speedrunning-180m-intrapreneur-playbook-gaurav-jaiswal-launchpod-logrocket
===

[00:00:00] All right, Gaurav, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Shiv. Happy to be here. This is gonna be a fun one. I'm, I'm excited for this. It's funny 'cause in pop culture, in the news, tech media especially, everyone really, really romanticizes the entrepreneur and the concept of starting in a basement or a garage or, you know, starting from zero.

But I think the more likely thing that most tech executives and most people in product leadership roles are going to run into, and the muscle you're gonna find a lot more powerful, is developing your sense of being a strong intrapreneur. How do you take a new idea within a company and move it forward, or how do you kinda add a business line, or how do you add a new business unit?

And these are all things you've done really, really well and have great history in, so looking forward to talking about that. Maybe before we dig into that, can you just give us the TLDR, who is Gaurav Jaiswal, and let's go from there. [00:01:00] So I'm an engineer by trade. Started as a software engineer way back, graduated to being a product manager when I came up with a new product idea for my first employer and pitched it to the company, did business development for it, developed the product, and that's where the business bug bit me.

Went to business school. After that, spent a few years in strategy consulting, and then realized soon enough that I'm a techie by heart, so came back to tech, and that's where I've been ever since. Spent almost a decade at SAP in three different roles, all again, entrepreneurial in nature. That has been the red thread through my entire career, where I've ideated, built, and scaled new products or new businesses.

And then spent some time in a completely new industry at Pearson in the ed tech space. Again, the same thing, being an entrepreneur and helping scale their products and businesses. So in a nutshell, that's, uh, what I've been up to, uh, for the past few years. I love it. Even the first gig, the first move that got you into product was an act [00:02:00] of entrepreneurship, so I mean, this runs deep in your veins at this point.

So you kinda mentioned SAP and Pearson, Lava, kind of more recent companies you've been at. Not to knock anything, I don't think those are companies that people look at and go, "They're going to move the entire ship overnight." They have a lot of business and a huge book of business they have to look to, and this is really, really common for a lot of companies.

You have a lot of existing customers you have to look to whenever you're changing anything or building anything new. And for good reason, you analyze more, you take a little bit more time to make decisions. But I wanna dig into a story you talked about when we met a little while back about you came into SAP, and one of the earlier things you did was build pretty much an entire new business unit or an entire new product that was B to B to C, which anything that ends to C in SAP, I feel like is a huge deal, and it moved way faster than I would've thought when you told me about the story.

So you're right. SAP, being a large enterprise software company, had been operating very successfully- Yeah ... [00:03:00] doing B to B business until we delved into this B to B to C part of the business. And this whole idea started with a simple conversation between the then CEO and the CDO Where they said, "Hey, wouldn't it be nice if, as a company, we were able to reach back out directly to the end users of our products, and hence the B2B2C part?"

And I, being in the office of the CMO, who then became the CDO, when being offered the chance to co-found this business, which we ended up calling SAP Digital, the only answer I could come up with was, "Why not?" That's how the journey started. So we incubated and started this business called SAP Digital, which was set up with the intent to enable anyone in the world to discover, try, buy and consume SAP and partner products in a completely self-serve manner.

So in a nutshell, to put it simply, we wanted to be the Amazon in the enterprise software world. And that wasn't easy at that time, but that was the BHAG, as we called [00:04:00] it, the big, hairy, audacious goal. And we embarked on that journey, spent about a good six, seven months working across the different stakeholders in 100,000 people company and across different business functions, sales, marketing, product, engineering, legal, finance, rev rec, you name it, to identify what the, the right customer segments are, what the pain points are, what are the pockets of opportunity that we could tap into and address as part of this business unit.

We built a business case around it, pitched it individually to each board member, and the CEO got their approval. And then about six, seven months later, we set up this new business unit called SAP Digital. And I, as a kind of one of the chief janitorial officers, had different roles under the sun for it because we were trying to, as I think of it, fly a plane while we were building.

But then in my day job, I took a deeper dive into the lead product portfolio lead role, and I started working with all of these teams that I mentioned earlier, especially focusing on the product and engineering [00:05:00] side, both at SAP and the partner ecosystem, to identify the right products that lend themselves well to a digital go to market motion, soup to nuts.

And in cases where a product didn't exist, we co-innovated with the product and engineering teams to build one so people can buy with their credit card, let's say a digital CRM for a single user, $25 per user per month, three-month contract, $75. Who would have thought that you could buy an SAP CRM, uh, for 75 bucks, right?

And we scaled that business from zero to about 180 million at that time when I decided to make the transition, and we did business in 130 plus countries. It was an exhilarating journey. Not easy. Challenging, but very rewarding. Really interesting to hear that. I think it's a good place to focus on because first of all, six to seven months of going from starting to pitch the idea to having a decision made.

I mean, SAP is a 100,000 person company, and there are companies I feel like that [00:06:00] are one tenth or one one-hundredth the size that wouldn't make that decision that quickly. I do wanna double click back on how that decision got done and how you guys kinda moved quickly there, but you said 180 million- ARR is what it hit when you had left.

How long did it go from basically when you started selling it, you know, go to market began to hitting that hundred eighty million? So I would say about four-ish years, give or take, that we got there. And the path to that, it wasn't linear, for sure. It was a bit zigzaggy. As you look at how the product developed, where were the inflection points where you saw, here's how we're gonna choose to make this improvement, or here's how we're going to move to get more traction?

Like, was it just kinda overnight success or it sounds more like there were choices you made along the way to prioritize or rework things that really added velocity here. That's a great question. For sure, it was not overnight, like that I can tell you right off the gate. The whole idea behind setting up this [00:07:00] business unit was for it to serve as a beach, as a land and expand strategy, right?

So the goal was that we will help expand SAP's footprint in the customer segments and in the markets where it has traditionally, let's say, not had a good sales rep coverage. So we'll start with like either small companies or like small teams in large companies, and once they adopt some products through this B2B2C motion, then we can convert it to a B2B to get the larger size of the pie, if you will.

Now, when we started this unit, we realized that it's not just about figuring out what are the right products that we can sell digitally, but it's also about changing everything soup to nuts in the whole product ideation to creation to selling to consumption process. So we put in place what we called like the four P framework, which was [00:08:00] product, platform, policy, people.

Essentially, it was about coming up either like building or identifying the right products that lend themselves well to a digital go-to-market motion. You need to have the right platform to enable their discovery and to sell them. Policies or processes, you need to have the right digital processes that actually enable that whole, not just the transaction, but also the pre-transaction, the discovery part, and then also the provisioning part of the product.

And then people, you need to have people with the right digital skills and the right DNA in order to enable this whole change, and not just within the company, but also in our partner ecosystem as well at that time. So it was a very deliberate action on our part, which oftentimes also seemed painful and there were areas of friction.

But thankfully, we had a lot of the stakeholders internally who also believed in it enough to drive a momentum behind it, which [00:09:00] helped us navigate around some of those challenges that we encountered as we were scaling the business. The thing that is a little bit unique to this type of a setup, like an entrepreneurial type setup when you're trying to build a business within an existing publicly traded company is like there's a lot of market expectations as well with the company overall, right?

So you have to be conscious of that because you have the permission to engage, but at the same time, you don't have that freedom of a completely independent startup- Right ... uh, because you are being evaluated constantly on the profitability of the business as well. Mm-hmm. You can't just focus on the top line.

You also have to think of the bottom line. Yeah. We're much smaller than SAP, and a lot of times how we think about where do we move fast, where do we think about let's just get the thing done versus let's really think twice about how everything's done, you know, measure three times, cut once kind of things.

In the company, we always have a good old four box, and, you know, you always look at impact in one-way door, two-way door kind of [00:10:00] thing is, is the very, very shorthand of it. And that's the thing, right? Smaller companies, there are probably a lot more choices that you can walk back a decision you don't like.

Maybe something doesn't have huge impact if it goes wrong. And in a company with the size and scale and scrutiny of something like an SAP, you know, you have the customer base you can sell into, which probably helped grow. But there's a lot of decisions that for us would be a two-way door, very quick decision And there might have a much bigger and lasting impact on shareholder share price or how the analysts view the company or anything like that.

So it makes the decisions different that you have to make for sure. On that theme though, I'd love to kinda dig in here 'cause you, you built the business plan and you built kinda the concept in six months. You stress tested it across the board. I mean, you speed ran that process. What were one or two of the big assumptions or big hypotheses that you found were just completely off base that you and the team really had to 180 on?

Or where'd you find the surprises maybe that you didn't expect in driving this thing forward? One of the probably [00:11:00] biggest surprises or assumptions that we had to adjust after a few months of launching this is how not easy it would be to change some of the operational processes as part of the process was one of the four Ps in our framework, uh, to actually enable a business at this scale Something that may seem very benign from an external point of view, to give you a small example, is like you're talking about operating a digital commerce business, right?

Mm-hmm. From where you have thousands of these SAP and partner products that are being sold digitally and hence, you know, as you and I experience in our personal lives when we buy something digitally, we also like to have access to it immediately as well after you hit that place order button. In order to enable that in an enterprise software setup in a company like SAP, there was a ton of, um, um, system, i.e.

platform, and process changes that we had to do [00:12:00] behind the scenes, which wasn't easy, and we had to work through legal challenges. Mm-hmm. We had to work through system challenges to overcome that, and it required a lot of back and forth, but eventually we got it to a point where we could satisfy the legal requirements.

We could also change our systems appropriately in order to make sure that the customers, as soon as they buy it, they can also get into the product and off they go. Because that was the whole value proposition. Want now, buy now, use now. That is what we pitched to the customers. And, um, happy customers meant repeat customers, higher LTV, higher ARR, and then validation of that beachhead strategy.

I think that was one example of the learnings that we had initially. And then the second part was not so much of a course correction or, or learning, but it was a validation of the strategy that once we launched this business, we found that after a year or so, we heard some of the other [00:13:00] large competitors in that space also followed, actually.

Like, they ended up setting up their digital businesses as well. So that was like a nice validation of the strategy that we did at least something right. I kept poking at that, like the six to seven months to decision with a company that size is, I think, pretty fast. And anyone who's operated a company at the ten thousand plus employee level can understand that.

But after SAP, you left and you ended up at Pearson. What I find really interesting there is you kind of took a similar concept or a similar push of how to take this kind of company that was not a software company in any way, shape, or form leading up to this. And not only did you get a new product line launched, but a new concept and turned them into a software company.

Is it really true from like idea to on market being sold in six months for that? Yeah. So, um, that was another interesting business that I found myself in. I bet it was. Yeah. And, and, you know, thankfully though, my SAP experience helped quite a bit. So when Pearson came knocking and I [00:14:00] was pulled in as part of, sort of like a tech executive infusion in the company at that time, because they were also going through a massive digital transformation.

You know, Pearson being a hundred and fifty-plus-year-old company Was a huge conglomerate, but over the years it had transitioned itself and focusing more on the edtech business, still operating five different verticals, but all in the learning space. And the mission of the company is to enable anyone to realize the life they imagine through learning.

Now, when I came in, I was brought in to lead their global e-commerce business. So I was the VP of digital product management, analytics, customer experience measurement and insights, and MarTech. But focused heavily on the product management side of it, and I ran the whole commerce P&L, which we scaled to three hundred and fifty million dollars over the course of, you know, five, six years.

Now, coming to your question about was that real? Yes, it was real. Like, essentially what we did was we ideated, built, and launched the [00:15:00] first subscription product in Pearson's business, and it was called Pearson+. That was the umbrella of the product brand, but then the product specifically was called Pearson+ eText, which essentially think of it as like a digital e-textbook targeted towards college-going students who without that are buying a physical textbook for hundred and eighty, two hundred dollars, what have you.

As opposed to that, now they have the power of the same book in a digital format that they can consume on their mobile devices on the go, phone, uh, laptop, iPad, what have you. Full audio visual capabilities, AI infused features, and all for a very small price, right? Like forty, fifty dollars and based on a subscription model.

So we ideated that product, I would say like in December of twenty twenty-one, I would like to think so. Mm-hmm. And then launched it MVP in the market around June, July of twenty twenty-two. So again, super dense from ideation to market launch in six, seven months, [00:16:00] which by any stretch of imagination was an extremely aggressive target, especially when given the fact that you are building the product.

At the same time, you are also trying to come up with a new commercial model for it. And pushing a company into much more of being a software company as well. Exactly. Like, that was the other part of it, that one of the challenges that I addressed coming in was how we can transform this sort of traditional publishing business into operating a software company because there's a lot of systems, again, that have to be put in place and run it with an operational rigor.

Run Agile, you know, the CI/CD. Mm-hmm. Define a regular roadmap that you are executing based on and making frequent releases, all of that stuff. So we did some of that legwork upfront. Mm-hmm. But then it was similar situation where we were still trying to build out a good chunk of that plane while flying it.

But hey, I mean, again, one of the learnings that I've had throughout my career is, like, the only way to handle complexity is to lean into [00:17:00] it, and that passion for the mission is not optional. So we dived head on, again, with the help. It wasn't alone. Like, we required help from all of those same teams that we sought help from at SAP.

Again, different industry, different company, but it was product engineering, program management, design, legal, finance, traffic. Like all of those teams, and it required a belief system that was a common thread between these people, and we made it happen. And of course, it also helped that having enough support top-down.

But ultimately, we prevailed and launched the product, and then we scaled it globally, and we also ended up launching another subscription product under the same Pearson+ umbrella called Pearson+ Study Prep, which was like a mash-up between YouTube, Khan Academy, and again, the power of eTextbook lined up with Annette to help college students prepare better for their exams, learn, like master the concepts more skillfully and stuff like that.

In this journey here at Pearson, 'cause you kinda took the model from [00:18:00] SAP and went, "You know what? That was a little slow. Let's try to, like, 10X this thing and see how fast we can go." Six to seven months to idea approval, nah. We're gonna do six to seven months to on the market. What was the couple of most important things in that?

What did you realize, like, we have to do these two things versus I'm sure there's a lot of decisions made that, like, they could go one way or the other. If they happen, they don't happen. It's gonna suck or maybe not suck, but the thing will still get done. First and foremost, we decided to take an MVP approach, truly.

Mm-hmm. So we made sure that the entire experience for the customers, whether it's building the product or taking it to the market, sits right at the intersection of usable, viable, and valuable. Right. That experience has to encapsulate that. Secondly, we also decided to focus on the biggest market, which was the US.

So we said, "Let's at least start from that." And we focused on that one product, the new subscription product, Pearson+ eText. And that defined our sandbox a little bit. So we were not, like, trying to tackle everything [00:19:00] under the sun, but under those three pieces of the guardrail. And fourth actually was also I had spent like almost a year before that setting up the necessary groundwork of the systems and processes, and also got the e-commerce business to a well-running rhythm which could support the commercial aspirations of taking something like this of a product to market.

So with that sort of foundation and assumptions, we embarked on this and again, with the help of top-down support and also horizontally across the different cross-functional teams, it became a little bit more manageable to address as opposed to like if some of these guardrails were not in place. Looking across these two instances, 'cause in both cases, I feel like you looked at it and you had executive alignment, you had people pushing the case from very high up.

You had to align teams, you had to get all that kind of bureau. If you had to think about how you [00:20:00] would look at in maybe a new company, is this a case I'm going to push or is this the kind of, you know, entrepreneurial push I want to make right now? What are checkboxes you look for and maybe red flags you would look out for to make your own mental decision of this is something to put my weight behind or not?

That's a great question. Frankly, I would say that everything that I've learned from those two experiences at SAP and Pearson, completely different industries running at different speeds, a lot of the learnings are still very much applicable if one tries to either apply it to an intrapreneurial setting or even an entrepreneurial setting.

Some of them maybe go away if you're-- had a total free reign in a truly entrepreneurial setting where everything is in your control. But if you're trying to build scale and launch new products or businesses, you know, within an existing company, you will invariably end up dealing with a lot of these challenges along the way.

Having said that, I think a few things that I would be on the [00:21:00] lookout for. So always define your MVP of the product early on. What's that minimum viable product? But to your point, has to be good enough for the customers to enjoy it, even though it may not be perfect. It's very important to define that sandbox.

What's your baseline customer segment? Which market are you addressing? What's their main pain points? So do the right level of user research. I'm a big fan of making data-driven decisions, but don't get too much bogged down by it that you get into that overly analysis paralysis mode. Be-because once you launch the product, uh, you will learn so much and, you know, you may actually end up redoing a lot of it.

Second part is like in the current age of AI, we can use so many tools to help speed things up along the way in terms of the operational efficiency improvement and then also the customer features as well. So I think that would be a big area that I would evolve if I were to do this again. So like, you know, in the last [00:22:00] couple of years, we started leveraging AI to make a ton of operational efficiency and process improvements.

That helped speed things up so much. So like some of those things I would do a little bit differently. But again, at the same time, I think a lot of those four Ps in that framework would still be very helpful to go by. How important, though, to kind of success here was having executive alignment at the top that was really on board with the idea?

Like, do you think these things could have been as successful if some of those board members at SAP or new CEO at Pearson was maybe Yeah, sure, Gaurav, go do it. But they weren't chomping at the bit versus really, really positive on the idea and understanding how powerful it could be. And I think it's extremely important.

Having that top-down alignment from the C-suite, I cannot overemphasize the importance of it. So yes, it definitely helped, but at the same time, having a groundswell of bottom-up and also sideways support also was very helpful. And that oftentimes comes [00:23:00] organically from many pockets, but oftentimes it has to be built as well.

Yeah. Awesome. And I know it's not one of the four core things to look out for, but the message repetition thing I, I think is one of those things that you cannot overstate. I had a former CEO I know who put it basically, "Say it and say it again and say it again, and just keep saying it. And when you hit the point where you think you're gonna puke if you have to say it again, you have probably just started to begin to scratch the surface of saying enough where other people have ingested it."

Right. Wise man. Yeah. With that visual, I think, Gaurav, I gotta let you get back to finding the next thing to grow. Great to have you on today. Thank you for joining. We had a whole section to talk about around historic markets being attacked by new competitors right now, so maybe we'll have to have you back on soon.

But thanks for coming on, Gaurav. This was fantastic. Thank you for joining us, and hopefully we can chat again soon. Yeah. Thanks for, again, having me here, and lot of fun, and I would love to be back any time whenever you guys want me. Thank you again. Have a good rest of your day. You too. Take [00:24:00] care.