3. The Invincibles – the Dot Com years

Happy Diwali! I hope everyone had a happy and healthy Diwali with their loved ones.

Thank you for the continued engagement and encouragement.

Following the previous post, we had a crash course on customer expectations in a very short period. We had customers in three different marketplaces, leading, almost by default, to a global customer base with expectations. We had our work cut out for us.

Around 1998, the internet boom started in the US and followed in other markets with corresponding growth in the stock market. The adage of ‘luck favours the brave’ was holding true for us.

It was around this time that our CEO, Mr. Ashok Panjwani, offered me the responsibility for P&L for the Optical Fiber vertical. The last three years had been extremely exciting, but nothing prepared me for what lay ahead.

As the dot-com boom and internet progressed, optical fiber was prophesied to be the chosen media for data transmission. All kinds of new companies were emerging and being funded at incredible valuations, including pets.com and theglobe.com. The idea was that we would be performing all our activities on this new platform, “the internet”, and that all the data would be traveling via optical fiber. While all of this is becoming true now, at the start of the millennium, there were more concepts and hope, rather than revenues.

The optical fiber demand started increasing rapidly and we started getting enquiries for our products from the US. There were a number of new companies in the US starting to deploy high capacity fiber links under the sea and terrestrially as well. As fiber demand grew rapidly, lead times and prices moved up.

Everything moved at an extremely quick pace and we were juggling multiple initiatives at the same time:

• All our sales started getting diverted to the US and by 1999-2000, almost 70% of our fiber & cables sales were in the US.??
• We were growing rapidly and our Board approved to increase our scale from 1 million to 5 million kilometers.?
• We were still a part of Sterlite Industries then. With the optical fiber business being extremely profitable and showing great promise, Arthur Anderson (this was before the Enron saga for people who remember that) advised us to de-merge the telecom business out of Sterlite Industries to realise its true value.??
• SOTL (Sterlite Optical Technologies Ltd) was born as a separate entity and our Chairman decided to list it on Nasdaq with an IPO.?

Those were heady days - I recall juggling multiple things at a time. We were spending time with the investment bankers and lawyers in Hong Kong and New York for the IPO, meeting machine vendors for capacity expansion in Europe, and bringing on new customers in the US. We were also expanding our sales and engineering capabilities and hiring globally. We had remote engineering and technology teams working from the US, and a few other global locations to help with the capacity expansion - much before global synchronous collaboration became the norm!

At the same time, there was extreme hype both in the equities market and media about SOTL. Along with our CEO, I was nominated to talk to investors about how the world was going to change through the internet with optical fiber as the medium - I truly believed in that and conveyed that belief to the investors. Little did I know it would take another 20 years for that to happen at a relevant scale!

There was a feeling of invincibility and we were on top of the world!

I had been working for about six years and thought about doing an executive MBA - I got accepted into Cornell University. My daughter was 3 years old and it was a great time to take a break. I remember writing a pros and cons list of doing an MBA and decided against it. I felt I was already learning rapidly on the job, had a great career path, and an MBA would disturb that. I continue to be ambivalent about that decision till today. To make up for this, I am currently considering an adjunct faculty role as one of the options while I transition out of STL.

Some of you have asked about my process of writing. I believe in keeping things simple, so I write as I recall my story. At the same time, I have my wife and three daughters go through the content and edit mercilessly. This happens synchronously over a shared google doc and is done within minutes. We have a rigorous process, and it's done with high speed.??

I love the concept of ‘and’ – it makes life simpler and more holistic. We tend to spend so much time on ‘A’ vs ‘B’, while ‘and’ makes it so much clearer. It really should be: left and right brain, mind and heart, process and entrepreneurship, market share and profitability growth.??

I understood the concept of ‘and’ through the movie Sholay (my apologies to folks who have not seen the movie or understand Hindi), when the protagonist Thakur wants to catch ‘Gabbar aur woh bhi jinda’ (catch Gabbar, and that too alive). The whole requirement of ‘and’ made the proposition so exciting. If the requirement was to do either of the two asks, it would have been relatively easy. Since the task was to deliver both, it required two high performing ex-cons to do the job.??

I use this example very generously. When sales folks mention that we can increase market share, but that would reduce profitability, I remind them that we need both. And if our sales folks are like Jai and Veeru, they would deliver it. That clinches the deal most of the time, as most of our team members are superlative.??

One of my partners for my entire time at STL has been KS Rao, who delivers this concept of ‘and’ beautifully. Whenever I plan or over-commit on a goal, KS would dramatically chip in and say ‘since you have committed, we will deliver’. I am extremely thankful for his partnership for my entire tenure at STL.

My next post will be about the dot-com bust and the reality bites that followed. Please keep the comments rolling in, with your experiences from that time, and any advice for my next move.

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