meet me room
GAURAV DHILLON – SNAPLOGIC
Gaurav Dhillon joined SnapLogic in 2009 and is the company’s CEO and chairman. He founded
his first company, Informatica, in 1992 and ran it for 12 years, before leaving to set up another
company, Jaman, in 2005. Gaurav was born in India but now resides in California.
Can you remember what job you
wanted when you were a child?
I’ve always wanted to build
things. I remember as a child
looking up to my uncle, who was
an engineer; he was certainly an
early inspiration for me. I also
remember, when I was about eight
years old, my father took me to
an electronics bazaar in the small
town in which I grew up in India.
I wanted to buy a transistor, and I
could barely see over the counter,
but I remember asking him all
kinds of questions – ‘What is the
most popular transistor?’, ‘How
does it work?’, ‘Can you show me?’
– I was a curious kid and wanted
to learn. I started building things
as a young child and then later
in life I was building companies,
teams, products, etc. In retrospect,
I am blessed to have known what I
wanted to do with my life.
Did you have a clear idea of the
career you wanted by the time you
left school and has your career
path gone the way you expected?
Yes, I would say so. My formative
business influences in Northern
India were all entrepreneurs. The
generation before me landed in
the town of Ludhiana, in part, as
a result of displacement from the
Partition of India. Because of this
great tragedy, from which they
were fleeing by the millions, many
of them had to start over, they no
longer had secure jobs, they were
lucky if they had a shirt on their
back, they had no choice but to
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be entrepreneurial and build a
brand new life. I went to school
with many of those people, these
families who came from nothing
but were building a full and rich life
for themselves, and they were a
great inspiration to me.
So by the time I was graduating
college, yes, I knew 100 per
cent that I wanted to be an
entrepreneur. I wanted to be in
control of my hopes and dreams. I
feel very lucky indeed.
What is your main motivation in
the work that you do?
I love building things. As long as I
draw a breath I will want to build
things. It makes me very happy to
have a hand in building a product,
or helping to build someone’s
career. My proudest moment
is when somebody joins the
company fresh out of college and
they put on their first suit and they
go out and get their first customer
– there’s just a magic to it. What
we are doing is building a home,
building a community, building
a way of life. It’s an evergreen
motivation, you are never done
with it. It’s true, I’m happiest when
I’m building something. around. We’re still doing things by
hand, using outdated technology,
in some cases it is really ugly.
There’s a sort of Pavlovian nature
of many IT organisations where
if something goes wrong they get
punished, including being asked to
potentially find a new assignment.
But if something goes right they
don’t always get rewarded. So over
decades of being a successful IT
person, they learn to become risk
averse, and they stick to what won’t
get them in trouble. It’s frustrating
and crazy but it is true.
Are there any major changes
that you would like to see in the
enterprise tech industry?
The enterprise tech industry
needs to truly become the web,
or SaaS, industry. It’s happening
but not fast enough. There’s still
too much old clunky stuff floating Looking back on your career so
far, is there anything you might
have done differently?
First, when I started Informatica,
I was a young kid in my twenties,
I didn’t have an MBA, I went to
the ‘School of Hard Knocks’, and
there were a lot of knocks! But