Take risk — Success mantra of Punit Soni

Punit is one of the world’s top most product management professional who has been instrumental in building products like Google Magazines, Google Newspapers, Google Buzz for Mobile and widely popular mobile phones like Moto X, G and E series at Motorola. His expertise in mobile product development has led to the creation of an early version of all Google Apps like email, chat etc. Most recently he was the chief product officer of Flipkart which is India’s largest e-commerce company with an estimated valuation of $11 billion.

Punit graduated from an engineering college (NIT Kurukshetra) in India in 1998. He wanted to pursue higher studies so he gave GRE and moved to the U.S. for his masters. He did not want to take money from his parents so he ultimately got a scholarship from a relatively lesser known school which is the University of Wyoming where he did his MS in electrical engineering. He was lucky enough to graduate during internet boom days and got good opportunities to work in the bay area which is the Mecca of technology.

He started with an entry level QA engineer job at a company called Avanti Corporation. He worked there for few months before moving to Softface Inc. which was an early stage risky startup. He was fascinated by the internet boom and by the fact that people were starting their own companies everywhere, so he took a risk to work at the startup. He was one of the early employees at Softface. The company soon got acquired by Ariba and he subsequently moved to Cadence Design Systems. At Cadence, he worked for almost 5 years across multiple roles and projects.

During this time, he decided to go to a business school. The first time he applied to a few of top 20 schools in the U.S., he got rejected from all of them. According to him, he was an ordinary guy who graduated from a little-known engineering college in India and later did his masters from another lesser known school in the U.S. There was nothing special about him which could help him get an admission in a good MBA college. In order to change his story and make it appealing for the MBA application, he decided to distinguish himself from the rest and work on the overall personality. His sole purpose was to get into the best business school in the country. He started taking child psychology classes and mentoring kids, he got interested in mountaineering, running and started training for marathons. Soon he was doing all sorts of interesting things so that he could round up his personality. He had fun doing all these things and so he got genuinely interested in them.

At the end of the second year, he again got rejected from the business schools. However, he kept on working on his personality. Finally, in the third year, he applied to the best schools in the country and got into almost all of them. He ended up going to Wharton and there was a critical shift in his career path.

“The process of applying over three years probably taught me more than what I would have learned from the business school itself.”

Until now he was following a linear path with few shifts in between. Like everybody else, he did his engineering but moving to the U.S. for M.S. was a shift in his path. He then started his job in the Silicon Valley and was slowly moving up the corporate ladder which was another linear path. Going to Wharton was a shift in his linear path. After MBA he got interested in venture capital and he even did an internship with Intel Capital.

However soon he realized that he was not the right person to do venture capital. He was still learning to build companies and he was a player and also he did not get into best VC firms. So he ultimately decided to spend time operating rather than going to venture capital.

“The trend line is invariably trying to achieve something which I was not getting so as part of achieving that you end up learning more than what you would learn when you actually got it”

He joined Google and worked with the search group and led to the development of products like Google Magazine, Google Newspaper etc. However, he was not satisfied with what he was doing and wanted to do things at an even bigger scale. Somehow he knew that mobile would be big soon but at that time, mobile had little or no focus at Google. Luckily during that time, Google acquired a company in Canada which was the seat for their mobile apps group. He was asked to go there and help build the group out. His team ended up building the first or second version of all Google apps like email, chat etc. Mobile over the years grew at Google and he led bigger and bigger roles in the company. Later he led the Google+ Games initiatives at Google, which was a failure despite their hard work, good strategy and great infrastructure. He did that for a couple of years and ultimately decided to leave Google. They asked him to take a break, clear up his mind and decide what he wanted to do. Luckily Google acquired Motorola during that time and he was asked to come in and help run software products at Motorola.

He was ultimately successful in turning around things at Motorola and under his leadership, products like Moto X, Moto G, and Moto E were launched. Punit shared an interesting story about Moto G phones. The phone was designed by optimizing Android heavily so that the performance was similar to a high-end phone but the cost was only one third. They worked with Flipkart to sell the phone online exclusively in India. Initially, people laughed that who would buy the phone online in India. But everyone was proved wrong, as the phone became the bestselling phone in the history of Motorola which led it to the path of profitability over years. Flipkart found a new way to boost GMV by selling lowcost phones online and he discovered India and later decided to join Flipkart as its Chief Product Officer.

This article is part of an exclusive interview of Punit Soni with ScaleUp Magazine.Click here to read the full interview and other articles on business growth, productivity and motivation.