Uphill, up there

ICE PEOPLE

If you want to be a CEO, acquire one skill "� trekking. That advice comes straight from "� you guessed it "� a CEO.

"The skills needed to make it up the mountain are very similar to those needed to run a successful Silicon Valley company," says Radha Basu, chairman and CEO of SupportSoft. Basu, incidentally, is the first woman CEO of a Nasdaq listed company.

"When you are climbing a mountain, you need to take a peak at a time. Every peak is a step towards the next peak. If you slip and fall you need to pick yourself up and continue. Climbing a mountain teaches you endurance and resilience, lessons that are especially relevant when there is an economic downturn. It is also the product of team work, for every person has a role to play. One person may reach the top of the mountain but it wouldn't have been possible without, say, the efforts of the person at the base camp," says Basu.

She clearly knows what she's talking about "� she climbed 18,000 feet of Mount Everest with husband Dipak.

Basu has been going uphill ever since she decided to become an engineer. Born in a conservative Tamilian family (Radha Ramaswami) at Chennai, her father clearly did not approve of her choice of career. In the sixties, nice Tamil girls did not become engineers. She, however, appeared for the entrance exams at Guindy Engineering College on the sly. But the newspapers broke the story"� she topped the exams. So what if in a college of 2,700 boys she was one of 17 girls?

After that it was Los Angeles for a masters degree. There she met husband-to-be Dipak Basu at a "very romantic place "� an electronic conference."

Next she headed for Hewlett Packard where she rose to be general manager and, incidentally, helped set up its Indian subsidiary.

In 1999, about two decades after she joined HP, the entrepreneurial bug bit her. She joined two of her HP colleagues who had just formed SupportSoft. And, yes, the decision to become an entrepreneur was taken during the trek to the Everest.

The company was listed on the Nasdaq in 2000. Its revenues have risen from $ 3.5 million in 2000 to $ 41.02 million in 2002. Since then, revenues have grown further by about 33 per cent.

What of the future? "I want our international operations to contribute 20 per cent to total revenues this year against last year's 6 to 7 per cent," the lady says.