Lessons - Why Thinking Like a Founder Changes Everything | Sandeep Chennakeshu - Former BlackBerry President

In this lessons episode, explore why building a company like a castle creates resilience, longevity, and sustainable growth. Discover how strategic structure replaces reckless speed, understand how culture, cash flow, and execution determine long-term success, and uncover the core elements that transform fragile startups into enduring market leaders. Let's talk about the thesis of what you've written. So the thesis of what you've written is that your company is your castle, which is also the name of the book, and obviously that's all going to go into show notes, and people can go check it out. But what does this thesis mean? Your company is your castle. I've heard the term moat before when it comes to business, in terms of business analogies, but I've never heard the analogy of the entire company is a castle. So walk me through what this means. Yeah, so I asked the question, I actually read this in an article in Forbes, that why do two-thirds of all companies fail within 10 years? You know, 20% fail within two years, 45 and five years, and 65% in 10 years? There are a whole bunch of reasons. Okay, it's well-cronicled. And so I said, I thought about my own career and why companies that I worked in went to the highest of highs and fell down to the Y. And the common answer to what I've read researched and experienced in my own companies is that sometimes speed is not as important, as systematically building structure. And when you go for speed, you miss a lot of things. And so I basically said, okay, if I want to basically build the way I've been successful in building companies, I began with this company called Ericsson Mobile Platforms, wherever I was sent to Sweden to help realize its potential. The company had invested a very large amount of money. We had nothing to show. We were bleeding. For every dollar, we made we lost a dollar. Our customers were getting anxious. And everybody was contemplating our failure. And I put this framework to work. And in the year, we became profitable. And within a few short time, thereafter, we took 30% market share on the work. And I said, what was this structure? And of course, I repeated this formula multiple times. And it always worked. It's even working in my startup now. So what was this? And I said, the analogy I used is I said, take a medieval castle. I was looking for an analogy and an extended metaphor. And I said, look at the castle. Medieval castles have lasted. Some of those that have lasted have lasted 500 years. Plus, all around the world, whether it's in Japan, in India, in England, Wales, the Czech Republic, etc. So these castles had a number of structural elements that have made them withstand nature's elements over the centuries, as well as in Vedas. And a company likewise needs to withstand macroeconomic factors like recessions, depressions, pandemics, etc. And a hordes of competitors. So it is a nice analogy. And I said, what are these elements? I said, if you look at a castle, you have to find the right location, which is unassailable. Hopefully, you need a solid foundation to take the weight of the castle and build it all castle. You need a perimeter wall that protected it from invaders. And right in the center was the keep where people lived, they stood granaries, they stood their ammunition, etc. And that turns, you know, that has a certain meaning. And then you have to protect the strategy, which is the perimeter wall with towers, because you don't want people scaling these long walls that are unprotected, or you don't want them tuddling underneath. And then you also talk about, so there are a number of towers. And then you talk about, you know, the central portion of the castle, the keep, needs a roof to prevent it from enemy arrows and from hail and snow and rain, etc. And so, you know, I took these elements and said, I likened them to a business. And in my analogy, I said, you know, the, the picking of the location is the business model. You want your business model to be as unassailable as possible. The foundation is cash flow. Without cash, you can't do anything. Without cash, you can't build a big, big business. And then I said, the perimeter wall of this was a strategy. The strategy surrounds the entire business. And that wall has to be protected by a number of towers. And those towers are product creation, products or services, it could be either products, creation, product delivery, you know, sales channels and execution. Because of each of these, any of these fail, the wall is not going to stand for long. And the central portion of this castle, the keep is the culture. In a strategy is what you want to get done. But culture determines what you actually get done. And when culture falls, the entire castle falls because it doesn't matter the walls are standing. And so I talk about culture as the keep. And then the room from the keep is stakeholder confidence. And there are three stakeholders. You have your investors, you have your customers and you have your employees. And they're the triangle of trust. If you break the trust with or any of them, you're toast. So I go on to explain how these elements actually build a very, very strong castle or a strong company and how they're interrelated. And then the last part of my book is I talk about now that you learn to build a strong castle. And I give you a lot of recipes and checklists. But at the end of it, I say, now how do you basically build yourself to run such a castle? And that's the whole book. I love it. Let's go into, let's go into some of, it makes a ton of sense. I love, I love the analogy. Let's go into some of the, let's go into some of these strategies so that people can at least take some really tangible things away. So there's so many different elements. And, and I always hate asking like, what's, what's the most important? Because they're all obviously very important. That's the concept of the castle. It's, it's, none of them can exist without the other entities. And they're, holistically, they create this ecosystem that leads to a strong business. And I'll ask actually, I'll ask in a second, maybe some of the, the more tactical strategies for pick, pick an element or two. But before we do that, what are, what are really glaring examples of companies that, that haven't done this properly? And what is the pick a company that has failed? What is the thing that they missed the mark on? To sort of highlight the importance. I'm sure you have some thoughts on, on different companies grown too fast. But like, I'm not going to make you, I'm not going to make you talk about the ones you don't want to talk about. But other companies, for example, yeah, what are some of them? I'm going to be a little political and, and, yes, no problem. Because, you know, the two most important things, because you brought up the, what are the two most important concepts? I talked about eight elements, but what are the two most important? I think that you must have, actually, there are three very important things, I'll mention the three most important, the three most important is when you build a strategy, you have to think it through very carefully. Okay, there are three elements of a strategy that if you get wrong, you're invariably going to fail. So the three elements of the strategy are, how big is your opportunity you're addressing? Don't go after little opportunities, go after big opportunities. You want to go and fish in lakes full of fish, so that you can basically catch something reasonable. Okay, and especially, I call it open spaces, go to somewhere where no one else is fishing, so you can catch something. Okay, the second is, is your product relevant to the market? How do you make sure it's relevant? Right, a lot of products have been launched, which either customers did not like, there was no need, and I make a lot of, I talk a lot about these, I give an example in the book, or they'd come too late when others have already been entrenched. Okay, now your biggest opportunity there is the example I give is the iPhone, you know, they entered when they were, the leader had over 400 million phones, they were selling 400 million phones in the market, but the leader basically didn't mist out a major issue. They did not realize the value of an application store and the user interface, which the iPhone sold. That was a fundamental customer need and they toppled an entire industry and rose to the top. So product relevance knowing what your customers want and need is most important. Find out what your competitors are not doing or will not do and see if you can address it. All of that relates to relevance. Make sure you have sustainable differentiation. So that's the second element of the three in strategy. The third element is, do you have the capability to execute on your differentiation and your relevance and capture the opportunity? If you don't, you're not going to succeed however brilliant your idea is. So that's about strategy. The second aspect is culture. You know, as I said earlier, strategy is what you want to get done. Culture is determines what you actually get done. How do you build the culture to execute and build? And in my book, I talk about two things. I call it raising the right army and leading the right army. It's both a combination of leadership and instilling the set of beliefs that you need in your team in order to execute to the strategy. I won't go too much into this. It's in the book. And the third part is, you have to be able to generate cash. Nobody trusts a company that bleeds constantly and does not meet its promises. So it's devoted an entire chapter to basically managing cash and managing risk and figuring out how you generate more cash. And fiscal prudence is extremely important in doing this. So those are three elements that stick out as it's very fundamental to how I run my businesses. If I can't get these three things right, everything else doesn't matter.