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
business decisions help people run
I've got to let the people who are in the business run the business. I can help them think through their decisions about products, about partners, about hiring. But in the end, the decisions are theirs, and so is the responsibility.
extremely fortunate larry people smartest work worked
I've been fortunate to work with some really smart people. Larry Page is an extremely smart guy, most probably one of the smartest people I've worked with.
mentoring people trained
I've trained my people in mentoring entrepreneurs and made myself obsolete.
founding
Zoomin is a hybrid model. The management and founding team is the one with half.com.
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.
believe certainly education mainly
My focus is mainly on education. I believe education made all the difference for me, and it is certainly going to make all the difference for other children, too.
country wireless
No country should waste wireless spectrum. Especially not India, where the cellphone has become the personal computer.
area ended northern series
Basically, I left Northern Telecom after 7.5 years of being in one company after school. And then, I ended up in a series of start-ups. The first of those was a company called Sitech, and they were in local area networks.
best life strive
Life is fleeting, and permanence in this world is something we all strive for. The best way to achieve permanence is through philanthropy.
downs highs hours life lived lows matter ups within
I have lived the life of the entrepreneur, and so I know the pain they are feeling. I know the daily ups and downs they go through. You know, they have their highs and lows sometimes within a matter of hours in a day.
enjoy except limited might nice partners provide
There are times I think it might be nice to have deep-pocketed limited partners to provide me with some cushion. But I enjoy having no responsibilities except to myself, financially.
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.
business issues
When you've dealt with real-life issues, dealing with business issues is not that hard.