#13: Ragy Thomas, Sprinklr

Welcome to From Startup to Grownup, the podcast. My name is Alisa Cohn. I'm an executive coach, an angel investor, and the author of From Startup to Grownup. Each week I talk to founders, creators, advisors, investors, and builders of all kinds about their insights and experiences in going from startup to grownup. This is episode number 13. Lucky 13. And I'm so lucky to have Rajee Thomas on the show today. Rajee is the founder and CEO of Sprinklr. Sprinklr is a social media and customer management company. It helps the world's biggest companies manage their social media across over 30 digital channels and make their customers happier. Now, I don't think Rajee knows this, but in many ways he was one of the inspirations for this podcast. I met him originally on Zoom cocktails gathering during the pandemic, We've run into each other again at Web Summit in Lisbon, and I was incredibly struck by Rajeev's depth and the way he thought about leadership and company building and just about life. And I'm eager to have those kinds of conversations. So with that and other things in mind, I started this podcast to have a context to have those deeper discussions. And Rajeev did not disappoint. We really got into it in this discussion from how he grew up in a family that looked down on business to becoming a multi-time entrepreneur with just bringing Sprinklr public in June 2021, and why his wife cried when he told her about wanting to start Sprinklr. We discuss his abundance mindset, and of course we get into culture, and Raji talks about the advice that changed his life. There are so many gems of wisdom in this discussion, so get ready and please enjoy my conversation with Raji Thomas. Raji, welcome to the show. I am so excited to have you and there's so much to talk about, but I first wanna start that I, I know that you've said in the past that you've came from an entre— an anti-entrepreneurial family. So very often when I interview founders, it turns out they have an entrepreneurial family and a lineage, but you have an anti-entrepreneurial family. I'd love to hear about that. They actually thought business was evil. Can you tell us about that?

Well, my extended family did not have any business people in it. And they were largely professionals, teachers or lawyers or doctors. And so, their concept of doing business with someone who was taking advantage of others just based on the local businesses they had seen. And so there was really no respect for someone trying to build a business in any form or shape.

It's really something, especially to see how you, you know, sort of found your way. How did you find your way to the business path and the entrepreneurial path if that was the kind of environment you grew up in?

I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I wasn't someone who had lemonade stands or grew up wanting, knowing and wanting to be an entrepreneur or starting a business. Um, during the dot-com time, you know, for those who don't remember, that's the late '90s, early 2000s. I was with a startup company and I was building a product for them, which eventually we spun out and became my first startup experience in— and that was in email marketing. So I just ended up being in a situation where the prudent thing to do, the only option out, was to try make something out of something that was going to fail. And that's how I got into entrepreneurship.

When you say— what do you mean by make something out of something that was going to fail?

This company that we were working for at that time, um, was a dot-com startup that was trying to do a version of Netflix before there was bandwidth, and they was trying to sell DVDs over the internet and then trying to stream, and the market and the infrastructure was not ready for it. And so they had money in the bank, they had taken the company public, but it was clear that the company was not going to survive in the long run. And so the need was to salvage what we could out of it. And we had built an internal email marketing platform that eventually became the foundation for the company we built outside of the parent entity.

I see. So, did you volunteer for that or did someone kind of put you into that? And what was that like as you embarked on taking the spinoff and trying to make something of it?

Well, it just happened. I was the person building the platform and I just teamed up with the other folks that wanted to do it, and it, it just happened. It wasn't planned or intentional.

So it's just— so it just sort of happened and you kind of went with it. And then kind of how did you get from there? I think you had a few other experiences before you founded Sprinklr, is that right?

That's right. So, um, well, you know, what led me to even the first startup is two things. One, I hate to leave things without completing it. And so once you start, you finish. And this was the logical way to finish or continue to try to finish the product that we were building. Two, I have a crazy fear of failure, um, and I just didn't want to fail at building and bringing this product to life. So that was the foundation for the first company, which was called Advaya. And I came up with the name because it's a Sanskrit word that means second to none. And, and then that became— evolved into what became my second startup experience, which was called Bigfoot Interactive. We sold that in 2015 to a publicly traded company called Alliance Data Systems and its Epsilon division. I was the CTO, Chief Technology Officer, of Bigfoot Interactive, and after the sale, in a few months, I ended up running what was then called Epsilon Interactive, which was the email marketing division or the digital marketing division of Epsilon. And I quit that to found Sprinklr.

Oh, so you quit that to found Sprinklr. What I guess I want to come back to this idea of you having a big fear of failure, which I have heard you talk about in other interviews. What are you kind of what's in there for you when you talk about being afraid to fail? Like, what is that like? Can you describe that?

I don't want to find out what that's like. I see. So I keep playing until there's a resolution I tend to like.

I see. So it's like about never giving up.

It's about never giving up. And then you're there, you just Called out one of our Sprinklr's core values. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

I can see how that's, you know, values are so much a shadow of a leader. And they're like values in a company are so much made up of what the leader has to offer. And so I can tell that that's something that must permeate inside of Sprinklr. You know, I'd love to hear more about sort of how you got to founding Sprinklr. You know, you said you left Bigfoot and you founded Sprinklr. Like, what was the founding idea? And how did you sort of decide that you wanted to put yourself once again into an entrepreneurial journey?

Well, Epsilon Interactive at that time— this I'm talking about 2005, 2006— was arguably the largest enterprise email marketing company in the world at that time. And I had the good fortune of watching email marketing evolve as an industry. And in my early days with Advaya and with Bigfoot Interactive, um, we would go meet CMOs who were so married to the concept of direct mail as their primary direct marketing channel. And I remember many, many conversations where I would try to convince them that email is the way to do direct marketing in the future, and many of them didn't buy that at that time. Um, and so having seen the movie play out where consumers embrace email and then businesses, for sure, slowly but surely move to using that channel, there was no doubt in my mind that this is the way the world's going to work. We did not invent phone to do telemarketing or telephone customer care. We didn't invent TV to do advertising. And so, what you'll find is that these channels are solving unmet consumer needs to communicate better. And as consumers flock to new channels, invariably businesses have to meet customers where they are and the way they want to be communicated to. So after we sold the business, if I can take you back to 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, it was obvious to me that Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube were all just going to continue to grow. And there were 20 more social channels at that time that don't exist now, names like MySpace and others. But it was clear to me that they were all just trying to create the next evolved way to communicate digitally. And knowing email as a channel intimately allowed me to understand the problems that email had when you're trying to communicate at scale. You know, email did not have a permission framework. Eventually, we had to rely on legislation. There was no way back then to differentiate different types of email. So I could send you a coupon, or I could send you your bank statement. They both appeared in your inbox the same way. And email did not have the ability to support photos and videos in a native way. We just sent it as an attachment. And back then, if you had an attachment, you were more likely to get that email flagged as spam. And so I had a clear understanding of the problems I wanted to solve. And when I saw YouTube and Flickr and Facebook and Twitter and others, I'm like, oh my God, It's not just this one company versus the other. These new generation of communication channels are solving the problems that we had with email. So it was obvious to me that these are going to take off. And I had spent almost a decade building business software to use email as a channel. So it was— I had conviction that businesses are going to need an enterprise platform to take these, what was then called social media channels and now messaging channels, and use them to reach, engage, and listen to customers. So I wasn't looking to start a company. In fact, I remember suggesting to someone at Epsilon and Adia saying, hey, we got to get into these channels. And this is going to be the future. However, Epsilon Interactive at that time was a fairly decent-sized division, and as the president, I had to focus on things that would move the revenue needle. You know, this is sort of the innovator's dilemma, uh, where once you have a lot of revenue, then you need ideas that would move the revenue needle in the short term. And so, it was clear to me that I was not going to be able to pursue that there. And, that's what led me to come back home and tell my wife, "Hey, we're going to do it one more time." What did she say? Well, we're still debating it because my real recollection of that was her breaking down into tears.

Oh, wow!

And, saying, "Are you sure?" Because we just Finally, we have money stashed away to send the kids to school and for us to retire. Um, and, and you just— you're in a place where, you know, it's just this kind of— the startup stress is behind you. Because starting a company and being in a startup, it's glamorous once you're successful. It's just painful as you go through it. Um, and, and now To be fair, her version of that story doesn't involve the tears or the, or the skepticism. But, you know, let's just say I was able to, to win that argument. And then I also said to her, look, listen, I'm going to make it worse. I'm going to fund it with our money, literally taking back the safety nest that we had put together with the previous startups and just putting it back on the table one more time.

Raji, there's so much to unpack in that story. My goodness. So I get it. So you went to your wife and you told her this, and either she cried or didn't cry. But the point is that you had already achieved some success. Let's face it, success. And also in particular, you had financial security. What was driving you to disrupt that? I'm going to talk about bootstrapping in a second, but specifically, like, what was this— what was driving you to disrupt that, to go back to the stress that you pointed out of a startup?

When you do multiple startups, you tend to learn things from those experiences. And I love putting together patterns and just going back to first principles every single time. And so I'd learned a few patterns from doing startups, and I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to apply some of those learnings back one more time and just roll the dice. I couldn't answer the question— I can't answer the question why I did it. I probably still can't, but I'm glad I did.

Yep, it sounds like— if I can just sort of take what you just said— it sounds like you have an inner drive that one way or the other wants to seek, wants to learn, wants to know. And so it's like this idea and you've got to pursue it. And that's probably combined with maybe at least a slightly above average risk tolerance, maybe even risk seeking.

That is true, Alisa Cohn, but I would also fess up to an uncomfortable fact. After you do startups and you are in control of your destiny, You become unemployable. You just lose your ability to follow directions that don't make sense to you. You could also attribute a part of me going back and starting another company to my realization that, hey, I think I'm unemployable.

I see, right? Unemployable maybe because your skill set as a CEO is a certain skill set, but also to your point, because You're not willing to go in and follow the rules. You're someone who has to make the rules.

That, that will be right. That's one way to put it.

Yeah. Wow. So then not only were you going to take the startup again, but actually you were going to take the money out of your bank account, your little nest egg, and use it yourself when you could very well have gone out and raised some money, especially you, a successful entrepreneur. What drove that decision?

I don't know whether it's Eastern Asian thinking, but, uh, there is Well, also remember, I don't come from a business background. So for many people, money is very personal. And what I learned through my previous lives with startups was if you raise money early, most of the company is owned by somebody else, which is just not a great situation to be in because you're the one doing all the work. On the flip side, When you lose, you're answerable to all those people for losing their money. Now, that's startup life, that's how entrepreneurs are, shouldn't be a big deal. But for some reason, it was a big deal for me. I was more comfortable losing my money where probably the only person I had to console was my wife. But I just didn't feel like I would have to awkwardly explain why I lost somebody else's money. And so that for me was a black and white decision. And I'll give you a third reason. So one is, you know, if you win, you own most of the company. If you lose, you're losing your money. You're not answerable to anyone. And number three, if you take apart how the venture capital world works, when you pitch a VC, you're one of 10,000 people wanting their money. When you become successful, you're one of 20 companies they are trying to desperately get into. So I'm like, listen, if I win, they're going to come after me anyway. If I lose, I don't have to answer to anyone. So it was just super clear that I should just fund it myself and find out whether there's a real business here that's going to be successful.

I see that. That is definitely part of your makeup. I can really see that. And I think that you did ultimately take some money for some external money. Is that because you proved the business model and they indeed came after you? What happened?

Yeah, yeah. So, Neeraj from Battery tells the story. So, I started getting inbound pitches because most of these companies have junior people dialing outbound, trying to identify and get to companies that have come out of that startup. With, with relative success, um, that others can't see. Um, and so I was getting inbound calls, um, that, that just validated what I assumed all along. Um, and the question I would ask all of them was, what can you bring to the table other than money? Because your money just looks, looks like everybody else's money. So what can you bring that is outside of the money that can help us. And so, that was my gating criteria.

I love how you frame that because what you said at first was, if you're asking for money, you're one of 10,000 companies asking for money. But if you're successful, you're one of the 20 companies that they're coming to the table. So, like, it's the same, it's the question in reverse, which is, well, what can you bring to the table because we're already successful?

Right. The world wants to help you when you don't need help. People want to give you money when you don't need money. The flipping of not having to having, it's a mindset. And that is precisely what I think entrepreneurs should figure out how to learn to do.

Yes. How did you— did you learn— like, it sounds like you had that mindset, but I'm wondering, as you went through that process, did you deepen that mindset? Did you learn anything new or get any new facets of that mindset yourself?

No, my— inside my brain is copious amounts of abundance. I wanna be, in my life, I wanna be a net giver, meaning I wanna give more than I take from anyone, anything, or the universe. And that just leads me to think differently, act differently, Behave differently. And that's a mindset that I always had. And when you go back and, you know, start afresh, it gets tested. But I just— when in doubt, go back to who you are.

Yeah. Are there some ways that you could share that it's gotten tested that you could describe as a story or two?

Sure. Starting Sprinklr was a big test. And I think when you see a successful company, what you're seeing is something that withstood 1,000 death sentences. And, and so what you're building is not the muscle to survive one test. You're not winning that test. You're building the muscle to be resilient and to win anything. So you're figuring out how to be creative. You're figuring out how to create something from very little or limited resources. And so where does that come from? And it always has to come from inside you. Everything on the planet is created twice. Once it's created in somebody's head, and then it's created outside. And to do that, you know, there has to be— you have to think abundance. You cannot think scarcity.

And how— when you think about the stress, and then to your point, the thousand death sentences, just talking about Sprinkler, that you encountered in your early days. Can you share maybe one or two really low moments and how you're able to overcome that?

Sure. You know, when you were starting out and you bootstrapped and you were working out of your bedroom and money's coming out of your checking account, every client win and every client loss is kind of a partial strategic, you know, move one way or the other to, to a death sentence or to, to success to the next level. Um, I, I recall a client that we just spent months and months chasing. We built everything they needed. They loved us, and the practitioners swore by wanting to use us and putting up the fight. And we put all the resources we had into making this customer happy. And we did the proof of concept, and they made the decision to go with us, only to be overruled by someone super senior who had an investment in a competitor.

Ouch.

Um, and I was— and I remember when we got the news of the cancellation of the awarding of the RFP. I mean, the team was devastated. And the instinct was, "Let's just wipe everything away from the servers," you know, because they were using us at that point. And I said, "No, let's just keep it on." Yeah, I know, no game is ever lost if you're still playing. Sure enough, and, you know, 3 months later, I got another call reversing the reversal, and they become a client, and they are a large happy customer with thousands of people on the platform worldwide today. We have another story. Again, these customer stories are very personal. And another story where a customer fired us, well, literally told us they were firing us. And, and I, I told the person who gave me the news to tell the customer that he was not able to find me. And I got on a plane at 3 o'clock and I showed up in their office, or that was the plan. So I get up at 3, my kids were little, get on a plane. I'm like, dude, you tell them that I'm on my way only after I leave the— I'm on the plane and I'll call you when I land in Chicago because this was out on the West Coast, West Coast. And you just, just tell me how it goes and just tell them I'm on my way. What are you gonna do? Um, and so I land in Chicago, I call this person, I say, hey, how did it go? Uh, where am I gonna meet her, the customer? And he goes, dude, get back on another plane and come back home because she's on vacation today.

Oh wow, ouch.

Um, so I say, she's alive, right? Yes. I don't care where she's on vacation, find out where she's on vacation, I'm getting on a plane. So I get on the next plane, I land, I had no idea. And it turns out that we found out that she was just taking a day off and kind of at home. So I said, look, I'm here. I spent 10 hours on a plane to come meet you. Would you give me 30 minutes? And I'll meet you wherever you want me to meet you. And she agreed to meet me at a coffee shop, and she probably thought I was a lunatic. But she agreed to meet me, and I told her, look, it's not about the money you pay us. It's not the right thing for you. And they're another happy big customer right now. So there are your two stories.

That is really— I could see also how important just the customer is to you. Like when people talk about the different stresses of startups, and there are many, they talk about different aspects of it 'cause it's all hard. But I could see how personal it is for you to have the relationship with these customers.

It's about them. No customer, no business.

Yeah. That's so beautiful. So as you grew the startup, you know, you, like everybody, really had to shift from being a doer. I mean, even in those stories you talk about, really, you are the one doing that. And if you're bootstrapping, you're really connected to that doing because this this is your money coming out. At what point did you begin to transition and realize that you needed to really empower a whole bunch of doers and be the leader of those doers? And what was that journey like?

Well, I was lucky enough to have had that journey in my previous life before Sprinklr because we ended up having 26 offices around the world and a lot of people. But, you know, I remember that as being a very tough transition for me, and frankly for a lot of people, because you— for people who take pride in what they do, um, they're craftsmen, you know, they do things a certain way, they pay a lot of attention to what they do and how they do it and the outcome that they create. And very often nobody else will do it the way you would have done it, and it's a tough thing to watch someone else do something in a different way— right, wrong, indifferent— but different way than you would. And to pass the baton over when you take ownership of the end broader team outcome is very hard. I see a lot of people struggle with it, but it's a one-way street. You got to get past it, and you've got to really accept that everybody is talented in their own ways. And you've got to start being really empathetic. You got to start really looking at the good and trying to understand, oh, that's not how I would have done it, but this could be better than what I could have done it. And then the other humbling lesson is to surround yourself with smarter people than you are, better people than you are. Um, and, and when you do, it's such a beautiful thing, and it takes a long time to check your ego in, to delegate, and then to surround yourself with people that you look around, God, gosh, these people do things better than I do. Then you go like, okay, my job is to be a servant leader, bringing them all together and keeping them going, right?

Absolutely. When you, um, when you were first able— I, I understand very much the sort of almost mourning, you know, the entrepreneurs that I work with as they grow into leaders, there's almost like a grief or a mourning for not being able to tinker with the product or have that direct customer contact anymore. Because to your point, they're like leading an enterprise. Was there one— was there a mindset that you shifted on to sort of see that you had to do that? Or was it like a moment of realization? Or was it a whole bunch of mistakes that you made and you realized, oh, this is not sustainable? How did you kind of finally get there and get over your own mourning on that?

Well, I was lucky to have had learned that with my first startup, right? And there's a moment in my life people ask me like, what's the biggest lesson that you learned early on in your startup journey? And I'm about to tell you that, um, it is, it is, uh, well, let me tell you the story. So I worked for a, a person who had a PhD in computing, computer science, whatever, mathematician. Who's a drummer in a rock band, tall, handsome, like a perfect package, and who was young and living his life. And I was just working so hard and working for him building this product. And I would go on and on about how I didn't sleep and I didn't eat, and my team worked so hard and we got this done, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I remember once it was a Friday evening and he was busy trying to go to a party. He was all dressed up and we are in downtown New York by the seaport area. And you know, you have these cobblestones and he's waiting for a taxi by the street. And I'm— he's walking up to trying to find a taxi. I'm walking behind him. I'm on and on about, oh, this is taking so long. I put in this, that. I didn't have breakfast, you know. I didn't— I haven't taken a weekend off. And meanwhile, he's just trying to get a taxi, you know. He's busy in his own world. It's like running late. And it just went on and on for 6, 7 minutes. And he's walking, I'm walking behind him. And finally, uh, he flags the taxi down, and he's not saying anything to me, and I'm really irritated at that point. And as the, um, as he pulls in, he leans in, and just before he shuts his door, he puts his head out and he says to me, Raji, efforts don't matter, results do. And he slams the yellow door in and takes off. I was devastated. And that was the last time I talked about all the effort that anybody she put into anything, and I started only looking at outcomes. So coming back to your previous question, how do you deal with the grief of not tinkering? You do that by switching your thinking from what you're doing and the effort to outcome. You learn to look at what's coming out, and then you learn that you don't have to do everything. You just start obsessing about making what's coming out better. That changed my life.

I can imagine. Wow. And I love that shift. I really love that shift. The idea of not taking pleasure in the work but taking pleasure in the outcome overall and in the smooth running of the outcome and realizing that that is your job increasingly as a leader. And then, what you said just before this was about being sort of a servant leader. And you also talked about being empathetic with people. Was— you seem like that comes naturally to you with your abundance mindset and, you know, your focus on people. Was that always true for you, or was that also a learned, a learned behavior, let's say, to become a servant leader and to be more empathetic?

Ah, um, you forced me to reveal more than I would have wanted to, but I didn't, I didn't grow up as a super confident person. Um, And I had two sisters growing up who were at that time doing really well in everything they touched. And I was sort of the loser kid or the black sheep in the family. Um, and you know, there were two years of my life where my parents, for whatever reason, put me in a boarding school. And at that time they were in, in, in Nigeria, in Africa. And, and so I ended up being in boarding school at a young age, just by myself, without a lot of warning. I had no idea how to adapt to it. It was a Catholic school, and every morning we had to wake up and go to the chapel to pray. And as a child who just didn't know how to learn with the 200 kids around him, um, you know, just every morning sitting there and listening to just sort of the the sermons, there was just sort of a clean slate of what good and greatness and kindness should be. I'm not a very religious person. I'm a spiritual person. But that laid a foundation for me that was just not tainted by the ceremonies and the Traps of religion. And then as I grew up, and I didn't know, I didn't have the tools to deal with any of this. In my earlier startups, I didn't know how to deal with stress. So there were periods where routinely I would get so stressed out, so routinely, that I would throw up. And I didn't know what to do. So you throw up and go back to work. And so when it was 20 years ago, when I learned to meditate as a way to deal with overwhelming emotion, and that set me off on a path of— set me on an inward journey in addition to an outward journey. And I've been a student of the mind since. It's just been remarkable for me, that journey, and correlating that with my, you know, sort of the external journey. And I think it's powerful to understand, um, you know, how at the core we're all connected, we're all the same, and, you know, almost everything that anybody does is done because she or he believes that's the best thing at that time for that person. And you just have to put yourself in that person's shoes deeply, deeply and emphatically to understand why. And then that gives you a way to cut through to anybody. Makes sense?

Totally. Yeah, it sounds like what you're saying is because you became a student of the mind, but also maybe a student of yourself as a result of your intense stress. You, through that, began to understand maybe the rest of humanity. That's what it sounds like.

That is true. And, and I, you know, it's powerful. It's extremely powerful. I can't even begin to describe. Mm-hmm.

Did that also— did that sort of experience, you know, the continuing journey of seeing into your mind and being a student of your mind, did that also play into what we talked about before about culture for your company? When you thought about culture for Sprinklr, How did you come up with those values and did it correspond to these concepts we're talking about now?

It does. It does correspond to this very much. And when you look at the Sprinkler Way, it could look like a bag of contradictions to the untrained eye because on one side, we talk about You know, people never forget how you make them feel. I'm asking people to be kind and empathetic. On the other side, we say set super high goals and never miss them. So they sound like you're speaking from both sides of your mouth. Um, and it only appears that way because we, in our social economic setting, for the most part, is We've been trained to equate power with being loud, with being dramatic. And when you look at the history of civilization, which I have a map of the history of the civilization hanging on my wall in my office. The biggest shifts in civilization were brought about by people who were very, very strong, but not very loud or pompous. And when you see civilizations form, that's because these leaders were able to bring people together. And when you see civilizations contract, is because people who are dividers get in and they make it about themselves. And while they might be very powerful in those 100 years, what you find is humanity gets fragmented as a result and the civilization shrinks. So I'm a believer that things that are big over hundreds of years or thousands of years are the ones that are very strong at the core, but very flexible and gentle, right? Everything in nature that's beautiful is carved by, like, water flowing over a rock for 1,000 years.

Yeah.

And everything that's loud and big and noisy tend to be bad things like earthquakes and tsunamis. And they Actually, they're more correlated with distraction than they are with creation. Hmm.

That is— well, that is very rich, extremely rich. And I'm wondering how it comes back to sort of the Sprinkler Way and maybe the dichotomies.

Yeah, because if you're very resolved and you're very clear on what you want to achieve, you don't need to scream, you don't need to shout, you don't need to be disrespectful. You can be firm.

I see.

And so the Sprinkler Way gets translated from one end to the other. You set very high goals. You have a shared understanding of what it takes to get to those goals. You have a shared understanding of where you are today and what— where you have to be tomorrow. You are— you're clear on the behavior gaps and you're clear on your skill gaps and you are committed to learning. Incrementally to close those gaps. And while you're doing that, you can be super nice, you can be very kind, you can be helping others, um, because none of this involves aggression in a negative manner. Does it make sense?

It does. And I, I especially love that because a lot of my, uh, the CEOs I work with, and really any leaders, they talk about how do I hold people accountable without stressing them out, basically, right? And what they're really coming down to, what I sort of frame it as, is how do I hold people accountable without making them feel bad, without criticizing them or blaming them? And I think what you're talking about is so powerful in terms of you can be a nice person and you can be actually quite diplomatic and warm and kind and still We're reaching for a goal and we're trying to get there. We're trying to get there together. And sometimes we fall short and then let's fix it. Right. That's, I think, the best kind of accountability.

Exactly. And the key word there is, do you have a shared understanding? That's my favorite two words. And a lot of times when you find leaders who, for example, would say, oh my God, this guy is terrible, or this gal is terrible, and, you know, the customer hates her, and I've made it so clear that customer happiness is super important. Well, I'll show you in 100% of such situations where there isn't a shared understanding of what success is, right? Because you're saying, what does customer has to be successful mean? Nobody knows that, right? Customer has to be happy. What does that mean? I don't know. So you don't have a shared understanding of the outcome to start with. So when you say, at Sprinklr, we say, you know, customer has to have a CHII score, a customer happiness index of 9 or above. Like, you know how to do that. You go to a customer and say, on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you with Sprinklr? You get an 8.9, that's not success. You get a 9.1, that is success. And then this is the process. You know what the outcome is. Then do you have a shared understanding of what skills and what behavior gets you there, right? We know the skills and what behavior. You have to do an EBR. The customer has to get value. Customer has to consumers, you know, a certain amount of seeds that they've paid for. And so, it is that cascading shared understanding of the outcome and the details that makes people accountable. And it's the absence of that shared understanding at different levels that makes people frustrated and results in aggression or misunderstanding. Very often, when you have very clear shared understanding of this, when the person is unable to perform or doesn't want to close what we call is the learning gap, then, then they leave. And they leave with a lot of kindness and happiness because they realize that you care so much about them and they can't deliver. They usually feel bad about it.

Right, when you set it up like that. You know, I'm curious, everything you just said is like right on. It's about communication. I love shared understanding. If it's not too tactical, like, how do you operate that inside of your company? How do you make sure the right meetings are happening, the right conversations are happening, the right goals are being set, and that everybody understands and has that shared understanding?

It's cascading accountability. And it's easy to talk about, and I'm not saying we have it completely figured out at Sprinklr, but we have a process that we call W2HMO. It's WWHMO. So, every initiative that we have gets mapped at the very top Why are we doing this? What are we trying to accomplish? How are we going to accomplish it? How are we going to measure whether we have accomplished it? What are the obstacles we anticipate? So we started the ELT, the executive team, and then we write these down and then it gets cascaded down. So the process part of it, you know, this is— I think Salesforce calls it V2MOM, cascading goal setting. And a lot of companies, OKRs, they're all the same thing. But the key is to have a process and make sure that people understand the process and are respecting the process. And at Sprinklr, when we fail in this, it's because the process wasn't followed.

And do you debrief it if there's a failure? Do you debrief it and see where it fell down?

But we were not there in our maturity journey, but we have the process and for the most part it works and we've We're going to continue to make it better.

Got it. Well, something's going right for you since you all went public in June of '21, and just this past year. So you're still a very new public CEO, and that's like every, you know, it's a dream. Was it a dream for you to go public?

No. No, no. It's a dream for me to help create the world's most loved enterprise software company. Everything else is a milestone, and that gets us closer to there.

Got it. And what was that milestone like on the day you went public? For you, what was it? What did it feel like?

It was amazing. It was just amazing to have all the employees come together and watch their, you know, 12 years of their journey and have that moment and milestone where you could come together and publicly celebrate And it's a milestone that everybody recognizes. It was easy for everyone to say, "Oh my God, yeah, we took this company public." And for the people who worked so hard for it for so many years, my God, it was just amazing to watch them come together and celebrate. You know, our investors, our customers feel happy for all of us. We're creating a brand new category. We're just getting started. That was just a great opening ceremony. For the rest of our lives.

I love the way you frame that. That's so great. So how have you found the transition to being a public company CEO, and what have you found challenging or surprising?

Well, you know, we have an entire— entirely new group of stakeholders in public investors. And so there's a substantial time and resource commitment to educating them, especially when we're creating a new category. But I love it. I think the opportunity to meet really smart people who ask amazing questions and make us better, it's just super good. It has been great to have customers like be able to validate us outside and not having to explain. It brings— it legitimizes the business when we operate like we do in enterprise software world. It's a good thing.

Yeah. Were there any surprises for you?

Um, not really, not really. Now, I've been around, you know, I've been in a public company and been done this journey quite a few times. Um, not, not really. Yeah, maybe my experience is not typical, but yeah, I wasn't really surprised with anything, right?

Did it— what, what prepared you? Have you already done your— you've already done your first earnings call, I would think.

2.

2.

Yeah, already. Yeah.

So how do you prepare for that? Again, it's your first— I understand you've been in the room maybe before, but like, what was it like for you to prepare for that first earnings call and do that first earnings call?

I was just cool. It's like, you know, I wasn't— you know, when, when you're mission-driven, it's just saying the same stories. It doesn't matter who you're saying it to, you're not changing the story. I think a lot of a trap that a lot of people, I, I feel like, fall into is they deliver earnings and they are looking up at the stock price like it's a scoreboard, and then they get surprised. And I don't do that. I personally think you don't— that it's not, you know, this is not basketball. You don't shoot and go, oh, where's my score? Um, in the short term, markets have got a million things going. These are fantastic people, but there's a lot of noise. People are busy, something's going on with portfolios and all kinds of stuff. In the long run, the market always recognizes winners. So when you stop seeing life in stock prices and progress in 5-day, 30-day, 90-day intervals or 1-year intervals and start looking at this in 5, 10, 15, 20, 30-year increments, a lot of things appear less important than it would otherwise appear to be. And so that's the approach I personally take. Um, and so I wasn't stressed out about any of these.

Um, yeah, I can see having a long-term view gives you a lot of perspective, and I You know, I can tell also your background prepared you for that. And as we talked about your background and, you know, even the way you've handled your entrepreneurial journey, and I think your, your inner spiritual compass, I'm just curious, have you ever experienced imposter syndrome? You know, the feeling like, oh, the jig is up, I'm going to be found out.

No, I mean, I don't know, found out about what. I, I remember a moment in my life where I would look up anybody and go, What does that person have on me? And, and I go, look, if I'm willing to work just as hard, I'm willing to learn just as much, you know, people say, why me? I always go, why not me? Can someone explain to me why Sprinkler shouldn't be the next big thing? Explain to me. I'm sure there are good reasons. Explain to me. But until someone gives me a convincing reason, 3,000 of us are going to go to work and make it a really big company.

I love that. I love that attitude. That is so great. I guess I'm wondering, as we sort of begin to wrap up, if you sort of step back and think about your overall kind of leadership journey, what are some ways that you feel you've changed as a leader most profoundly?

Um, I've learned to talk less. I'm learning to speak last. I'm learning to listen more.

And how does that help?

Makes me a better leader, I think.

In what way?

Because most battles are not won on the battlefield. They're won by absorbing information and strategizing better. And so, you know, there's a code that says when you speak, um, at the end of it you don't know more. When you listen, at the end of it there's a possibility that you might end up knowing more.

Yes, I think it's absolutely true. I actually, I tell people that all the time, like, you already know what you know. You don't know what the people around you know. Yeah, I think that's well said. Do you think that people find that motivating?

I don't know. I couldn't answer that, but, uh, it works for me.

Yeah, it works for you. And what do you wish you had known earlier on your journey, on your entrepreneurial journey?

Well, the one thing I've always said is focusing on outcome versus activity was a lesson that I wish I learned 10 years sooner.

And do you— what advice do you have for founders as they embark on their own journey to grow into leaders?

You know, it's not about how many shots you make. It's really about how many shots you take. And life's not a basketball game. The clock doesn't run out. Keep shooting.

Mm-hmm. Keep shooting. That's life lesson. That's not just for founders. That's life lesson. That's amazing. Rajeev, is there anything else that you just want to share with our listeners? Anything else you want to say?

Hey, I just want to let them know that at Sprinklr, we are trying to create the world's most loved enterprise software company. So if they are working at the customer prospect or thinking about a job or any way they can want to be a part of it, they're welcome to.

Amazing. Call Sprinklr if you want to be part of this journey with this amazing founder CEO. Thank you, Rajeev, so much for joining me today.

Thank you, Alisa Cohn. It was a pleasure.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, Give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.