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RADHA BASU, President and CEO of Support.com

by Peg Townsend

MAKING A LOT FROM A LITTLE

Radha Basu came to the United States from India with $8 in her pocket.

She was 21 years old and without a friend in the entire country. That first day, a greeter from the University of Southern California picked her up from the airport and dropped her off in a seedy downtown Los Angeles hotel.

Undaunted by the strange smells and somewhat unusual people in the neighborhood, Basu tried to make her way to campus by bus.

"The driver kept saying I needed a dime, but I couldn't understand what he was saying," Basu says.

So he bumped her off at the next stop.  She got on the next bus, but the same thing happened one stop later.

Basu found herself standing on the sidewalk again. "It took me four 'bumps' to get to the university," Basu says.

She never thought about quitting, though.

"You take things and go with them," Basu says in a voice that still carries the lilt of her native country. "Those kinds of challenges build a person."

It's that kind of determination that typifies the life of this 49-year-old CEO of Support.com, a company which provides a kind of e-support software for e-businesses who depend on making sure their computers are up and running at all times.

She has twice climbed 18,300 feet to base camp at Mount Everest, challenged Indian traditions by forgoing an arranged marriage for engineering school, and left a successful job at an established company to join a pre-IPO firm.

"I enjoy taking on challenges and constantly pushing myself," Basu says. "I believe we must personally be responsible for our own destiny and never make others feel responsible for our life."

Basu grew up in a traditional Tamil household in Indian's fourth largest city, Chennai, or Madras as it was called then. It's a city that sprawls over 68 square miles to cup the Bay of Bengal. There are beautiful beaches, an elegant promenade and banks of flowers.

"I grew up in a very loving home, very traditional," Basu says.

Her father was a mechanical engineer who worked for the railroad. Her mother was a housewife: 4-foot-10, 70 pounds and tireless.

"They really built a value system of how important it is to care for other people," Basu says. "They embodied the Dhaka philosophy of service above self."

It is a value Basu carries to this day.

The first notion that life would not be traditional for the young Indian girl was the day her all-girls Catholic high school class took a field trip to a new hospital in Chine, India. There, a doctor showed the class how an EKG machine worked. Basu, who had always been attracted to math and science, suddenly saw what an impact technology could have on everyday life.

While her parents worked to arrange a suitable marriage for her, Basu secretly took the entrance exam for an engineering school. When she received the highest score on the test, the newspaper ran a story about it. Basu had to rush home and hide the paper from her father until she could tell him the news herself.

But her parents consented to their daughter's plan and soon she was one of only 17 girls in the 2,700-student program.

But there was still the arranged marriage.

"I said, 'look, I'm going to go to engineering school and do something after that and it (marriage) doesn't make a whole lot of sense,'" Basu remembers telling her parents.

"I was the rebel and they just really wondered about me," she says.

But her parents relented and Basu went off to the United States to earn her masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from USC.

Her first job was at Hewlett-Packard, where she worked as a research and development engineer.

It was a job she loved. She worked in ultrasound and medical imaging at the giant firm.

"It was one of the most satisfying jobs. You really were able to contribute to make people's lives better," she says.

It was while working at Hewlett-Packard that she met her husband-to-be at an electronics conference and fell in love.

"We both wrote home on the same day, and waited with bated breath" Basu says, remembering how they told their parents they wanted to get married even though their families were from different castes and didn't speak the same language.

"My father was here in four days. My husband's parents came in two weeks," she said.

It turned out, both sets of parents were happy with their children's choices and Basu and her fiance were married.

But even riskier than writing to tell her parents about her impending marriage, was agreeing to leave a solid career path at Hewlett-Packard to develop the company's operations in India.

"I went from a division of over 1,000 people to becoming the first HP India employee, working out of my dining room with only a telex," Basu says.

Today, HP India's software operations has more than 800 employees.

But then, it was tough.

Basu laughs.

"We took a building that was just a shell and created a whole operation," she says. "The first 25 people I hired, I said to them: 'You have a primary job which is software, but your secondary job is telephone lines or lighting or something.'

That ability to do a lot with little is something Basu brings to corporate American life from her Indian culture.

"In India you learn how to have a lot of adversity, to get yourself up, shake yourself off, pull yourself together and move on," Basu says. "Day-to-day life can be pretty difficult there," she says. "It's very admirable how people conduct their lives and do so well with so little."

That truth became even sharper for Basu when she made two treks up to base camp on Mount Everest - grueling, 18,300-foot climbs.

There, she walked with Sherpas whose philosophy - and not their job - called them to help other people.

"They didn't have much, but they were happy and content with themselves," Basu says. "Their whole approach was self-actualization; where you are really kind of at peace with yourself...and you make the best of everything."

Putting one foot in front of the other in the oxygen-starved air, Basu also learned that teamwork is what would get her to the top and endurance was key in life, and in the corporate world.

"Although I have been a risk-taker all my life, these trips inspired me to set the highest expectations for both my personal and business goals," says Basu.

It changed her life.

It was while walking on narrow dirt trails, breathing the scent of snow and ice, that Basu made her decision. After 20 years at Hewlett Packard, she would leave her job as general manager for the Electronic Business Software Division and find something new

"I wanted to work in a small, intense, team environment filled with entrepreneurs. I wanted to face the challenge of building a company from conception to a very successful reality," she says.

Still, it was as hard as a decision as she would ever make.

Four months later, she became CEO at a Redwood City, Calif., company that was to become Support.com.

She worked 100-hour weeks, sometimes spending all night at the office. She felt responsible for her employees and their families. She had to define the company's strategic intent and then set the company on a path in that direction.

The experience, she says, taught her decision makers need to be nimble, creative and wise.

Unlike at Hewlett-Packard, there was no safety net to cushion a fall. No big brother.

It gave Basu sleepless nights, but also, she says, a sense of focus and excitement.

In July 2000, the company went public with a successful initial public offering of 4.2 million shares of common stock at $14 per share.

The success comes from a talented team of people, Basu says, but also from a lesson she learned: that any successful product must meet a customer need or solve a customer problem.

Without that, all the marketing in the world won't make a company profitable.

Basu has a mantra: "scaleable, repeatable, predictable and thereby long-term sustainable," she says. That's what it takes to make a company grow.

Luck, she admits, has crossed her path - her upbringing, her supportive spouse, opportunities.

"But," she says, "I have taken advantage of every circumstance to constantly advance."

It's like walking up Everest, she says: one step in front of the other, being prepared for whatever comes your way, knowing that failure is not an option.

"We are equipped with the tools, management skills, and technical abilities that enable us to take risks - trailblaze new markets, create breakthrough products," she says.

It's up to people to use them as a team.

That's what it takes to reach the top, Basu says.

On Everest - or in the world of high-tech.

A FEW MORE MINUTES WITH RADHA BASU

If you could have dinner with any two people (living or not) who would it be?

BASU: It would be a tough choice between my husband and daughter or mother and sister. But on the professional side I would like to meet Golda Meir, John Kennedy and Ghandi. These are all individuals who I greatly admire for their ability to create and follow a vision that improves our society and then truly devote their lives to achieving it.

What is your favorite quote?

These are both very common, but they mean something special to me: "God helps them who help themselves" and "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can."

What is your definition of success?

Success to me is being happy and making your loved ones happy. Having a good balanced ecosystem around you to balance profession, home and community.

Written by Peg Towsend, copyright TECHdivas 2001, all rights reserved