Krish Ramakrishnan and the art of changing the plan

Krish Ramakrishnan once helped run a company where employees could not reserve a conference room. Arrive on time, the thinking went, and you could get one. It was an admirably direct solution to lateness, with the possible disadvantage that a meeting might require a small expedition. As BlueJeans grew, the company abandoned the rule. Meetings needed predictability. The policy had served its purpose, or perhaps revealed its limitations. Either way, it could go.

That small office experiment offers a useful entry into Ramakrishnan’s working life. He has spent decades asking how familiar arrangements might work differently. He has also been willing to discard his own arrangements. For a founder, these are separate talents. Questioning somebody else’s convention is enjoyable. Discovering that your own clever idea has become an inconvenience requires a less comfortable conversation.

BlueJeans, which he co-founded with Alagu Periyannan in 2009, addressed a much larger inconvenience: video systems that could not easily communicate with one another. Before that came Internet Junction, which helped desktop users reach the internet, and Topspin, which connected servers. Across the three businesses, the recurring problem was connection. Across his management decisions, the recurring question was whether the current method still made sense.

The outsider learns to ask

In his own account of growing up in a remote Indian village, Ramakrishnan described a culture that favored conformity over questions. Moving to New York in the 1970s gave his questioning temperament more room. He credited the city’s public school system with encouraging creative thought. He later called himself an outlier, treating that position as a useful place from which to notice an unanswered question.

His formal education crossed disciplines. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Madras and a master’s in computer science from Monmouth University. His early employers included Bell Labs, Perkin-Elmer, PeerLogic and NET. Those names place his career in the machinery behind computing: the systems and networks that have to function before anyone can admire the application on a screen.

An outsider’s perspective can sound like a charming personality trait until a customer asks a difficult technical question. Ramakrishnan’s background gave his curiosity something solid to work with. He could move between an engineering problem and a business proposition. That combination became useful in a career repeatedly concerned with making existing technologies easier to reach, combine and use.

Ten people and an internet gateway

Internet Junction was founded in March 1994. When Cisco announced its agreement to acquire the company in September 1995, the startup employed ten people in Mountain View. Ramakrishnan was its president and CEO. Cisco described a stock transaction with an indicated value of $5.5 million. The scale was compact; the problem it addressed was becoming less so.

The company’s Passport software allowed users on Novell networks to run internet applications without installing internet access software on every PC. For a network manager, that meant fewer individual machines to configure and maintain. The product helped connect a growing appetite for internet access with the awkward reality of corporate networks already in place. Customers could keep their existing investments while gaining a new capability.

There is an early outline of BlueJeans in that proposition. A company does not get to start its technology choices afresh every Monday. It has equipment, users, budgets and habits. A product that connects those existing pieces has to respect their untidiness. Ramakrishnan’s first acquisition placed him inside Cisco, where his later responsibilities included the content business and server virtualization. He had seen the junction from both sides: the small company building it and the large organization absorbing it.

Topspin’s second draft

At Topspin, Ramakrishnan encountered a more severe revision. He became CEO in 2001 and found that the market for the original product had collapsed. Rather than continue with the same premise, he split the company into three teams and gave them thirty days to devise alternatives. His later recollection was dry: “one idea was slightly better than everything else.” It is an unusually unceremonious description of a corporate turning point.

By April 2005, when Cisco announced its agreement to buy Topspin for approximately $250 million in cash and options, the company supplied server fabric switches and virtualization software. Its equipment connected servers into grids and linked those grids to networks and storage. Topspin had approximately 135 employees in Mountain View and Bangalore. Dell, HP, IBM, NEC and Sun had announced relationships with it.

The two Cisco announcements, a decade apart, provide a useful view of the changing work beneath the screen. Internet Junction opened a path from office PCs to the internet. Topspin helped organize the growing computing resources inside data centers. Ramakrishnan’s career followed those changes through products with practical jobs. The thirty-day exercise also left a less glamorous lesson: a company may need a new answer while it still has the resources to search for one.

The dog park enters the business plan

BlueJeans had an origin scene that would be difficult to improve with a conference badge. A former Cisco colleague encountered Ramakrishnan at a neighborhood dog park. Each had brought dogs. The conversation renewed a professional connection and led to an invitation to join Norwest’s entrepreneur-in-residence program. Periyannan was already there. A walk had turned into a recruitment channel, with considerably better scenery than an office lobby.

The founders brought different experience to the same question. Periyannan had worked on QuickTime at Apple. Ramakrishnan brought a background in networking, virtualization and bringing products to market. Together they considered why video communication lacked the cross-system convenience people expected from a telephone. By 2009 they were developing BlueJeans, with Norwest and Wing backing the venture.

The ambition was easy to state and difficult to build. A person should be able to enter a video meeting without first matching the equipment or software used by everybody else. High-definition video, broadband access and a workforce increasingly comfortable on camera made the opportunity plausible. The work lay in making the different pieces cooperate. An ordinary-sounding promise can conceal quite a lot of computer science.

Let the equipment disagree

When BlueJeans emerged publicly in 2011, Ramakrishnan described a market where video meetings largely connected one corporate conference room to another. People outside those systems had a harder time joining. The company wanted to move that connecting work into a cloud service. It had raised $23.5 million when it emerged from stealth, funding the effort to make video meetings accessible across platforms.

The effect becomes clearer in a small episode from 2013. Business Today journalist Nandagopal Rajan joined an interview through a meeting link. Ramakrishnan and commercial chief Stu Aaron were on a Polycom system in Silicon Valley; other participants used laptops, Skype or a browser. Rajan reported that joining took about a minute. The interview itself demonstrated what its participants were selling.

For the user, successful interoperability can feel rather uneventful. You click, somebody appears, and the discussion begins. Nobody applauds because two different systems have agreed to behave. That quietness was central to the proposition. BlueJeans sought to spare the participant from becoming the interpreter between pieces of equipment. The conference could then return to its usual difficulties: the agenda, the decision and the colleague with one more question.

A credit card is not a sales department

Ramakrishnan’s appetite for changing an arrangement extended to how BlueJeans got paid. The original business plan assumed customers would buy the service online with a credit card. Customers liked the product, he later explained, but were reluctant to put a $5,000 purchase on a card. BlueJeans hired sales teams. A clean online transaction had met the less tidy purchasing habits of a business customer.

That experience helps explain his distinction between following technology headlines and studying the trends beneath them. Headlines announce that a market exists. Trends may suggest the inconvenience a customer will encounter a few years later. Yet recognizing an opportunity does not settle how to sell it. His product thesis could survive while its route to the customer changed.

Inside the company, he pursued other experiments in access. In 2015 he described managing his own calendar rather than giving a gatekeeper control of it. He also wrote that BlueJeans opened board meetings to the whole company. Employees could see discussions that startups commonly keep behind a closed door. These practices gave his interest in communication an organizational form: fewer barriers between people and the information they needed to do their work.

“It’s all about universal connectivity.”Krish Ramakrishnan, 2012

Making room for a successor

In 2017, Ramakrishnan moved from CEO to executive chairman as Quentin Gallivan took the chief executive role. The company had reached a point where its founders chose outside leadership. A founder’s name can remain attached to a business long after its needs have changed; handing over the operating role makes that distinction concrete. Founding and running are related jobs, and a company can eventually require a different person for each.

In May 2020, Verizon completed its acquisition of BlueJeans. The transaction closed on May 15, and Verizon’s announcement welcomed 390 employees. Gallivan was CEO at the time. The purchase brought BlueJeans into a communications company with a global network and a broader business portfolio. Ramakrishnan later said the negotiations themselves had taken place over BlueJeans. The service was both the subject of the transaction and the place where people discussed it.

His own message about the sale dwelt on the people involved. He credited Periyannan as a partner and acknowledged the early support of investors Peter Wagner and Matthew Howard. He also emphasized the working culture the team had built. The announcement reads as a founder taking stock of relationships accumulated over years, alongside the change in ownership.

The company ends; the questions remain

BlueJeans did not continue indefinitely under Verizon. In August 2023, Verizon stopped offering it to new customers, and the company announced a retirement of the product suite extending into 2024. That ending belongs in Ramakrishnan’s story alongside the acquisitions. A useful idea, a functioning product and a lasting independent business are different outcomes. The record contains achievements and an ending; neither requires the other to disappear.

Away from the transaction dates, a 2019 university biography described a Saratoga resident who enjoyed hiking, had taken up drone flying and lived with two German shepherds. Monmouth awarded him an honorary doctorate in business administration that year. The details give some ordinary scale to a career otherwise measured in networks and acquisition agreements. Dogs, at least once, had already made a measurable contribution.

The memorable habit in his career is the readiness to revisit a method after putting it into practice. A product can change. A sales plan can change. A chief executive can make room for a successor. Even the rule about the conference room can be retired. For someone whose businesses repeatedly helped incompatible systems meet, Ramakrishnan seems to have reserved a useful amount of room for disagreement with his own first draft.