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Lessons - Why Thinking Like a Founder Changes Everything | Sandeep Chennakeshu - Former BlackBerry President · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, explore why building a company like a castle creates resilience,
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  longevity, and sustainable growth. Discover how strategic structure replaces reckless speed,
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  understand how culture, cash flow, and execution determine long-term success,
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  and uncover the core elements that transform fragile startups into enduring market leaders.
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  Let's talk about the thesis of what you've written. So the thesis of what you've written is that
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  your company is your castle, which is also the name of the book, and obviously that's all going
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  to go into show notes, and people can go check it out. But what does this thesis mean? Your
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  company is your castle. I've heard the term moat before when it comes to business, in terms of
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  business analogies, but I've never heard the analogy of the entire company is a castle. So walk
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  me through what this means. Yeah, so I asked the question, I actually read this in an article in
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  Forbes, that why do two-thirds of all companies fail within 10 years? You know, 20% fail within
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  two years, 45 and five years, and 65% in 10 years? There are a whole bunch of reasons. Okay, it's
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  well-cronicled. And so I said, I thought about my own career and why companies that I worked in
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  went to the highest of highs and fell down to the Y. And the common answer to what I've read
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  researched and experienced in my own companies is that sometimes speed is not as important,
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  as systematically building structure. And when you go for speed, you miss a lot of things.
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  And so I basically said, okay, if I want to basically build the way I've been successful in
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  building companies, I began with this company called Ericsson Mobile Platforms, wherever
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  I was sent to Sweden to help realize its potential. The company had invested a very large amount
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  of money. We had nothing to show. We were bleeding. For every dollar, we made we lost a dollar.
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  Our customers were getting anxious. And everybody was contemplating our failure. And I put this
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  framework to work. And in the year, we became profitable. And within a few short time,
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  thereafter, we took 30% market share on the work. And I said, what was this structure? And of course,
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  I repeated this formula multiple times. And it always worked. It's even working in my startup now.
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  So what was this? And I said, the analogy I used is I said, take a medieval castle.
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  I was looking for an analogy and an extended metaphor. And I said, look at the castle. Medieval
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  castles have lasted. Some of those that have lasted have lasted 500 years. Plus, all around the
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  world, whether it's in Japan, in India, in England, Wales, the Czech Republic, etc. So these
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  castles had a number of structural elements that have made them withstand nature's elements
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  over the centuries, as well as in Vedas. And a company likewise needs to withstand
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  macroeconomic factors like recessions, depressions, pandemics, etc. And a hordes of competitors.
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  So it is a nice analogy. And I said, what are these elements? I said, if you look at a castle,
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  you have to find the right location, which is unassailable. Hopefully, you need a solid foundation
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  to take the weight of the castle and build it all castle. You need a perimeter wall that protected
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  it from invaders. And right in the center was the keep where people lived, they stood granaries,
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  they stood their ammunition, etc. And that turns, you know, that has a certain meaning. And then
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  you have to protect the strategy, which is the perimeter wall with towers, because you don't want
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  people scaling these long walls that are unprotected, or you don't want them tuddling underneath.
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  And then you also talk about, so there are a number of towers. And then you talk about,
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  you know, the central portion of the castle, the keep, needs a roof to prevent it from enemy
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  arrows and from hail and snow and rain, etc. And so, you know, I took these elements and said,
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  I likened them to a business. And in my analogy, I said, you know, the, the picking of the location
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  is the business model. You want your business model to be as unassailable as possible.
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  The foundation is cash flow. Without cash, you can't do anything. Without cash, you can't build a
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  big, big business. And then I said, the perimeter wall of this was a strategy.
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  The strategy surrounds the entire business. And that wall has to be protected by a number of
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  towers. And those towers are product creation, products or services, it could be either products,
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  creation, product delivery, you know, sales channels and execution. Because of each of these,
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  any of these fail, the wall is not going to stand for long. And the central portion of this castle,
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  the keep is the culture. In a strategy is what you want to get done. But culture determines what
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  you actually get done. And when culture falls, the entire castle falls because it doesn't matter
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  the walls are standing. And so I talk about culture as the keep. And then the room from the keep
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  is stakeholder confidence. And there are three stakeholders. You have your investors,
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  you have your customers and you have your employees. And they're the triangle of trust.
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  If you break the trust with or any of them, you're toast. So I go on to explain how these
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  elements actually build a very, very strong castle or a strong company and how they're interrelated.
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  And then the last part of my book is I talk about now that you learn to build a strong castle.
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  And I give you a lot of recipes and checklists. But at the end of it, I say, now how do you basically
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  build yourself to run such a castle? And that's the whole book.
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  I love it. Let's go into, let's go into some of, it makes a ton of sense. I love, I love
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  the analogy. Let's go into some of the, let's go into some of these strategies so that people can
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  at least take some really tangible things away. So there's so many different elements.
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  And, and I always hate asking like, what's, what's the most important? Because they're all
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  obviously very important. That's the concept of the castle. It's, it's, none of them can
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  exist without the other entities. And they're, holistically, they create this ecosystem that
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  leads to a strong business. And I'll ask actually, I'll ask in a second, maybe some of the,
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  the more tactical strategies for pick, pick an element or two. But before we do that,
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  what are, what are really glaring examples of companies that, that haven't done this properly?
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  And what is the pick a company that has failed? What is the thing that they missed the mark on?
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  To sort of highlight the importance. I'm sure you have some thoughts on, on different companies
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  grown too fast. But like, I'm not going to make you, I'm not going to make you talk about the ones
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  you don't want to talk about. But other companies, for example, yeah, what are some of them?
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  I'm going to be a little political and, and, yes, no problem.
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  Because, you know, the two most important things, because you brought up the, what are the
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  two most important concepts? I talked about eight elements, but what are the two most important?
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  I think that you must have, actually, there are three very important things, I'll mention the
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  three most important, the three most important is when you build a strategy, you have to think it
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  through very carefully. Okay, there are three elements of a strategy that if you get wrong,
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  you're invariably going to fail. So the three elements of the strategy are,
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  how big is your opportunity you're addressing? Don't go after little opportunities, go after
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  big opportunities. You want to go and fish in lakes full of fish, so that you can basically catch
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  something reasonable. Okay, and especially, I call it open spaces, go to somewhere where no one
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  else is fishing, so you can catch something. Okay, the second is, is your product relevant to the
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  market? How do you make sure it's relevant? Right, a lot of products have been launched,
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  which either customers did not like, there was no need, and I make a lot of, I talk a lot about
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  these, I give an example in the book, or they'd come too late when others have already been entrenched.
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  Okay, now your biggest opportunity there is the example I give is the iPhone, you know, they
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  entered when they were, the leader had over 400 million phones, they were selling 400 million
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  phones in the market, but the leader basically didn't mist out a major issue. They did not realize
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  the value of an application store and the user interface, which the iPhone sold. That was a
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  fundamental customer need and they toppled an entire industry and rose to the top.
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  So product relevance knowing what your customers want and need is most important.
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  Find out what your competitors are not doing or will not do and see if you can address it.
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  All of that relates to relevance. Make sure you have sustainable differentiation.
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  So that's the second element of the three in strategy. The third element is, do you have the
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  capability to execute on your differentiation and your relevance and capture the opportunity?
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  If you don't, you're not going to succeed however brilliant your idea is.
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  So that's about strategy. The second aspect is culture. You know, as I said earlier,
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  strategy is what you want to get done. Culture is determines what you actually get done.
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  How do you build the culture to execute and build? And in my book, I talk about two things. I call
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  it raising the right army and leading the right army. It's both a combination of leadership
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  and instilling the set of beliefs that you need in your team in order to execute to the strategy.
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  I won't go too much into this. It's in the book. And the third part is, you have to be able to
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  generate cash. Nobody trusts a company that bleeds constantly and does not meet its promises.
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  So it's devoted an entire chapter to basically managing cash and managing risk and figuring out
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  how you generate more cash. And fiscal prudence is extremely important in doing this. So those are
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  three elements that stick out as it's very fundamental to how I run my businesses.
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  If I can't get these three things right, everything else doesn't matter.