Global Lessons In a Nutshell

Raviteja is building a new-age marketing cloud for consumer businesses catering to the mobile-first world. He finds the present times very dynamic in nature and, especially, the domain he operates in challenging. He shares the lessons he picked up from three tomes that have helped him win clients and build a global enterprise.

Startupland by Mikkel Svane

The book is the biography of the Founder & CEO of Zendesk. I read that book because I wanted to understand how some of the global software enterprises were built from scratch. It talks a lot about the early days of Zendesk and how they experimented with different ideas before ending up into the customer support domain. My venture
MoEngage, on similar lines, is also a result of different experimentations over time. Further, Zendesk's story has taught me to think big and global. Its journey of starting from a small town in Europe to becoming a global behemoth in the customer
support space with $500 million ARR has inspired me to make MoEngage a global firm too.

ELON MUSK-How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future by Ashlee Vance

I consider Elon Musk a big inspiration. He believes in doing the un-ordinary, i.e., creating things which can change the world. His radical approach towards creating enterprises for building a better future has taught me that our minds have no limits, and the enterprises
we build are a pure manifestation of its immense power. Further, his personal life has been through many upheavals, and despite that, his vision to shape the future is unshakable. His resilience gives me strength to traverse through difficult times, which often arise in my entrepreneurial
journey.

Behind The Cloud by Marc Benioff

Every entrepreneur dreams of building a company like Salesforce. The book teaches different tactics of building an enterprise in a space already occupied by big enterprises. While the established players were offering on-premise services, Salesforce introduced the concept for cloud and showcased themselves as the disruptor in the category.
Further, they not only projected themselves as disruptors, but also did it. Their success story reminds me of David versus Goliath, and instills in me to the courage to take on big players operating in my domain. They established a new category in an existent domain and it truly excites me as an entrepreneur.

Straight Talk by Rajat Gupta

Rajat Gupta is a native son who brought India fame by becoming the first foreign-born to head Mckinsey and Company-the world's most influential management consultancy firm. In 2011, he was incarcerated on charges of insider trading - for passing secret information about an investment in Goldman Sachs to Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge fund manager and a billionaire of Sri Lankan origin. That is the story so far. Now, Gupta repents for conceding to his lawyers' demands and not speaking directly in his own defence. In Mind Without Fear, Gupta is candid:
"My side of the story has never been told. Raj was a business colleague (a poor choice, on my part, but not a criminal one). I want others, who looked up to me as a role model, to know my side of the story".