@TiEcon 2006: Keynote Address By Vivek Ranadive Of TIBCO

The Keynote address on Day 2 at TiEcon 2006 was delivered by Vivek Ranadive, Chairman and Founder of TIBCO narrated his story in a wry self deprecating manner, and offered advise to entrepreneurs based on his own experiences. Giving his own example of enterprise, on how he persevered and eventually got some of his (according to him) ‘smarter’ friends to join his business after he received seed funding, his first offering bit of advise: surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. He began his company at a time when there was little funding, but he had an idea of a “software bus” that he wanted to implement. After receiving his funding, he talked his was into the Goldman Sachs office and convinced the newly appointed head to allow him to digitize wall street. He was among the first people to go down on to wall street and talk to the traders on how they actually worked and this helped them plan their implementation better. So – Listen to your customer and really understand how to help them. Forget about the competition, he reiterated – listen to the customer. He joked that Reuters had been a competitor for them, since because of thier digitization, the Reuters business at Wall Street was actually suffering. When Reuters bought TIBCO, he learnt that internally, people at Reuters had referred to TIB in TIBCO as ‘That Indian Bastard’. After Goldman Sachs, their next big deal was with Solomon Brothers who wanted to put the entire bond system on digital. IBM was among their competitors, and he was called for a lunch meeting where the CIO of Solomon Brothers asked him why they should do business with TIBCO? Ranadive repeatedly spoke about his product, his people and the company. When the CIO asked him again about why they should do business with him, Ranadive looked him straight in the eyes and said – “Because we have fire in our eyes”. That later became a joke at Solomon Brothers, but it is important to have passion, he said.

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