Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign.
B (0:08)
Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corusant.com brand welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Rajesh Kazanchi. Rajesh Kuzanchi is the CEO and co founder of ColortoKens, a company that provides industry leading micro segmentation and breach containment solutions that span across it ot industrial control systems, devices and users. Under Rajesh's leadership, the company has accelerated to grow over 300% annually in the last three years. Deployed over 100 large enterprise customers in insurance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, oil and gas and pharma. Rajesh leads a team of 400 plus people worldwide and drives the vision, strategy and execution of the company's product and services. Well, good afternoon Rajesh. Welcome to the show.
A (1:07)
Thank you for having me, Brian.
B (1:09)
Absolutely my friend. I appreciate it. And you're hailing out of Cupertino, California near San Jose. Done a lot of podcasts out there. I'm in Kansas City, but a two hour jump in time zones. I appreciate that. I know it's hard to make schedules, so thank you. And Rajesh, if you don't mind, I'm going to jump into your first question. Under your leadership, Color Tokens has grown over 300% annually for the last three years and deployed over 100 large enterprise customers globally. When a company is growing that fast while working with many large complex clients, what are the biggest internal, operational or cultural challenges you face and how have you managed to keep the culture of innovation intact?
A (1:52)
Well, thank you for asking me that question, Brian. Hey, when you're operating at a very large speed, by the time you hire the people you already showed start. So what's extremely important is to follow certain goals framework in your mind. Now one such that we follow at Common tokens is a 9010 rule. Anything that can be done repeatedly, so something that you do it over and over again, it's probably time to automate and we follow that rule really judiciously. So more or less like it's really, really important to understand how your day is going as a team, as an individual and then which are the area that you can complete the renewal completion card. That's number one. The second is about innovation. We have a role of 10%. Process is important because otherwise it creates a complete chaos in the organization. But if we think that is more than 10%, then it becomes process heavy. And a lot of companies which are like much larger companies, there's a Lot of heavy duty process. And at some point in time, process takes over the entire workout. So we are not that date what we are exponentially growing. So the core team, the leadership team is very focused on making sure that we have this 10% process called channel. Anytime we see that any structure involved a customer success defined in deliveries, taking care of customers, solutioning, there should be a lightweight process where then the core focus needs to be what is the towel that we need to do. So these are some of the things that we follow, especially at color tokens. The next one is, as a core team are very much fascinated with big problems and it's very easy to solve a small problem. But sometimes there are, I would say like two types of problems, problems that you want to solve, you feel like it's good to solve, but no one cares about those problems. And all the people are saying, you'll see like you might have solved a problem, but it's not such a big deal to any of this. So you'll find another 10 or 20 companies holding that problem. But anytime there's a big problem that has a deeper meaning, it's going to be really interesting to solve those problems. So culturally focusing on lightweight process, repeatable things need to be automated and solve big problems. Big problems lead to major innovations and that keeps the culture apart, also intact. Because when you're handling those particular problems, then all hands on the tech people are just focusing on solving those complex problems.
