Ramkumar Narayanan?s family tree is inundated with public administrators. Former election commissioner TN Seshan is his uncle. His father TN Lakshmi Narayanan was in the very first batch of India?s IAS officers way back in 1946. There are many more in the family who are equally reputed, but Ramkumar chose to be an engineer.
?I am the odd one out,? he says, even as we settle down for an early lunch. ?Even as a kid, I wanted to build things with my own hands. I always like to put things together.
So it was natural that I chose engineering,? says Ramkumar, who is Yahoo!?s vice-president (emerging markets and small business). His family members were largely outspoken people, and Ramkumar says he learned how to communicate effectively from an early age. ?I picked this up from my dad. He spoke his mind, but he could also ensure that he did not hurt anyone. This has helped me tremendously in my career.?
?I put my opinion on the table and I set context by making people understand why I am making this point and I am ready to be proven wrong. I believe that having an honest dialogue and putting everything on a table is a good thing.? From his initial days at Chrysler, US, to his eight-year stint at Microsoft and now Yahoo!, he has always been the ?go-to? guy, thanks to ability to find solutions for the most acute problems. But his decision to join
Yahoo! has perplexed many. After all, the internet player has been struggling immensely over the past few years.
Ramkumar says while Yahoo!?s problems are well-documented, he also saw opportunity. ?I have been here four years. We?ve gone through a lot of ups and downs and a lot of turmoil. But I also have to say what brought me here continues to keep me here, which is the ability to have a massive impact. We have to still get 700 million users on monthly basis to visit our site.?
Fair enough, I think. ?The other thing that attracted me to Yahoo! was the ability to work in several different areas. The advertising side where I first started working, is a very enterprising business. And I also work on the consumer side. How do you attract your consumer to come to you? I can?t think of too many companies that offer a plethora of different opportunities within one company. The last 4 years have been one of the greatest learning experiences in my career.?
So what are these key learnings? ?A couple of things that stand out. Thinking about how to think about consumers. Big corporates operate the same way, whether you?re in India in US in Europe. Consumers are not like that. Even within India, a consumer in Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai or Chennai is different from a consumer coming in from
Allahabad or Hubli or wherever. And then you extrapolate that. What drives a person in Indonesia is very different from what drives a person from the Vietnam or the US. That?s one side to it. The other side to it is that I?ve had the ability to work with people from different parts of the world, which has been a great people-learning experience from me, what does it take to be a global manager. What are the aspirations, desires, how do you motivate people from different parts of the world to work towards a common goal.?
The third learning, he says, is the internet itself. ?How do you think about problems not just in terms of thousands of customers but millions and billions of customers, all coming to you at the same time. The amount of data that flows through our systems on a daily basis. The time it takes to load a page, that page has so many components that have to come together for that user in a very short period of time. Our benchmark is less than 5 seconds, but we have to make sure we mitigate all that to give the user the best experience. The webpage has got the story, the ad, its got all these pieces. That story comes from multiple sources. We assemble the page. It?s real time for the user because that user is unique. We have to personalise the page. By knowing your interests by either your login interest or imputed interest, by what we gather over time,? notes Ramkumar, now completely in the zone, talking about his favourite subject.
?Advertisers are looking at your profile, not you as an individual. When we load the page, we also let the advertising systems know, that the person who is loading this page, is a person who is potentially a candidate for showing an ad for say Ford, because this person is interested in buying a car maybe in the near future.?
?If I look at it from a competitive perspective, there?s nothing like a big competitive barrier. Once you spend hundreds of millions with me in buying my infrastructure, the barrier to entry is very high for somebody else who?s coming in. In internet there?s nothing like an entry barrier. You as a consumer, may use Yahoo!, Google, Facebook all at the same time. So for us the challenge is how do we make sure that we get your mind share more than our competitor gets it. The barrier there is very low. You will go where you get the best experience for whatever you?re trying to do. So that?s the challenge, because it?s a very democratic system. And that complicates matters considerably,? he adds.
India?s unique challenges make things a little more difficult, isn?t it? It is tough to read an Indian consumer like an open book. ?India is different. The US is a highly penetrative market from the internet perspective. There the challenge is more like you?re really competing with the next big startup that?s coming up. A market like India, with 8-9%
internet penetration, the challenge here is, what is that first experience the user gets when he comes on. Is it going to be Yahoo? Is it going to be Facebook? Is it going to be something else? And how do we attract the users the first time they come to the internet, and be able to retain them. The marginal cost of adding that user is very high, because we really need to make sure that we know that user and what his aspirations are.?
And then the fourth area is connectivity. ?In the US the average bandwidth is around 16 megabytes per second. There it?s about very high quality video. And that?s eating up all the bandwidth. They used to have an unlimited plan for iPhone. But their networks came crashing down, because everybody was watching videos, because of unlimited bandwidth, on their phones. But India leapfrogs a lot of these things.?
I remind him about e-commerce?s recent fast rise to success in the country. The point of contact is very important in India, I tell him. Just the way that you have somebody to pick up your stuff and deliver. It is much more comfortable if there is a door delivery mechanism, rather than you book online. ?Whatever we are seeing is not even the tip of the iceberg. I think the big chunk is yet to come. When, the friction of availability becomes lower, it just becomes the natural way of life,? says Ramkumar.
How does he think Yahoo! can take the game forward now? There is growing criticism that its focus is not clear to many. ?Three years ago, we put a plan in place about how do we convert the global platforms that will allow us to rapidly switch to market. We have been focused a lot on platformisation. We are spending a lot of time doing research, trying to understand the trends, understand the consumer across geographies and find a way to connect with the lower end user. But you are right, we can get better. But our pipeline is strong for the next few years and you will be able to get a clearer picture soon.?