00:00:00 · S0
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00:00:29 · Surojit Chatterjee
[00:00:29] S1: So I grew up in a lower middle class family, almost a third tier town in India. In my town, at that time, there was only one person with a car. I really loved math. I was very good at it. I just wanted to learn more math. Someone told my dad, you should put your son in computer science because that's the next big thing. And that's what probably got me into one of the top colleges in India called lucky to get to Google in early days. I ran a couple of things at Google, Google's mobile advertising, which actually I happened to prove that to $50,000,000,000 in revenue before joining a company called Flipkart in India, where I was Chief Product Officer. Second time I joined Google, I worked on Google's Product Search. Most recently, I was Chief Product Officer at Coinbase and helped Coinbase through their IPO. I am Surojit Chatterjee. I'm founder and CEO of Ema. The full name of the company is Enterprise Machine Assistant, EMA. We built Ema as what we call a universal AI employee. So the idea is Ema can collaborate with human employees and take a lot of the repetitive, tedious tasks that humans do today in enterprise. So I grew up in India. I went to one of the top technical institutes in India called IIT. I was an engineer in early years of my my journey. Got a business degree from MIT. I was confused that, oh, should I be a consultant, investment banker? And it took me a little bit of time to realize, no, I am a technologist at heart. And I need to go back and just focus more on technology. Quite lucky to get to Google in early days. I had no idea what product management was before joining Google, to be honest. And I was an engineer at a business degree. I interviewed at Google, and they said, you can be a product manager and hired me. They told me, oh, your first job will be in actually payments and billing and fixing the Google's payments product. I have no idea what it is. And I'm like, yeah, that's fine. Just go learn and figure it out. That was really interesting for me, that kind of culture where we hire really good people, really smart people, and we believe they can figure out anything. I was very lucky to... I had the opportunity to actually cofound Google's Mobile Ads team. So another engineer and myself, we started very modest team working on mobile advertising at Google, grew that business from 0 to $50,000,000,000 in revenue.
00:03:09 · Surojit Chatterjee
See, at Google, I built stuff that were many times incredibly hard to build. Many people told me they were impossible to build. This happens all the time in larger companies because people, someone will try the product that you were trying to build before and they might have failed. They'll tell you, Oh, no, no, don't try it. It already failed. Some of my biggest learning was, you know, how to take on very ambitious idea, believe in my conviction, believe in my gut on those ideas, and really risk it all. I would always go to work. I would tell my team, you know, I'm ready to be fired today. But not doing anything unethical or illegal, but pursuing my idea. When I was running mobile ads, so I came up with the idea of click to call ads. There's a button to call. You can call the advertiser directly that now it's a multibillion dollar business for Google. You would think it's the most obvious idea today, but for some reason, there's tremendous resistance internally. We wanted to go and experiment in Google. You experiment everything. And Google had this massive experimentation framework. To launch anything, you need to get, like, significant volume. Like, you need to show a statistical significance of your feature. And at that time, on mobile, the number of users were really low. So if we just follow the norms of Google at that time, which is large desktop business, the mobile features will take at least nine months or a year each to gather enough data to launch. That just seems like too long, and the the mobile industry is moving really fast. We can't wait that long. Let's make a mistake and turn this feature on for 50% of the users. And how long would it take? Like, okay, only just a few weeks. If somebody finds out, of of course they will find out. I'll take the blame. And what are they going to do? Fire me, maybe. That's fine. So we made a mistake and launched that feature 50%. Of course, I had to go and explain what happened, but then, well, actually it is working really well. Let's not unleash it. And a lot of things we had to do in early days was breaking the norms. When you build a lot of success, you create some norms for that success. And that becomes an innovator for the next success because those norms is actually stopping you from innovating. So everything I did on mobile, I had to break a lot of norms. There are many, many projects I did.
00:05:50 · Surojit Chatterjee, S0
There's enormous internal resistance. Google has really smart people. Right? If bunch of smart people are vehemently against my idea, I think there is something good in it. That actually gets me fired up to pursue that idea. I think the conviction on your ideas is very important attribute of a product manager of any leader. Right? Of course, not stupid conviction, but conviction to the extent that you want to take it all the way and test it out. That's how I have lived my career, trying out things that often seemed contradictory and often seemed out there a little bit. I was running Ad[00:06:30] S0: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed dot com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
00:06:59 · Surojit Chatterjee
[00:06:59] S1: Google Ads at Google, doing extremely well. I got promoted many times. It was the fastest growing and largest business at Google at that time. You would think there is no reason to leave. Back of my mind, I was getting a little worried that I will never leave. It's kind of so comfortable in some way. I have done well. And that was kind of worrying me a little bit that, oh, I may become like a lifer, I just want to learn, always learn more. But the Flipkart thing was completely serendipitous. I was visiting a bunch of customers in India. What was curious was Indian customers like Flipkart and others at that time had already made the leap to mobile. So India was a mobile first company. They skipped the desktop generation. So a lot of the e commerce was 90% of the GMV or the net revenue was from mobile, which is very different from developed markets where at that time, it was still 90% was on desktop or maybe 80% was on desktop. So it was great to see that. I was very curious about that. Going back to India and meeting a lot of these customers, I thought, this is the kind of completely different thing that I could do from Google. It's a different country, very different business. I would just learn a lot. India was the last place where ecommerce should have gone in those times. So if you think about it, the three ingredients for e commerce: Internet, electronic payments, and logistics. At that time, very few Indians had credit cards or debit cards. The road infrastructure was very poor. So Flipkart as a company had to take on this enormous challenge of the infrastructure of the country to build e commerce for a billion people. So how do you get a product like a village in India? A second tier, third tier town in India. We had to design special trucks that were thin, that could go through small lanes and alleys. So we had to solve a lot of those technical challenges, logistical challenges. That was really amazing learning for me. So Flipkart actually got into an agreement to get bought over by Walmart. That was kind of the motivation for me to come back and rejoin Google. Running a company is different from popularity contest. You cannot please everyone. And whenever... If you try to please everyone as you grow your company, then you will definitely degenerate your culture.
00:09:39 · Surojit Chatterjee
The next three years at Google, when I ran shopping, Google was becoming a place which was not very enjoyable to work anymore. Google had actually, as a company, changed dramatically from cultural perspective. Some of the things that were very positive about Google had degenerated into being very negative. So Google was a place where people would always express their opinion very freely. People could discuss anything. But you can take that to an extreme and then discuss anything and everything that is outside the scope of Google's main mission or the business, and everybody is distracted. So I felt actually very fortunate to leave Google, have done something else, have seen something different. At every stage of growth, there is a risk that your culture will degenerate because you are hiring new people. You have to learn how to work in a different setting and so on. So you have to be very aware and very deliberate, very intentional to maintain culture. In fact, you have to take a stance that this is our culture. If you as an individual don't align with our culture, there are other opportunities out there, other options out there. Yes, it's possible to maintain the culture, but you have to be ready to be unpopular, make hard calls, and be very intentional about maintaining the culture. Look, I have run very large teams, grown teams in companies like Google, Coinbase, Flipkart, some of the best companies in the world. And one thing that always bothered me, we hired really talented people, but then a large percentage of their time was still spent in repetitive work. So the idea behind Ema is, can we automate most of the mundane tasks people have to do in enterprises and free them up to do more value added, more creative tasks? In our journey, first thing is we walked very closely with customers very, very early on. We built the product actually working with multiple customers as design partners. So from the get go, we knew there is a need. We knew if you build it, at least there are a few customers. And I think the trick is to figure out, okay, are these the only customers who will use it or there is a broader demand? So you have to talk to enough customers to recognize patterns and make sure, okay, whatever you are building is not too custom for this given customer.