Mobile technology will disrupt entire industries, says Stanford's Raj Singh

This is the third interview in an ongoing series on innovative thinkers and business leaders. Firstpost will explore technical expertise to a lesser degree and focus instead, on what makes them outstanding leaders.

A 12-year veteran of the mobile industry, Raj Singh is an entrepreneur-in-residence at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) who has worked with tech heavyweights such as Dell, Samsung, and Kodak. As his current title implies, Singh also has experience starting his own companies, and he’s co-founded Veeker, NBC’s mobile video citizen journalism service and ToneThis, CNET’s most-downloaded ringtone creation app. Singh speaks with Firstpost about what an entrepreneur-in-residence is, what’s on the horizon for mobile technology, and the one thing every start up should know.

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What do you do as entrepreneur-in-residence at SRI?

EIR positions are one of those nebulous positions that have lots of definitions depending on whether it’s an R&D firm or venture capital. Some EIRs are there to look for the next startup or an opportunity to jump into.

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SRI is a large R&D lab that’s 2,200 folks strong, and it was the inventor of the mouse, among other things. Within an R&D association, there’s significant technology that is not commercialised, so they have an internal team whose responsibility is to effectively go around SRI and look for opportunities to commercialise things.

How did you get interested in mobile?

That started when I was in college. I was fascinated with my Palm device, so for my senior project at Cal Poly, I said, “What if I build an app for Palm?”

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This is going to sound funny but getting into mobile was really an accident. I moved to the Bay Area, and it was the hardest job market. It was

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post-[dot-com] crash. The only company that would hire me, it turned out they were in mobile. The next company that was willing to hire me was because of some development work I had done on a Motorola PageWriter. So out of necessity, I moved to New York City and I was in mobile again. Upon my return to the Bay Area, the job recruiters talking to me were for solely mobile opportunities. Then I made the transition to Kodak as a product manager.

One thing that was inspiring is we had mobile consultant at Kodak who had carved out a whole lifestyle around being a mobile strategy expert. I was fascinated with how he was able to do that. Everybody has that light-bulb moment: Wow, there are advantages to staying in one industry and becoming a domain expert. I realised the value of developing a brand that people can associate you with. From that point forward, by intent and by plan, I have remained in mobile. Now it’s impossible to leave the industry because I’m so entrenched.

Still, it must have been something you thought about because mobile is such a dynamic space.

That’s easy to say now because it’s the post-iPhone era. In 2001, the hot thing was storage. When it was ‘06 and ‘07, the hot thing was web 2.0 and consumer 2.0 services.

One thing mobile has certainly done is it has matured. It’s not, “What is your mobile strategy?” It’s “What is your strategy?” and if mobile isn’t part of that, then it’s a fundamental problem.

What trends are you seeing in mobile?

I am focused on mobile and enterprise. There are some exciting trends with enterprise with respect to employees using their own devices, with enterprise applications, and enterprise data in the cloud.

What’s really interesting is just how mobile has penetrated every known industry. There was a great TED Talk on the variety of apps that doctors and medical specialists can use on their iPhone.

For many years, devices were benchmarked on their battery life, which stymied acceleration of hardware improvement. What I tell people now is you almost have infinite CPU [processing power], and assume that you’re always charging your device-most people have two chargers-and assume that you have unlimited network bandwidth. So what are the crazy apps you can come up with now? The mantra that mobile phone has become a personal computer is coming to fruition. Industries are being disrupted because you have this connected device that’s always in your pocket. It has already disrupted GPS navigational units in cars, but will it disrupt the entire intelligent dashboard? Does the phone become the dashboard? Does the phone become the hub of your living room and not the TV? And then the TV becomes a dumb terminal that is streaming off your phone? There are a lot of scenarios like that we’ll see in the next five to 10 years.

Where do you get your best entrepreneurial ideas?

I don’t work on things unless it’s been a problem for myself. I’m a big believer in only working on things where you are the number-one power user. I hate projects where I’m not the power user because the passion isn’t there. At end of day, it’s got to be something you’re passionate about.

Can you give an example?

When I started my ringtone company [ToneThis] in 2005, I was just trying to put ringtones on my phone and it was very hard to do. So I built the tool for myself and I made it available for download, and it started taking off. The same thing happened later in my career when I started Veeker, a video startup. The whole use case here was my wife, who is British, was based in England, and I was based in the US and I was looking for a way to livestream from my mobile phone. So I built it for myself, and that’s how the company started. I had co-founders in all of those cases, and it’s something that evolves over time, but multiple times its been based on, “This is annoying; I can make it better.”

What’s one thing every entrepreneur should know?

Team dynamics. Everybody needs to click and there needs to be absolute trust. Remove the egos off the table. There needs to be some role delineation, people need to know what they’re responsible for, but it’s all about team. Just because you have five of the smartest people in the room doesn’t mean you’re all swimming in the right direction.

Even from an investor standpoint, there’s a great emphasis on team dynamics and making sure this is a team that gels. A lot of people mistakenly look at the investment process as a company pitch and a product pitch, but they fail to realise that every question is effectively a test of the trust between founders - from who answers the question, to how that person is being overruled.

What’s your read on the state of Silicon Valley?

Right now, it feels awesome. There’s so much innovation coming out of the Valley. Recruiting has never been harder; it’s kind of insane. And I find it interesting that everyone is an angel investor now. It’s like the new real estate.

In the last couple of years, the combination of Twitter, plus LinkedIn, plus a number of these other services like Foursquare-connecting has never been so easy. It’s a significant advantage because in ‘03 and ‘04, you had to lean on someone for those relationships, and it necessitated the biz-dev guy. Now I can send a tweet out to Mark Cuban and he might respond.Twitter is like your public email address. So the fact that you can connect to people so easily and there are so many arenas and channels to do so is phenomenal. It’s absolutely reducing one of the walls that may stymie someone’s ability to start a company.

iPhone or Android?

I personally carry an Android phone. I tend to believe you should choose the right phone based on what you do most. I have no qualms with the iPhone. I’m not the design freak where I need the phone to look a certain way. But the real winner is the consumer because competition has created unbelievably smart phones.