Doing What's Next - Life After Microsoft

Moving on from Microsoft has been interesting. To start with, I have realised that there is a world out there beyond the soft cocoon I was enveloped in for the last six years. I have also realised that I have been as busy being jobless, as I was when I held a job. I have been places, met many people, immersed myself in so many ideas, wandered cyberspace quite a bit, and I have seen the inside of my gym a lot more than I did before. Admittedly, I have missed my office, my team the routine, the stress, the frustration and the laughter. 

I must say that a lot of people have been enquiring of me, whether I intend to spend the rest of my life in idle worthlessness, or take up a worthy vocation sometime. Some have been curious, some have really been worried about me, and some have come to the firm conclusion that no one really wants to give me a job.

While I would like nothing more than spending the rest of my life in langurous lethargy, I have finally roused myself to go take up a worthy vocation - actually, take up several of them.

So to satisfy your morbid curiosity, and to set your worried minds to rest, here is what I intend to do:

At the outset, it is not conventional. As I hinted at earlier, I am not joining a single company in some executive position, nor am I doing this one startup that I have been talking about. Instead, over the next few months, I am going to be associated with a few things simultaneously. In a sense, I am putting my fingers in a few pies.

Certainly the largest pie, where I spend most of my time, is my association with Genesis Colors Pvt Limited as their Group Advisor and an Independent Director on the Board. Genesis Colors is India’s largest luxury retail company: it owns some iconic Indian fashion brands like Satya Paul, and runs the operations of global brands like Armani, Jimmy Choo, Bottega, Paul Smith, Canali, etc. in India. Besides that, it has a JV with Burberry. Genesis was started 15 years back by a couple of dynamic entrepreneurs, and is now the market leader  in its category in India. A bunch of private equity funds – Sequoia Capital, L Capital (LVMH’s PE Fund), Mayfield Fund, Henderson Global Investors, etc. – have invested in the company recently. My mandate will be to work closely with the GCPL team to help strengthen and transform the core business, set up internal processes and systems, build a team, and work towards growing the business to new customer segments and international marketing. Additionally, I will be responsible for building and growing the ecommerce opportunity for all their brands. I start on May 01. 

Besides that, I have decided to focus on investing-in and mentoring tech and ecommerce start-ups. To that effect, I am going on the Board of three to four VC-funded startups  in the ecommerce and tech services space, and will mentor them through their growth and fund-raising activities. The ones I can disclose currently are ETechies and Skoolshop. In addition, I will also be involved a little more deeply with a stealth startup in the Internet product space, in an investing and Director capacity.

So, I have decided to follow my heart and do a few things concurrently; perhaps, after a few months I will settle down with one of them full time. And if and when I do so, I do hope I make the right decision, unlike our friend below :-) :

Last day in Microsoft - my farewell mail and post...

Memories, declaims PG Wodehouse, are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.  

Disregarding this very sound advice, and go back six years, when I joined this company as a wide-eyed young(er) man to lead our Online Business in India. Things were a little different then – Bill Gates was still around, Ballmer still danced on stage, and Apple was half our size. As Douglas Adams puts it in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: “In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.” I joined our Bangalore Office at Signature Building, and sat on the ground floor without any sun lights or openings (‘Microsoft Office without Windows’ was my first WL IM update). I had the usual first year of a new Microsoftie – flowers on day one, deadlines on all others; countless acronyms; multiple conference calls; reams of .ppts;  innumerable trips to Seattle; and vague, guilty thoughts about our end consumers. And a super, passionate, committed team of the then OSG team to help me through. 

I coped through all the multiple re-orgs and the ordered chaos,  as we all do, and after the first year, things seemed a little more coherent. Deadlines became  manageable   (“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Our partners and customers became a little more real, WHIs and NSATs started to mean something, and some of our products and technologies revealed a magic hitherto unnoticed. Seattle was beautiful, when sunny. Every single Microsoft employee in every single office was the most intelligent, passionate and caring human being I had ever encountered. The parties were awesome; MGX was a revelation. And I started to fall in love with the company… 

Six years have passed in the blink of an eye. Somewhere, in the middle of some quarter between an MYR and an MSPoll, I moved jobs to lead our E&D Business ( later called Retail, now called RSM, watch this space for the next name change!). And, unbeknownst to me, I landed my best job ever! We built a great team of Retail superstars, turned around our business, completely redefined its purpose and vision, went after our budgets and growth targets with a vengeance, and had amazing fun doing so. We challenged the status quo, and went after a New Normal (“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” – Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt). All of this was possible because of all the amazing leaders, managers and colleagues I worked with, who are too numerous to mention, but they know who they are; I thank them with all my heart and humility, and hope to be in touch with them always. 

But now it is time to go.  

I have had the privilege of working with one of the best companies on earth, but it is time to go do other things. There is a very strong urge inside me to do something very different, perhaps create something, to bring technology and the Internet to another business and business model, and participate in transforming an industry. Perhaps the urge is a foolish one, and “…if I ever meet myself, as Adams remarks in ‘Mostly Harmless’, ‘I’ll hit myself so hard I won’t know what’s hit me”. But then, I would far rather be happy than right any day. 

And today is my last day in this wonderful company, working with all of you wonderful people, and I have the immeasurably sad task ahead of walking out my cabin for the very last time today. I will continue to stay on in Gurgaon though, hold on to my phone number (and my Windows Phone), and will certainly be found all over cyberspace*. I will take some time off in April, and start my next adventure in May. A lot of you have asked me what it will be,  but “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer” (Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish). 

A few of you poor unsuspecting souls have also asked me for my advice, my parting words of wisdom if you may… All I would say is that you, like me, have had the honour and the privilege of working with the greatest company on earth, with fantastically brilliant people and some mind-blowing technology. What I tried to do  was to work hard and smart, give my best, and have loads of fun along the way. I never forgot that this company was created by two very smart guys dropping out and taking big huge risks. So I took some calculated risks of my own: some of them worked, and I got a nice Rolex watch along the way; some of them bombed, and I nearly lost my job for that. All through it,  I learnt how to beg for forgiveness, rather than ask for permission. As Mr. Adams advises in Mostly Harmless: “You live and learn. At any rate you live”.  I enjoyed every waking and jetlagged moment of it; and when I stopped doing so, I moved on to do other things…  

And so here I am now, on the verge of doing those other things, bidding you goodbye once again. And I agree one final time with Douglas Adams, as he says in The Dark Teatime of the Soul: 

“…I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

So, thanks for everything, especially for reading the nostalgic ramblings above, and please keep in touch with me at do@mailjaspreet.com