Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 299 | Entrepreneur | 1

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 299 | June 2-8, 2023.

5 Lessons From Founding CEO Who Led a Startup to $51 Billion

By Peter Cohan | Inc Magazine | June 4, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

Many business leaders dream of transforming a business idea into a company worth billions. If you have such dreams, you might be interested in how this founding CEO led her company from a team of engineers with no revenue to a publicly traded company worth tens of billions of dollars.  The CEO in question is Jayshree Ullal, who has served as president and CEO of Arista Networks, a Santa Clara, California-based cloud networking technology provider since September 2008.  Five lessons from Ullal’s successful tenure as Arista’s CEO: 

1. Turn lemons into lemonade.  Sometimes leaders must make the best of bad economic forces outside of their control.  That’s what Ullal had to do when she joined Arista. After all, September 2008 was the month Lehman Brothers — an Arista client — went bankrupt. Fortunately, she made the best of a bad situation.  According to her “We had built a system for the finance vertical and it helped our other finance customers survive because we had lower latency a software and stack that was programmable. The economy crashed and the customers loved it.”
2. Adapt your leadership style to your company’s growth stage.  Most founders don’t make it to the IPO and fewer are still CEO years after taking their company public. The reason is that they can’t change their management style to adapt to the changing requirements of each stage of scaling.
3. Let go to grow.  When a startup is trying to get off the ground, the CEO often feels compelled to get involved in everything. Such centralized control limits a company’s ability to reach escape velocity.  At that limit, the company faces a choice. Either the CEO learns how to delegate and empower people or the board replaces the current CEO with a new one who can.
4. Keep adding value to customers.  Business leaders must find ways to keep customers buying more.  Arista does this by developing or acquiring new products. As she said, “We look at our talent, the market potential, and we listen to the customer. They ask us to do more. 
5. Strengthen your bench.  Ullal feels a fiduciary responsibility to build the next generation of Arista’s leaders.  “For succession planning, I have one or two candidates internally or externally. It starts with building bench strength. There are people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who might want to retire. For the next CEO, we need an operator, someone who can embrace our vision and fit it with their style,” she said.

2 key takeaways from the article

1. Many business leaders dream of transforming a business idea into a company worth billions. If you have such dreams, you might be interested in how this founding CEO led her company from a team of engineers with no revenue to a publicly traded company worth tens of billions of dollars.  The CEO in question is Jayshree Ullal, who has served as president and CEO of Arista Networks, a Santa Clara, California-based cloud networking technology provider since September 2008.  
2. Five lessons from Ullal’s successful tenure as Arista’s CEO: turn lemons into lemonade, adapt your style to each scaling stage, let go to grow, keep adding value to customers, and build bench strength.

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Topics:  Entrepreneurship, Startup, Success