YouSaid · the spoken record

Suranga Chandratillake

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26
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2015-11-23
most recent
2015-11-23
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1
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  1. “Yeah, so the last project we announced on was Cloud9, which is almost a year ago, actually over a year ago now. And it's very, very simple. If you look today at the most forward-thinking development organizations in the world, and by that I mean it's like Google and Facebook and Intel, you will find that all their employees do no longer write to code on a piece of software or an application they've installed on their PC or laptop. They write it all in the cloud. The same way that Google Docs is changing and replacing Microsoft Word and the download office products in the future all programmers will write code in the cloud. And Cloud9 is the premier option for that today.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, like I said before, I look a lot at what Marxicaburg does. I think he's very smart. I think he's more focused and engaged than ever. And he has a fantastic array of capability beneath him.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Nowhere to stick and know when to twist. This came from the CTO co-founder of Autonomy, and he said, you know, when you're a startup, you have to We don't do that, sorry, because you need to focus on what you actually do. And half the time, you'll have to actually change your mind and pivot. And as he said, the difference between successful startup CEO and an unsuccessful one is knowing when to do which.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yes, like with many firms, we're pretty open about the fact that our policy is that there isn't a clear track from analysts to principles partnership. That's kind of always been our policy. Certainly there are people who go on to be partners at other firms. That's worked very well. There are other people who go on to be entrepreneurs and so on. And who knows? They may come back one day. And there may be exceptions where for some unusual reason we think it makes sense to make that leap. But yeah, I mean, I don't think I'm not sure that venture is really supposed to be a career that you sort of join at 21 and sort of slowly progress yourself through. It's a little bit too random and a little bit too much of it is a little bit too much of a random walk to be able to do it that way. It's not like being a lawyer or an accountant or whatever. It's a bit different. So I think it tends to suit people who have done something quite different for a while and then decided they want to apply themselves to this area.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Lifestyle before joining a venture firm. So that's probably the key thing for us. And the second big thing is look, just someone that we get on with, because we are an equal partnership. We spend all day and often all night together on a Monday every week. If you don't like each other, it just doesn't work. So we look very hard for finding someone that we know is going to fit in and be part of the team, but that who brings some fascinating experiences that will help our companies be better.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Every firm is different. For us, a big part of it is, first of all, someone who's really achieved something really interesting in their career already. The reason for that is partly because you want people who have lived, quote unquote, because that helps our own companies. When we help entrepreneurs, they want to have partners on their board or investment partners who've been through difficult experiences and who've been through challenging times because they're going to go through those without doubt. And it helps to have someone who's lived through some of that themselves in some of the region or some other arena in some way. So, you know, Lars really has, if you look at his background, we're very early employee at both Uber and Dropbox. He's witnessed incredible growth in two very interesting, complex areas. He was also an early advisor of WhatsApp, so he knows what it's like to be on one of these rocket ships. There's a lot of kind of experience and understanding and knowledge that comes from that kind of.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Hiring is impossibly difficult because when you hire someone, you're bringing them on as a complete equal. It's very difficult to remove them after that. It's very difficult to sort of try them out for a while. There's no try as you buy before you buy. So, you know, we can take months and years to sort of hire people.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “That kind of thing is, you know, if you have an unequal partnership, let's say you have senior partners and a couple of junior partners, those junior partners are essentially competing with each other to an extent to try and be the guy or the gal who gets the promotion up to be a senior partner next. So what does that mean? What that means is that if they've got a deal that they've done and that deal now needs some help because maybe things haven't gone quite as well as they'd hoped or whatever, the other junior partner arguably has a bit of an incentive to talk down this company's chances, even if he or she doesn't believe in that because they know that if that investment fails, they'll have a better chance of getting that brooture. There's a lot of politics that goes on that basically has impact on innocence and in particular on other companies. And so we get to get rid of all of those things about having this equal partnership structure. So I think it works a lot, lot better. However, to your question, it's not more efficient. And the reason it's not more efficient is because by being equal, there isn't like a small group that can carry a vote. So everyone has to talk. Everyone has view has to be taken into account.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Not sure it's the most efficient model, but I think it's the best model. So what this means basically is that Bolsonaro is an equal partnership. There are very few venture capital firms that are equal partnerships, certainly over time. And what equal partnership means is that there are six partners at Wales and today. And all of those six partners are entirely equal. They all have exactly the same number of votes in every single deal that we make. They can bring the same number of deals, invest the number of same investments, and also all of their compensation is completely identical. So we get paid the same salary. If our companies do well, the person who led that investment doesn't do better than the others. They all do exactly the same. So we're in it together. I think it works a lot, lot better because it destroys a lot of the politics that exists in a lot of venture capital firms. And the problem with the politics is not the politics itself because people like that drama sometimes, but it's more the impact it has on great companies that could do otherwise better. So what I mean by...”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “But the other reason why it's really important is because more and more of us will have to look after that kind of thing for ourselves. 20 years ago, if you look at our parents or our parents' parents' generations, pensions were generally handled entirely by the state or by large employers. That won't be the case for this generation and certainly not for the next generation. So there are lots of interesting toolkits and tools like that that the society will need as things change.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, I mean, look, like any portfolio, like any portfolio business, venture capital is a matter of balancing your risk by making a variety of investments in a variety of areas. But for sure, as a firm, we are going to make some really interesting, very futuristic investments, and we have made some already, and we'll do some more. Many of them are under the radar because that's the way these things are usually. We just announced our investment in curious AI, for example, which is a fascinating company that's building a complete AI, complete artificial intelligence in a whole new way that people hadn't thought was possible until quite recently. So there are some interesting sort of big bets in the real future. But then there'll also be a lot of stuff, as I say, that's shorter term, that it's really to do with the fact that society is changing and therefore the nature of the tools we all need will change. So look at a company like Nutmeg, which is, you know, allows people to manage and plan their pensions online. Part of the reason that many people pick it is because it's cheap and it's efficient and it's frankly better than a lot of the options on the high street.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Possible. There'll be other companies like that that will change our lives around drones, around virtual reality, around machine learning and so on. So there's these fundamental changes that kind of change the basic toolkit we have and it's always fun to see what gets built on top. So I'm really interested in that. The second big area that I'm really interested in is not necessarily just pure technology, but it's the societal impact of what we're doing right now. I grew up in Manchester and if you grew up in Manchester, one of the things you learn a lot is”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “In general, well, I think so, there's sort of two things that intrigue me about technology going forward. So there'll be lots and lots of great companies beyond these two areas, but there is a bunch of very interesting new technologies that are going to, I think, change the infrastructure in a big way. So there's a few different ones, but classic examples include virtual reality, include drones and other kinds of autonomous vehicles. Basically, these things have become possible because of the developments in certain types of technology, primarily miniaturization of computing power driven by mobile phones, but also things like the sort of availability and cost, the lowering cost, things like cameras. And the beauty of those developments is that it sort of changes the rules on what actually can be done. So in the same way that a couple like Uber could not have possibly existed until mobile phones existed, but once they did actually became very, very”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “People laughed at it a lot that anyone would spend a billion dollars on a company like that with whatever it was, 12 employees and a photo app company was, I think, the way people sort of derived it. But he understood the trajectory it was on and the direction it was going in. And he was absolutely right. Think about how big Instagram feels now and how big it actually is, if you look at the actual number. So, you know, he has the guts to do that kind of thing. I'm looking forward to seeing WhatsApp, which is a huge acquisition. And of course, Oculus Riff, also a huge acquisition that seemed weird at the time that were beginning to understand now. So, you know, it's great to see someone have the energy of youth and kind of excitement and dynamism that he has with the sort of checkbook and kind of ability to change the world that he has, you know, still very, very much in his game.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Particularly around maintaining that CEO role. I think he's become an excellent role model for a lot of technical CEOs. It's not right for everybody, but I meet a lot of technology people who are nervous about being the CEO and who feel they need to sort of listen to the gray hairs in the room or the person with the NBA. And Zuckerberg clearly doesn't. I mean, he's very happy to use people like that, to listen to them and take their insight, but he doesn't sort of do what they tell him to do. So I think I've been very impressed by his ability to do that. The other thing that he does, which is amazing, is he has the confidence to make absolute massive big bets when it matters. Things like his Instagram acquisition. So Instagram recently, I think it was last month, exceeded Twitter for the number of users. And if you look at the numbers, Twitter is, I forget what exactly, but somewhere between 5 and $10 billion company, Instagram he acquired for a billion dollars. At the time, it seemed crazy.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Product, you know, it's just sort of legendary. You'd get emails from them any time of the night or morning, ask you questions about detailed bits of your code or whatever. And also, who's an incredibly strategic thinker? For two or three decades, he thought ahead of everybody else consistently, every single time, which is pretty remarkable. I can't think of many other people who've been able to achieve that. I think the power of what he did has become sadly visible since he stepped away from Microsoft day to day, because unfortunately, although Steve Bulmer and so on are great executives, clearly very smart, very able people, it struggled because that job is really hard. And I think it shows since he stepped away that that's happened. The good news is, of course, he's doing arguably even greater things with his talents now, which is fantastic. The other more recent CEO that I'll pick out is Mark Zuckerberg, who I think is absolutely phenomenal. Two things about him. One is the confidence that he had.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “That's a difficult question. Look, there have been lots of great CEOs. I think I'm a huge Bill Gates fan, and I'll say that because a lot of people aren't for whatever reason. And I think that's really people misunderstand him. He has an energy and attention to detail that's absolutely phenomenal, if you like. If you talk to any early Microsoft about how much Bill G, as he was known internally,”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, I think a good CEO is both at different times. So the question really is a situation occurs, when do you do which? And look, it's really, really hard to call that. I think a lot of it is to do with hiring the right people beneath you. If you hire the right team around you that you're working with, then many, many decisions are decisions for their team. So if you have a great CTO, then what technologians should be his or hers? If you have a great chief marketing officer, then any PR crisis you're dealing with should be his or her problem. And you should really listen to them and take their advice. I think where you step in is in the area is in between these. When things contradict, when there are topics that are owned by multiple departments at the same time, or where you just know you have a weak team.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Get out of the way. And that's a really, really hard balance because, of course, it's very, very contradictory. There are times when a bunch of people will be telling you what to do and pulling in different directions and you just need to walk in and say, forget it, we're doing this. And I don't care what the rest of you say, I'm the CEO, I'm taking charge, here's what we do. And there are other times when everybody's asking you for help and saying, what do you think? What do you think, when actually you need to say, I don't know either? We need to figure this out as a team or, you know, I trust you. You take whatever decision you think you should take. the judgment call of knowing when to be in charge and when to be jackdorsey calls it the editor you know and not really being in charge but instead of just sort of letting other people flourish is a is a really tough thing to do”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Don't know. I mean, I've had the pleasure of working with some really, really great CEOs and seeing them in action up close. I think there are a number of traits that sort of matter, but there are different combinations of these traits and they're a very, very different successful CEOs. If you look at people who've done well out there, I think that certainly technology, if we just sort of focus in on that, one thing that's key is someone who viscerally understands the product that they're building and the marketplace that product lives in. You know, if you look at someone like Steve Jobs, that's what he understood. If you look at someone like Bill Gates, that's what he understood. I think that's crucial. It doesn't mean you have to be a technical person, but you certainly need to understand what it is you're building in a very visceral way. It can't be analyzed through just data by sort of reading lots of things. It's something you've got to just get in your glow. And then apart from that, I think the other big thing about being CEO is sort of judgment, knowing when you have to lean in and take charge and do things and when you have to actually step away.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, I think, so honestly, it sounds like a bit of a joke, but I think the only way you can do it is by not really having another life outside work. I think most CEOs can pull off sort of two things in their life. So, you know, maybe they have a family and they have a job. You can probably pull off that. Certainly when I was CEO, I felt like I had a family and I had my job and didn't really have much of anything else beyond that. No hobbies, no social life, nothing like that. So maybe Jack can do it by basically not having social life, family, or anything else. I don't think he's married, you know. So maybe he can do it by just working essentially. The good news is the companies are not conflicting in any way, so there's no chance of him having some kind of awkward situation where he feels he's on the fence because he sort of has two different companies to deliver value to. The other good thing is that actually because they're so”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, I think that there's a sort of belief in technology, there's been a historical belief that the technical person who comes up with the innovation or the product probably shouldn't be the CEO. I think that idea has well and truly been replaced in the US where it's okay to do that if you want to do that, but it's also okay to stay in charge. So you have very, very prominent cases like someone like Mark Zuckerberg, for example, or Jack Dorsey, for example, who product and technology people who've stayed in charge of their companies and been the CEO. And I think that belief and that sort of model of bringing in a professional CEO, someone who has an MBA, it doesn't really exist in the US, but it still exists to a certain extent here in Europe. And I certainly suffered from it back when we were starting our company, which now is almost 10 years ago.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Came across the bulletin team and realised it's an opportunity to join the firm as a partner, so I did that when I returned about 12 months ago now.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Took the company public, and most sort of proudly we built a team of about 300 people who were all doing great things in the company. And then really at that stage it became very different sort of challenge for me, sort of a great company and lots of interesting things to do, but not really my kind of thing. I'm definitely someone who enjoys the early stage of companies more than later stages. And so at that point, sort of with a few of the things I wanted to achieve checked off, I decided to quit. So I retired, handed over the reins to my second in commander. And then I spent a couple of years kind of working on startups and doing some advisory stuff and so on, all in the Bay Area. And then I decided that I wanted to come back to Europe because I'd spent some time back here at that point and realized that there was a lot of interesting stuff going on with venture and entrepreneurship and way more interesting companies being set up in Europe than ever were before I left 10 years earlier. And yeah, so I decided to come back. And then luckily when I sort of planned my coming back night,”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Team decided to make more sense to spin it out and make it a separate company. So we found a new team. That company was interestingly based on autonomy technology originally around the analysis of video content. But like many great startups, it pivoted about three or four times before it found its real true calling. And that true calling turned out to be an advertising business. So we basically built an engine which would use things like speech recognition and visual analysis to understand the meaning inside video content and then use that meaning to target better ads within that content. And it turned out that if you could target ads that were more relevant video unsurprisingly, they sort of performed better and you could charge more for them and we could keep a portion of that uplift revenue that people would get. And that was the business model that worked for Blinks. And so in my time as CEO at Blinks, we went from zero to about $200 million of revenue. We went to profitability.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I'm not sure it's that exciting, but yeah, I'm originally an engineer, so I studied computer science at university and technology was definitely my first love from an early age. And that led me to working for a number of different technology companies, both in Britain, where I grew up, but also in the US. And the last of those really was autonomy, which is a Cambridge-based software company that I started working for in the UK but then ultimately moved me to the US and I became their US CTO for a number of years over in San Francisco. And that took me to the Bay Area. And when I got there, I sort of started to fall in love with the whole startup culture and this idea that anyone could start a company as long as they had a good idea and a great team. And I was sort of really biding my time for that opportunity. And before too long, it came along. And me and a couple of my friends at Autonomy started a project internally that gained a lot of traction, looks very interesting, and we and the autonomy.”

    2015-11-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source