Immerse yourself in culture to be a better businessman, says NVIDIA's Trivedi

This is the fifth 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.

Listen carefully and there’s a lilt in Shanker Trivedi’s accent that betrays his multinational background and his ability to easily navigate multicultural business environments. Growing up in the “hills of India,” Trivedi attended a high school run by a group of Irish-Catholic brothers before heading off to earn a mathematics degree from IIT Delhi and an MBA from IIM Calcutta.

After moving to London where he worked for companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM, he landed in Silicon Valley, where he is currently the vice president of worldwide sales at NVIDIA. The former entrepreneur and first-ever intern at Hindustani Computers talks about how to manage a global team, why studying history is important for business, and how to avoid being “dead boring.”

You’ve lived and worked in three countries: India, England, and the US. What have been the biggest transitions, culture shocks, or growth moments?

India to England was not that hard because my parents are both doctors and they were trained in Britain. And because of [my schooling> with Irish-Catholic brothers, I was actually quite okay.

The big learning point was moving from Britain to the US. We jokingly say it’s two different nations divided by a common language. But the language issues are real. The way you speak English and communicate is a little bit different in the US. Unless you’re conscious about it, you can make accidental errors and you can mis-communicate.

And my job at NVIDIA is to develop deep strategic relationships with the customers, so you have to understand where they’re coming from. And it takes a long time to understand [American sports>. Every sport I’d been doing was cricket and football. So I spent 20 years understanding Manchester United and cricket, and it was all useless. You’ve got to start again. And you have to know the universities where people are from here, and which network they could be part of. That is the big cultural thing to overcome.

What are your tips for making that cultural transition?

If you were moving from India to Germany, what would you do? You’d study German language and you’d study everything. When you move from an English-speaking country to another English-speaking country, you need to do the same.

Today, my biggest interest is American history. Every weekend I’m studying American history. Why? I want to get more money from the US government into technical computing, so I want to understand how that government works. Why is the political system the way it is? How does budgeting work in the US? You have to understand history to understand the process.

How has globalisation changed the way you do business?

The obvious thing is meetings and travel. There’s more use of Skype and video conferencing, and the hours are 7-by-24. But you have to do some things face to face.

The second thing is the role of the BRIC countries. If you’re doing a global job, whatever business you’re in, the BRIC countries are really important; there’s an India play, a China play. And it’s different to North America and Western Europe.

What are some of the differences you’ve noticed across countries?

Because I worked at IBM, International Computers Limited (ICL), and at Sun when I was in the UK, I learned a lot being an Indian doing business with European people. I became culturally sensitive. You need to be more formal in Germany. In Italy, everything gets decided after the meeting is over as you’re talking to each other quietly. In China, you’re all going to sit in a restaurant and it’s going to be countless courses. In India, the scheduling is a little bit flexible. When you call up someone and say, “Should we have a meeting?” They say, “What time?” And you say, “About 9 or 9:30.” I don’t know anybody who’s ever showed up on time. Everyone’s in a massive hurry and everybody’s late.

I’m emphasising the differences, but I also want to emphasise the similarities. In many industries, they are genuinely global. Take for example the financial services industry. You can walk into someone’s office in London and they’re American, or they just got transferred from Hong Kong. It’s normal. The language is the same, there’s a similar culture. It’s similar with pharmaceuticals and the oil industry. A lot of industries are actually getting homogenous, and that’s another part of globalisation, too. You have to treat these organisations like one customer, or organise by industry. You have to think about companies globally and engage, cover, and contract them globally.

What should global-minded executives be doing more of and why?

I have a small team but they are in so many different countries so what do you do? You have to have ongoing, frequent communication.

You have one guy in Atlanta and they have to feel part of the company. They have to wake up and go to their home office, and they have to now imagine they have walked into the door of NVIDIA. How does that happen? Through frequent, ongoing, two-way communication. Otherwise, they don’t feel like they’re part of a fabric and then they’ll leave or they’ll get misaligned or something will happen.

Then there’s managing your boss. For CEOs, it’s the board, or it’s your major stakeholder if you’re a startup. Again, it’s all about that frequent, ongoing communication but the style of communication is a little different. You have to be very precise with the upward communication. There’s no point sending an essay when a line will do.

What advice do you have for Indian companies that have their eye on the US market?

If you’re a company in India and for whatever reason, you decide you need to be in the US, I can say there are three really important things. One is that there is no point in saying, “I need to be in the US.” That is such a generic statement; it’s like saying, “I need to be in Russia” where there are 11 time zones. It’s like the American saying, “I need to be in India.” Where in India? Bangalore is totally different than Delhi, let alone all the places in between. So focus: Which industry segments or which set of custom or suppliers are you trying to reach?

I’ve seen so many young companies hire one biz-guy dev in the US. And this one bloke is now trying to cover the whole US, and it’s going to fail. In the case of a bigger company, they work with some sort of advisor or Indian investment banker who says, “You should buy this and that,” and then you inherit 20 employees, and it’s just a mess. There have been many such disasters with small, unfocused acquisitions or with the solitary biz-dev bloke. It doesn’t work. Focus is really important.

From an Indian perspective, they have to understand that this is a big commitment. Big in terms of money and in terms of time. You’re trying to enter the most competitive and biggest market in the world. It’s not like going to Dubai or Singapore, a classic Indian expansion strategy. They’ve got to have at least a two-year time horizon, and they have to think seven digits as a starting point. Nothing comes on the cheap.

And then the third thing is one person doesn’t do it. Two is the minimum and probably three because two people can have an argument and then the rule of three applies. So you’re hiring a team, and if you’re making an acquisition, it’s the same thing. Whether you’re growing the organisation or doing it through an acquisition, at the end of the day, it’s about hiring a team and getting the right people.

Given current state of the Indian market and the talk of the “reverse brain drain,” do businesses in India need to even consider coming to the US?

There’s fantastic opportunities in India and China. The size and scale of it is just incredible. I started a computer company in Hyderabad in 1982. There were no computer companies in Hyderabad then; there was no HITEC City. There was nothing. But we wanted to do it. It was a really hard slog. If you ask any of the Indian entrepreneurs from the ‘80s, the Infosys guys, they’ll tell you it was really hard in the ‘80s.

If you have a great idea like I had when I was in my 20s, well, now there’s a source of capital, there’s markets, there’s everything. If you have a great idea, go ahead and do it in your home country. Why do you want to take the additional risk?

But as an entrepreneur, if you have something that you think will change the world, then you should relocate and bring your idea here. But remember that the chances of failing are very, very high.

How did you end up in Silicon Valley?

Sun asked me to come over here to take up a senior executive role at corporate headquarters. I got approval from my family—my wife, who was a tenured professor in Britain and the kids.

What I didn’t know was that I had to start all the way at the bottom again. You come to the Valley, everyone’s a genius, and you have to start again. Was it a good thing? I don’t know. Time will tell, but it was exciting; it was challenging.

In hindsight the easiest route into the US is by coming to university here. The big benefit, and it has nothing to do with your education, is the network. It’s about that cultural immersion. You go to a university and you drink beer with the gang, you cheer your local basketball team. But if you don’t have that opportunity, you have to study it. There’s no alternative; you have to immerse yourself.  Because you can’t go and talk about web 2.0 all the time, or “Hey, let me tell you about GPUs [graphic processing units>!” [Laughs.> Cool, that’s great. But you can’t do that 24 hours a day. You’d be dead boring!

Hear Trivedi talk about NVIDIA products and initiatives in mobile computing (Tegra) and power computing (Tesla and Cuda):

Audio Part 1

Hear Trivedi talk about how parallel computing works: Audio part 2