Ram Shriram Quotes

When you've dealt with real-life issues, dealing with business issues is not that hard.

I've got to let the people who are in the business run the business. I can help them think through their decisions about products, about partners, about hiring. But in the end, the decisions are theirs, and so is the responsibility.

Zoomin is a hybrid model. The management and founding team is the one with half.com.

Stay externally focused - on your customers - and focus internally when you have to hire.

If America wants to lead the world, it needs to make sure new ideas can get to market. More opportunity will birth more companies that create more jobs.

My focus is mainly on education. I believe education made all the difference for me, and it is certainly going to make all the difference for other children, too.

Young Indians are energetic and ambitious, have lots of ideas. They work around the difficult situation they face here. But the big challenge is to market products and services to the West, because costs there aren't coming down.

I've trained my people in mentoring entrepreneurs and made myself obsolete.

Life is fleeting, and permanence in this world is something we all strive for. The best way to achieve permanence is through philanthropy.

My only loyalty is to what's best for business, not to any set of constituents.

There are times I think it might be nice to have deep-pocketed limited partners to provide me with some cushion. But I enjoy having no responsibilities except to myself, financially.

Basically, I left Northern Telecom after 7.5 years of being in one company after school. And then, I ended up in a series of start-ups. The first of those was a company called Sitech, and they were in local area networks.

I had an ethnic preference, if you will, for the warm weather, coming from Chennai. So I finally said, 'Look, can I move to California?' because every time I come here, it would be in the 70s or 80s, and there would be beautiful blue sky and warm.

You learn that different people are made differently, and they have different ways to reach to their goals. Some people reach their limits of what they can produce and create, and that doesn't necessarily make them bad. It is just that they may not be right for that role in that instance.

You can't just tell your team, 'Think long term.' It doesn't work that way. When you are starting out, you have to always think about trying to build something of value for the customer: something they can use all the time, something of use.

There are still some pieces that aren't being used, like the white-space bands between TV channels. With digital broadcasting, those buffers aren't needed anymore. The wireless telcos want to lease them, while the TV industry wants to maintain the status quo. Either decision would be a mistake.

I've been fortunate to work with some really smart people. Larry Page is an extremely smart guy, most probably one of the smartest people I've worked with.

In the U.S.A., technical innovations come out of universities and the research produced by Ph.D. students. We don't have that happening in India.

All the social things the consumer has gotten used to are being applied to business.

I ended up working in Michigan for a young company called Sycor out of Michigan, worked there, and that company got bought by Northern Telecom. We became the Bell Northern Research Labs of Northern Telecom.

You want to do a few things really well because you want to come out with a product that is fully baked, even though it may be lacking in a few features or whatever, rather than the one that's all-achieving but not doing anything too well.