“Without Trust, ADDVERB would not have existed”
Sangeet Kumar, CEO and Co-Founder, Addverb
The 10 Tenets of Building Institutional Leadership Capital, outlined by our Chairman Mukesh Ambani, articulate how each of us can cultivate a Founder's Mindset and help Reliance grow from strength to strength.
In a conversation with RIL's internal communication team, Sangeet Kumar, CEO and Co-Founder, Addverb, shares how he uses the 10 Tenets in driving culture and building a Founder's Mindset.
Can you take us through the journey of Addverb?
Sangeet Kumar (SK): All the co-founders [of Addverb] used to build the world's largest paint factory. We used to import most of the equipment for these factories either from Europe or from Japan. And every time we used to do it, I felt that all of these things can be made in India.
So I decided to start Addverb with all my colleagues and friends.
We started in 2016 with five people. Today we export our robots made in India across the world. Today we are more than 800 engineers.
Robotics is a multidisciplinary engineering product, and so, we have people from mechanical, electrical, electronics, and software working together to build our product.
We started with a two-room rented apartment. Today we have two factories—one of which is the world's largest factory for robots at a single location.
We also have tools and a software development centre: one in Pune and the other in Noida.
We grew from zero revenue. We made around Rs 430 crores this year. We are today one of the fastest-growing robotics companies in the world.
One of the things which differentiates us is we not only build flexible automation, which is robotics, but also, we build fixed automation—the traditional automation, which is ASRS cranes and shutters etc. with one software as a base.
How do you build trust and cooperation in leadership and the company culture?
SK: Our vision statement is touching human lives by pioneering human-robot collaboration. We believe both humans and machines—that is, robots— have to work together to solve the problem.
This is our vision and which resonates with the 10 Tenets. In fact, there is no “Technology" if “People" is not there.
As far as our “Trust" and trustworthiness is concerned, without this tenet, ADDVERB would not have existed. It is not only the trust between the co-founders, trust between the senior leadership team, but also in B2B business, most of our customers, if you see, are really large organisations. These big companies were able to trust a small company.
The more you deliver according to what you have committed, the more you become trustworthy.
So that people could trust us during our initial days, we used to go beyond the ask. So that the company who was buying, the people who were buying from us, they understood that these people are genuinely interested in the success of their company, and therefore, they trusted us.
From the top, the instructions would come to the person responsible for execution, sometimes skipping the hierarchy. In this situation, without killing agility, if we had to perform, “Cooperation" in the hierarchy as well as between the functions in the organisation had to be at a different level.
If I am running a relay race, the biggest problem is exchanging the baton, or I have to be careful while exchanging the baton, because if I'm running in other places, it is always about me. Now, it is about two people. And therefore, whenever we had a function created in the organisation or a department within the function, we would define the grey area properly. This is the area where both the people have to run together, and, therefore, have to absolutely trust each other, respect each other, and then only we can cooperate.
What are some leadership lessons from your journey heading Addverb?
SK: Decisions are important, and taking the right decision is important.
But more than that, making the decision right once you have taken that decision is very, very important.
So whatever [be the] decision—you take [a] decision based on certain data, you get the feeling that that is the right thing to do, and in [the] absence of being backed 100% by data, what you do is very, very important.
You take decisions, and then as a group, you ensure that those decisions are right, so you do whatever it takes.
And that is the only way you can succeed when you are small as an organisation.
That is something we have done very religiously.