Building your Network versus Networking - in Silicon Valley and Beyond with M.R. Rangaswami

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by MR. Rangaswami, founder of sandhill.com, the Enterprise Software and SaaS Enterprise Conferences, the Corporate Eco-Forum, and Indiospora. Today, with MR., we will be covering three main areas. The evolution from Enterprise Software to the SaaS CEO Conference. The Corporate Eco-Forum. What's the connection to the software and cloud industry? And third, the Indiospora form. Moving from connections to political activation. MR., please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**M.R. Rangaswami** (1:17)
Hey, Ray. Thank you for having me on your show here. And again, I have to tell you, I have had a front row seat in this incredible journey in Silicon Valley. I came here in 1982, guys. So it's what? 39 years now. So I've seen ups and downs pretty much across the board. All the busts and booms, the bubbles and bursts. So I've had a privileged and good fortune of having a great driver seat here. And my journey kind of mirrors the journey of Silicon Valley. You know, people coming in with some kind of idea to change the world, trying the hand of different things, failing, succeeding, trying again, all the way to today. So my journey, again, like I said, mirrors Enterprise Software, to Client Server Architectures, to the ASP model, to cloud, to SaaS. And now with all the new buzzwords and things that are upon us today. So I've really witnessed all this stuff. And, you know, a lot of things when they change, a lot of things are still the same. So excited to be here. And this journey is taking me a long way to kind of creating wealth for people, to giving wealth away, to doing new things, to exploring new ideas. And so really it's been a tremendous journey for me in the past 39 years here in the Bay Area.

**Ray Rike** (2:40)
Well, I think we as a industry are so lucky and fortunate to have you there at the forefront of these trends. And one of the things that investors and entrepreneurs alike are good at is pattern recognition. And you've been at the forefront of several major industry trends, starting at Oracle and Enterprise Software to creating the Enterprise Conference. And then you saw the SaaS trend and created the SaaS Enterprise Conference to seeing the importance of sustainability in the Eco-Forum and now the importance of giving back through political activation with the Indian American community. Are there any common threads or patterns of commonality across all of those different initiatives that you've led, MR?

**M.R. Rangaswami** (3:24)
Yeah, I would say that all these started accidentally. I can't look back and say, man, I had a great idea, I imagined all this stuff. And also I started accidentally giving back. So when I left the technology industry as an executive and started the Enterprise Conference, the main business model of the event was to give back. So that was something I stumbled upon. It wasn't something I created initially. But when I turned the switch and said all the profits from the Enterprise Retreat, which we used to have at Pebble Beach and play the Pebble course, and more recently now at the Ritz-Carlton and Half Moon Bay, the whole focus was the industry leaders to get together, industry leaders to discuss insider issues and not grandstand each other, but to talk about problems, stock options, accounting, the turnover in our industry, going public, getting bought. These were the issues we tackled, but at the same time, we gave away all the profits off this conference to nonprofits. That was my introduction into giving and to becoming a philanthropist. I think it stood me in good stead as I moved from the enterprise and the technology industry to the Eco-Forum, to now the Indian American community. That's been an underpinning of all these networks that I've started.
That is the common pattern you'll see in my last 20 plus years of my journey now.

**Ray Rike** (4:57)
Well, it's very interesting. Having this desire to do good and give back has actually accelerated your reputation and presence across the industry. I think for people today who are trying to build their own B2B networks and following, it's an important lesson. Start out with the right goal and a successful follow.