Rainmakers work in perfect harmony

Who is the better programmer- father or son?

Going home a winner!

At FirstRain India we like to host numerous events that every Rainmaker can particiate in. We divide everyone into event teams (a lottery system) comprising folks from different departments, getting together to participate in fun, as well as competitive events, throughout the year. This allows people from different departments to come together and team up to excel in an entirely different setting. The events range from quiz competitions to ramp walks to decorate your bay and the events culminate with a prize trophy to the winning team at the annual offsite event. The new teams were created this summer and the first task assigned to them was to create a name, logo and punch line for their team.

Finally, June ended with a small party in our cafeteria for all the employees who had June birthdays. All the June birthdays gathered around the cake (including myself) and so a case for me of have your cake and eat it too!



Tribal Knowledge is Treasure

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We try to capture everything – we really do. But the reality is so much of our wisdom is in our heads and it’s never more apparent than when trying to train someone new.

At FirstRain we have a new executive – the fabulous Daniela Barbosa who just joined us from Dow Jones. She’s smart and experienced and I want to bring her up to speed as fast as possible but pointing her to our systems is, I know, simply insufficient. We think we capture everything about our users and workflow in our salesforce CRM system. We think we capture our contracts in Netsuite and our central wiki. But of course so much of the deep knowledge is tribal – to quote Wikipedia “Tribal knowledge is any unwritten information that is known within a tribe but often unknown outside of it.”

The reality is that the really interesting stuff about your customers, your technology, why people truly buy is in people’s heads. Our customer facing technical team knows the customer’s workflow, the nuances of why they want one choice over another, what internal projects – and opposition – they are facing and need our system to help them solve. It’s impossible to write it all down, and so it’s crucial to share as much verbally as possible.

And it’s one of the reasons that turnover can be so damaging to companies.

Sometimes turnover is good. If you want to change the culture of a company you typically will have to change 50% of the leadership — or more as when Cadence fired it’s entire executive team. If you want to dramatically change your strategy and go-to-market you have to change your business team — as Dell is now bravely doing.

But short of dramatic change, turnover is expensive simply because you lose and have to re-learn so much tribal knowledge. Especially with your R&D team and with customer support. The R&D team knows where the bodies are buried in the code; the customer support team knows the truth about customer use and where they find value.

It is, of course, important to document the knowledge you have, but when you are growing and moving fast it is also important to value, and protect tribal knowledge and bring your team together frequently and efficiently to talk through and share what’s in people’s heads.

Progressive states of long offsite meetings

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Long meetings can progressively sap energy and create altered states of being. Yes they can.

We went offsite as a management team for 2 days this weekend to talk through our strategy and 2012 planning. 11 of us in 2 houses at Pajaro Dunes, lots of flip charts, heated discussions, cooking together, walking on the beach and generally spending time together thinking about our business. It was really fun but, even so, it was intense and, combined with long discussions late into the night about the state of the world accompanied by some excellent wines, pretty tiring for some.

Two of our jokesters memorialized their progressive states of mind as they helped clean up after the meeting. They sent me the photos – the editorial is all mine.

Yeah! This two day offsite thing is a great idea, they’re ready.
A few hours in and Ryan is already wondering, he’s seen enough of these type of meetings to be healthily cynical, but Nima’s still gung ho.
Second day and Ryan’s mind is wandering but Nima’s using caffeine to push through – “There’s the mountain guys let’s go for it!”
Ryan’s rolling his eyes at Nima’s enthusiasm, just as Nima starts to wind down .
But as Nima finally falls asleep in response to Penny’s energizer bunny, Ryan stoically keeps pushing forward.

Thanks Nima and Ryan – it was fun – and despite the warm sun and sand, amazingly productive!

FirstRain Continues Annual Tradition of Volunteering at Second Harvest Food Bank

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One of the best ways I’ve found to build community in the office is by working together to give back to the greater community.  Last week, the FirstRain team and I continued our annual tradition of volunteering at the Second Harvest Food Bank.  SHFB is a fantastic organization that strives to end local hunger around the San Francisco Bay Area.  I was pleasantly surprised (and impressed with the massive amount of food to sort) to learn that gathering and collecting enough food was not the organization’s main concern.  The great need for volunteers, like those of us from FirstRain, is necessary in order to help sort the food.  Kristin Sulpizio, the Director of Volunteer Services told us the “the food is there, it’s finding people to help figure out what to do with all of it, is our problem”.

FirstRain participated in this event not only to give back to the local community but to hopefully encourage others to follow in our footsteps. I know activities like this strengthen our own FirstRain community. Working together outside of the office allows my team to engage in an experience that deepens their sense of shared values, such as social responsibility and caring for others. Every year, I know I can count on our team to clear their busy schedules, to show up and to work very hard.  This morale is later translated inside the office, all part of the many reasons why FirstRain’s company culture is so dynamic.

Everyone got his or her hands dirty that day. Working as a team, we were able to quickly and successfully sort through a hefty amount of food in our two-hour time slot. Thanks to the entire FirstRain team’s effort, we helped 236,000 people receive food this month! The day was a huge success and everyone left the bank in great spirits. As always, I was pleased and proud to see my team come together for such a great cause –and one we will continue to support!

It’s All about Expectations folks

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I have a pet peeve that got me thinking. My peeve is people who say “I’ll call you” or “I’ll email you some times to connect” and then don’t. It’s the modern equivalent of the Hollywood brush off “Let’s do lunch”. One of my service providers did this to me last week and it’s annoying and unprofessional, and it got me to thinking again about how important expectations are.

Satisfying other people really is all about setting their expectations, and it’s especially true in business.

The ultimate is meeting your quarterly numbers. AAPL was slammed because they missed their financial expectations even though profits had grown dramatically. If you say you are going to report X and you report X-1 you are going to get dinged in today’s short term market. It’s a no win for the public company CEO and the great ones understand it’s a long term game, but the CFOs make their stripes on setting expectations right consistently.

Next is product schedules. There is discipline to this skill. You want to be aggressive to stretch the team and yet hit the dates you set because the rest of your business team is planning on it. Literally. Planning customer roll out, planning PR, so major delays play havoc with customer expectations. I very much admire my business partner YY and her ability to think through every aspect of the product release, set the company’s expectation at 95%, consistently deliver that 95% and sometimes deliver the upside of 100%. Everyone’s needs are met and our products leap forward every month.

Then there is your relationships. Californians seem very friendly at first, and then are hard to get close to. The English are frosty at first and then warm up. In business, be clear about your relationships. Are you work colleagues or friends… can your companion truly be him or herself in all his or her dumbness at times, or do they always need to be wary ? Are you loyal or fickle at heart? Obviously you can’t signal this early in a relationship but there comes a time when you can, and it’s just more efficient.

Arrive when you say you are going to arrive. Being late is the ultimate in bad manners – it says you think your time is more important than my time.

And if you tell me you are going to do something for heaven’s sake do it or don’t tell me in the first place! It just makes me grumpy.

FirstRain picnic at the Ridge Winery

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At FirstRain many of our technical and support team are located in Gurgaon just outside of New Delhi in India. Because it is very important that the US based team and the India based team work closely together we  not only travel to Gurgaon several times a year, we also bring Gurgaon team members out to San Mateo from time to time for product design sessions, for training and to improve our support process.

Earlier this month Sagar and Nitin came out for 2 weeks and since they were here over a weekend we decided to take them for a classic California experience – wine tasting at Ridge Winery. Ridge is in Cupertino up on the Montebello ridge and offers spectacular views of the Bay Area, plus a warm garden to picnic in and wine tasting for those that drink. We put together a picnic and took family members with us, including one who was 15 months old, and one who was 82. A great way to get to know one another better in a relaxed atmosphere.

Cory, our resident sommelier, sampling the cheese selection with his grenache

Our littlest rainmaker, Sebastian, enjoying the picnic with Sagar and Nitin

Towards the end of the picnic our families persuaded us to pose together and toast a lovely day

Are you an energy source or energy sink for your coworkers?

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Everyone interacts differently in the office, based on their role and personality, but most people sort into one of two types with respect to their impact on other people: energy sources and energy sinks. The CEO has to be open to all, and to motivate and energize all, and so I become very aware of the net gain or drain of interaction with my coworkers – and everyone at all levels of the company is consciously or unconsciously impacting the energy level of the people around them.
Energy sinks:
- Bring you problems for you to solve. They’ll arrive with a problem, dump it on you and ask what you are going to do about it. Particularly sink-ish when they phone you up with the problem on Friday afternoon and get it off their chest so you can worry about it all weekend.

- Have a negative outlook. Every solution you come up with they shoot it down without chewing on it first, and they drag down other people in the discussion who are trying to find a positive solution. Some people are consistently negative – about movies, about food, about their spouse. It’s exhausting!

- Take cheap shots up. Some people think it’s OK to be positive down their organization, positive to peers and attack up. The logic is something like “well you wanted the job so you just have to take it”. Very negative to other people in the room and, inside, very tiring for the leader. Equally draining are people who are obsequious – also does not move the business forward.

- Are non interactive. They sit silent in a problem solving discussion. Especially frustrating when you know they are smart and have ideas to contribute so you work extra hard to help them participate and overcome whatever inhibition is holding them back.

In contrast energy sources:
- Bring solutions with the problems. Even if they don’t have a good solution to some killer problem you are facing together, they try get the brainstorming going until the team comes up with a reasonable idea.

- Bring smart, out of the box solutions. The people who are willing to listen to an issue, think and then take the risk of an unusual or creative solution are particularly energizing, even if half their ideas are bad ones. They open up the solution space for everyone.

- See issues as bumps in the road, not roadblocks.

- See you a fellow traveler on the road (whatever level of management you are at), working together to move the company forward. They don’t take cheap shots or kiss up.

- Have a positive outlook. Some people know how to look for the silver lining – it’s in their nature – and these people often become leaders of their teams, whether they have an official manager role or not.

- Understand that executives are human. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone gets stumped at times and energy sources know that and detect when to be demanding and when to offer an ear to listen. As CEO you can never expect support from below, you need to be self reliant, but it sure is helpful sometimes when it’s offered no strings attached.

Think about which are you in what circumstances – and is your behavior and impact on your coworkers conscious? And if you behave differently with co-workers who are at or below your level in the org chart than you do with coworkers above you why is that and is it justified or helpful to your company?

The top image is of Centaurus A which is two colliding galaxies around a super massive black hole. The bottom image is our Sun.

Splash and a Dash of Teamwork

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The FirstRain office has had a full house this week with members from our East Coast sales team in town for our quarterly sales kick-off. And last night, in the spirit of fun, culture and generally getting over ourselves, the entire sales team and most of the company, headed down south to Cupertino for the final Splash and Dash race of the summer.  The race consisted of a one-mile swim in the Stevens Creek Reservoir, followed by a three-mile run.  We are lucky to have 13 great (or at least enthusiastic!) athletes that competed in relays – so we had 6.5 teams in the competition. The less brave joined the superb cheerleading team led by Julie and her cowbell.

Splash and Dash race @ Stevens Creek Reservoir

Aaron and Ryan finished first for the team, crediting their win to the support from our star, 5-year old cheerleader Natalie.  Natalie earned her prize, keeping the shiny blue pom-poms that she used to cheer on each rainmaker.

Natalie-- our star cheerleader

After the race, everyone plus families and friends and headed back to my house for a team cookout – where Thomas, Carolyn and Doug dueled over the grill (I was happy to hand off the tongs, so to speak). It was a beautiful night out, with great food and terrific company.  We finished the night by celebrating Rajiv’s birthday (he is visiting us from our Gurgaon office) using our best singing voices to serenade him (in and out of tune!).

all of our FirstRain racers (minus Eugene)

The Splash and Dash race has proven to be a great team building event for FirstRain and I’m very proud of my team.  The encouragement and support they show one another builds the kind of relationships that make a company great.  Their ability to congratulate each other for a job well done, to help each other, to care about each other independent of their work roles is part of what makes FirstRain such a fun place to be.

FirstRain team at the Cupertino Splash and Dash last night

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Perfect, beautiful Cupertino evening last night. A few of us competed in the July Splash and Dash in the Stevens Creek Reservoir – a 1 mile swim and 3 mile run which is just the right distance to make you feel great! Aaron and Cory did both the swim and the run, Thomas ran in relay to my swim, and Doug completed the swim and decided he’d wait until next time to do the run….

I am a big believer that competing in sporting events is a great way to build teams and it’s something we do well together at FirstRain, especially within the sales team. We started with everyone participating in some way at the Aquabike in 2008 and now we not only compete in a couple of events a year together, we also train together, and eat and drink together!

David, Thomas, Jordy, me, Doug, Carolyn and Cory

Because the reservoir is only a couple of miles from my house we joined up with supporters, spouses and several kids at my house for a bar-be-que. The kids — and one of our dogs — spent the whole time in the pool and I gather everyone under age 10 slept like a log last night!

Having fun together in my back garden on a warm Bay Area night