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| Lunch with BS: Nikesh Arora | | Karma's chameleon |
| Suveen K Sinha / New Delhi Aug 17, 2010, 00:19 IST |
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Google’s global sales chief rules himself out of the Tata race, saying he’s too fond of fast-moving and radical change
 Nikesh Arora likes to talk about movies. Expectedly, he loved Inception, a techie’s delight in which Leonardo DeCaprio enters layers of dreams. Equally expectedly, he hated Up in the Air, in which George Clooney — like Arora — spends most of his days travelling on work, but — unlike Arora — ends up having a sad and loveless life.
The first sentence he speaks when we meet is an anti-climax, offering no hope of a happy ending, writes Suveen K Sinha. “I have had lunch,” says the six-foot-one Arora, patting me on the arm rather patronisingly, which makes me feel shorter than my five foot five inches. Fighting to regain my stature, I put my foot down. I had explained the rules to him much before we met. It was Lunch with BS, for Heaven’s sake. We were to share a meal at a place of Arora’s choice. He had chosen Cilantro, the 24x7 restaurant at Trident in Gurgaon, though I had a sneaking feeling that Arora’s selection was guided more by convenience. We were going to meet right after Arora, who is the president of global sales operations and business development at Google, finished a meeting at Airtel’s headquarters — a stone’s throw. He is an independent director on Airtel’s board.
Arora says he would have coffee and dessert. He makes an enthusiastic reconnaissance of the stalls, but comes back undecided. In no time, two stewards turn up at our table, asking if they could help. With mock triumph, Arora says he has shaken up the entire restaurant, and tells them that he does not get much Indian dessert and if they could help him with some. He latches on to their fourth offer, a platter of kulfis. I, though, am determined not to go away hungry and settle for wheat pasta with tuna.
Now that Arora has agreed to eat, I warm to him. Besides, you cannot be cross for too long with a man who, according to a leading financial daily, could be in the running for Ratan Tata’s position at the head of the sprawling Tata Group. “No comment,” says Arora, breaking into one of his frequent laughs. One of the rules of Lunch with BS, I say, quickly making up the rule, is that you cannot say “no comment” to anything. Thankfully, Arora falls for it. Grabbing the issue of the paper which had named him as Tata’s possible successor (his corporate communication person had it on her), he puts his finger on the words: A long shot. “You know what that means?” he asks.
Undaunted, I offer: “Very likely?”
“No,” says Arora, perhaps wondering who made me a journalist, “very-very unlikely.” Has he been contacted by the selection panel? “My impression of the Tata Group is that it is phenomenally successful and a fantastic brand. I, as a person, am more akin to radical change, more akin to a fast-moving environment. I am not sure that’s what they are. I love what I do at Google.” Given a choice, which would he rather head, Tata or Google? “I’m not going to answer that question,” he says, amid more laughter.
Arora, who joined Google in 2004, was not enthused by Google initially. He had just left a corporate job (chief marketing officer at T-Mobile) and was not sure he wanted another corporate job. He was in London trying to raise funds for a startup, which was to be a mobile virtual network operator. “What convinced me in favour of Google was that it was still an entrepreneurial opportunity, just on a larger stage. It was still a startup in Europe. I spent four and a half years in Europe, during which time our revenues grew ten-fold. So it was entrepreneurial. I am a bad person for maintenance situations.”
Born in Ghaziabad to an officer of the Indian Air Force, Arora was not new to adapting. His schooling was spread across several Kendriya Vidyalayas. Still, did joining Google stretch him, considering that he was not really a sales person? It turns out Arora did do sales in the first year of his career — 1989 — selling 486 chip-based computers for Wipro, before moving to the US, one among the hordes of engineers of his generation who migrated.
Wipro would have been different in those says, wasn’t it? “Wipro’s hardware sales were more than its software sales. That’s how different it was. I was selling computers to the government. It was fascinating because here you were, riding a motorcycle, trying to sell computers to officials whose salary was perhaps as much as the price of the computer.”
After Wipro, Arora quickly moved out of sales, into product development, finance, investments, and so on. Until Google called. “When I interviewed at Google, Erich Schmidt, our CEO, said I had done everything in life but sales and that’s what he would like me to do in Europe. I thought it was going to be a very short interview, that I should pack my bags and go. But he said something very insightful. In our lifetime, he said, Google would probably be in multiple industries. They wanted someone adaptive, not a traditional salesperson. I went on with the interview.”
What is Google focusing on right now, I ask, as Arora offers to keep talking so I could eat in peace. One part of the company, he says, is very consumer-oriented, with search, chat, YouTube, Android, Chrome OS, Chrome browser, etc. The other part was about monetising, making money from this user base. The biggest opportunity, however, is in the advertising space. “As consumers migrate from traditional means of consuming media to online ways, the advertising dollars have to follow.”
I point out that many of the advertising dollars chasing social networking could be headed towards Facebook and Twitter, instead of Google’s Orkut or Buzz. It’s a good time to raise this delicate issue, since Arora’s platter of kulfis has arrived, eliciting visible delight from him. “We understand the importance of the people aspect of the web. Facebook has done a great job, but this is still the beginning of the trend. For now, that’s all I have to say.”
That’s it? Did I wait for his dessert just for this? Arora relents. “The web is going to permeate every business. Everyone has its space. Are we going to nail every ball out of the park? No! Are we going to stay relevant? Yes! Some people will stay ahead for a time. Some will be overtaken by others.”
In this race, how critical will it be to be on the right side of regulation? “That issue is bigger than Google,” he says. “It relates to the establishment of the internet in the mainstream of business. The internet, unlike other goods and services, does not follow national borders. As new products and services merge, regulators are going to have continued interest.”
They do seem to have more interest in Google, given the skirmishes in China and elsewhere. “We went to China five years ago. We were trying to be constantly on the edge, satisfying the needs of the user and the government. It was untenable. We decided to do it differently. We had to operate the way they wanted us to operate while still staying true to our principles. They are hopefully comfortable with our presence, but it is not as it was six months ago.” That, as an ending, is happier than I could have expected when we began.
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