Serial entrepreneur Vetri Vellore shares insights on building great products, being a better leader, hiring decisions, and prioritizing family. He also emphasizes the importance of core values, writing gratitude journal, affirmations, and early career advice to dream big and focus on learning.
Differentiate products by listening to customer insights and creating a frictionless user experience.
Balance optimism and paranoia with tenacity and conviction to become a better leader.
Prioritize family and create work-life balance by incorporating habits and values like gratitude and affirmations.
Deep dives
Wetri's Journey to Building Ally and Discovering OKRs
Wetri Weller shares his entrepreneurial journey and how he discovered the importance of purpose and alignment in building highly performing teams. After struggling with managing his first startup, he realized the need for a framework that would help teams understand how their work contributes to the overall success of the company. Through a series of insights and customer interviews, he discovered OKRs as a powerful tool for bringing purpose and transparency to work. With a strong belief in the value of OKRs, he started developing a software solution, Ally, to simplify the adoption of OKR and make it a habit in organizations.
The Journey from Competitor to Microsoft Acquisition
Initially, Wetri was hesitant about entering a crowded OKR software market and passed on an acquisition offer from Microsoft. However, he later realized the potential of partnering with Microsoft to bring purpose to 100 million users. Despite having other options for funding, Wetri saw the opportunity of leveraging Microsoft's platform to achieve a larger user base than any other competitor. This alignment of mission and the challenge of reaching 100 million users led Wetri to accept Microsoft's offer and ultimately led to the acquisition of Ally by Microsoft.
Habits and Values for Success
Wetri emphasizes the importance of forming habits and values that contribute to personal and professional success. He starts his day early to ensure focused work time and to spend mornings with his family. Wetri is disciplined in following habits that promote personal well-being, such as hydrating, light stretching, and planning his day. He values habits that foster gratitude, priorities, and affirmations. Wetri also emphasizes the importance of transparency, striving for excellence, and customer obsession as core values for building successful teams and companies.
Importance of Access to Computer
The speaker emphasizes the importance of having access to computers and programming, highlighting that it helped them improve their coding skills and think critically about their code. They also mention the significance of having access to a computer lab, even before they were in their second or third year of college, which allowed them to further explore computer science.
Transition from Microsoft to Entrepreneurship
The speaker shares their desire to become an entrepreneur and their passion for combining business and technology in order to solve meaningful problems. They explain their decision to leave Microsoft after 14 years in various roles, as they wanted to pursue their dream of starting their own company. They mention the importance of timing and the realization that if they didn't take this opportunity, they may not have another chance to pursue entrepreneurship.
Vetri is a serial entrepreneur with a proven track record and over 25 years of experience building successful products and businesses. He has helped thousands of leaders and teams leverage the OKR framework. Vetri was the CEO and founder of the successful OKR software startup, Ally.io. After Microsoft acquired Ally.io in 2021, he become the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Viva Goals, continuing the mission to bring purpose, happiness and productivity to work.
A few nuggets from and lessons from the episode:
Building great products: Differentiate products from competitors by listening to customer insights, creating frictionless and integrated user experience, attention to smallest detail.
Being a better leader: Balance optimism and paranoia with tenacity and conviction.
Have core values: to guide everything you do. His own values are transparency, trust, excellence and customer obsession. The notion of customers first, business, team and then self.
Hiring decisions: First alignment of values, potential to be 10x better and unstoppable attitude.
Prioritize family: Create habits to balance work and personal life, like waking up at 4:30am so he can spend the evenings with his family.
Writing gratitude journal and affirmations: Really helps lead a better life.
Early career advice: Dream big, pay attention to details, focus on learning (vs. earning) early on.
BALL podcast extracts best advice and lessons from world-class performers & leaders from various fields, by deconstructing and teasing out their routines, success habits, tactics, techniques, hacks, tricks, secrets and the best advice or life lesson they've ever received.
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