Satya Nadella: Get success via failures

Tells startups not to lose sight of long-term goal of business

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday told entrepreneurs to learn from failures to build success in their careers.

“It’s not about the failure, it’s about learning from the failures. Failure itself cannot be celebrated. When I think about my career, my successes are built on learnings from failures,” Mr Nadella said at Telang-ana government funded startup incubator T-Hub on Monday. He said this while replying to a question on how to handle a failure.

Mr Nadella’s visit to T-Hub was cloaked in secrecy. While his visit was known for a long time, organisers were told kept it low key and keep off the media persons. However, he was joined by two other techies — Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka and Keerti Melkote, the co-founder of Aruba Networks, which was acquired by HP for $3 billion ('19,000 crore).

Suggesting how different Hyderabad has become since the time he left the city for the US, Mr Nadella said “When I grew up here, there was no T-Hub probably, the closest to T was the Tank Bund.” He was reacting to IT minister K.T. Rama Rao when he was introduced as a Hyderabadi.

Addressing the entrepreneurs, Mr Nadella spoke about the three important points to keep in mind for startups: to not lose out on the concept that drives them, capability that you need to build to chase after that concept, have that persistence and to curate the culture they drive in their organisation on a constant basis.

Mr Nadella told starts up not to lose sight of long-term goals. “Often near-term plans get overestimated, while long-term plans get underestimated. But long-term plans are as important as short-term goals. So you also have to keep an eye on long-term plans,” Mr Nadella said.