Ram Shriram
Ram Shriram
Kavitark Ram Shriram is a founding board member and one of the first investors in Google. He earlier served as an officer of Amazon.com working for Jeff Bezos. Shriram came to Amazon.com in August, 1998, when Amazon acquired Junglee, an online comparison shopping firm of which Shriram was president. Before Junglee and Amazon, Shriram was a member of the Netscape executive team, joining them in 1994, before they shipped products or posted revenue...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
CountryUnited States of America
coming costs difficult energetic face indians lots market products services situation work
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.
build starting time trying value work
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.
almost capital chasing deals issues money venture
There's almost too much venture capital in India - there are issues with seed capital, but for venture capital, there's a lot money chasing deals here.
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I remember when AOL was small and they were growing like mad. Consumers were coming on in droves because they made it easy to connect to the Internet. That was the single biggest innovation of AOL; when grandmas were signing up, AOL had arrived.
cannot lock people
I think, ultimately, open always wins out. It wins out because you cannot lock data in; you can't lock people in. They will find a way out.
bands decision digital either industry maintain needed pieces status tv wants wireless
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.
customers
Stay externally focused - on your customers - and focus internally when you have to hire.
best business
My only loyalty is to what's best for business, not to any set of constituents.
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My mother has been my mentor in my life. The number one attribute was discipline. To be on time to school, never miss a day at school, and then checking out homework and making sure I was doing it correctly and signing me up for lots of activities, extra tests and classes.
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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.
happening produced technical
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.
features few fully lacking though
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.
applied business gotten
All the social things the consumer has gotten used to are being applied to business.
died early guess raised
I guess the most seminal moment going early way back was my father died when I was 3 years old. I was raised by my grandparents, and my mother went back and got a degree.