Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners chats with Byas Nambisan, CEO Ezetap, one of the early companies on our portfolio.
 
In this conversation, they discuss Byas’s transition from CFO to CEO of Ezetap, driving seamless change within the organization and his passion for restoring cars. 

Byas has been the chief financial officer at Ezetap since 2014 and has been among one of the key members of the top leadership team. He had spent 20 years at Intel Corporation and had taken up the role of CFO at Intel India.

Listen to the podcast to learn about

1:10 - Byas’s career journey and what brought him to Ezetap

3:30 - How Byas addressed concerns of multiple stakeholders after the founders left

6:30 - ‘I am not afraid to fail. I am afraid to do nothing.’

8:10 - How Byas handled the transition from a CFO to a CEO

10:30 - Why Byas is known as a mechanic in his neighbourhood

13:10 - What are Ezetap’s future plans?

Podcast Transcript:

Sanjay Swamy  0:22  

Hi everybody this is Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners. Welcome to our podcast series. Prime as you know is an early stage venture capital fund investing in technology and product focused businesses. Today, we have with us, Byas Nambisan, CEO of one of our first companies in the portfolio Ezetap, which is fairly well known now as a mobile based payments acceptance solution and doing a lot more now. Company is about seven years old, has several hundred thousand points where it's being used by a number of large enterprises, and Byas joined the company, about five years ago initially as the CFO and has now taken over as the CEO as both the founders have moved on. So Byas, this is sort of a unique situation, that we have here and would love to share your experiences of the journey as well. So tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to Ezetap.

Byas Nambisan  1:16  

Sure. Before I started at Ezetap, I spent 20 years at Intel, thought I would be a lifetime Intel big company employee. And it happened to meet Bobby, in one of my stints with Intel, when I was in India, as CFO of Intel, India. We had gone back to California, and I was there. I had been four years in my role in California. And I was looking at my next assignment within Intel. We started thinking about what are the different things we could talk, I could consider doing and I got talking to Bobby, and he was saying, "Hey, why don't you think about startups? Look at companies here, come look at us. I'll introduce you to others." So, I made a trip out to India, met the team. I liked the area that they were working on. I didn't know much about FinTech, neither tech part not the Fin part. But it seemed like dynamic was changing, was interesting. I liked the team. Both those things were important to me, I got to gel with the team and got to be interested in the company. Decided to go ahead and take the plunge. So I joined them in 2014. I was with Bobby for four something years. When the founders leave the company, it is a big change. A lot of the culture of a company revolves around the tone set by the founders. So therefore, when there is a change from a founding leadership, I would imagine for most companies it is hard. I think we have the benefit that I've worked for four years with Bobby, we actually shared a similar background, similar approach over the four years was sort of our joint culture that already existed. So for me, there was a sense of continuity going forward, that perhaps somebody coming from outside may not have had the benefit of. Still, I think It's a big change even for the employees and the team, there's uncertainty and for your customers, etc. There's uncertainty. 

Sanjay Swamy  3:07  

So, I think in Ezetap's case, specifically, there were three stakeholders that you had to interact with. And the employees to the most important from an immediate perspective, but also business partners as well as customers, given that the business involves partnering with the largest of banks and customers are some of the largest names in the industry. So those would be in three areas, were there any specific things that you did for each of these stakeholders? 

Byas Nambisan  3:34  

Absolutely. I think all three have to be addressed quickly and firmly, can't let things let go. So, I started with the employees. I got to start with the home base. I started by meeting every single person in the team in our company in teams of five to ten. They knew me they were comfortable with me, but they were uncomfortable with the change the magnitude of the change, so I had to walk them not only through the reason why Bobby was leaving and the change, but also energize them with my vision of where I wanted to take them. I think both those elements were important. And I think I was successful in taking the team through. Anytime there's a change It's an opportunity to sort of re energize, reset, etc. So I really took advantage of that to pump up the energy level, get them focused, get much more focused, and I think that really paid off. The next set was to then, go after the customers and partners. I already knew most of them those whom I didn't I got connected to through Bobby through you Sanjay, connected and met them, established a face to face relationship. And again, walk through the transition. They had some questions, but at the end, they were okay, yeah, comfortable, where Ezetap was going, and it was pretty seamless. 

Sanjay Swamy  4:58  

And of course, the fourth stakeholder there being, investors in the board, but there you had the continuity and you had the full backing. So, just for the audience, actually the board conducted a CEO search, and actually they worked with the recruitment firm and made sure that we did the right thing, judiciary wise. And then after that period of time during which Byas, was an interim CEO, he did such a special job that we felt he really is the right person for the role, and it's worked out really well. I think it's very clear from, the social media and all the other posts that I see and yesterday, I judged hackathon at Ezetap as well, that the energy has not reduced. So, as you said, whenever there's a change, there's an opportunity to inject some new direction. But broadly, Byas from your perspective, while some of the methods might have changed, and the energy levels have perhaps changed, and gone up because, that was an opportunity to do so, I think a lot of what you also did, has started producing some new results from a strategic direction perspective. And that's where the continuity and the thought process help, but it's also, quite dangerous in some ways to do these things sort of aggressively and abruptly. So, how do you manage, keeping with the same strategy and yet expanding on it and perhaps accelerating some of the broader growth plans that the company may have had? And how do you change as these moments, inflection points ?

Byas Nambisan  6:22  

Look, there's always change, there's constant change, and trying to figure out how we respond either proactively or reactively. Depending on where we are to the change, is key. Look, I'm not afraid to fail. I'm afraid to do nothing. I'd rather think about the ways to attack something and then go about it. And if failure happens, it happens, that's when you learn and then you figure out how to move forward. In setting the strategy, choosing a course of action, one of the things I did with the leadership of my team was to get them really bought in and leverage the collective wisdom, versus just my thoughts on where we should go. I think by getting that I've got the buy-in from the team. And that actually gives me stability. Because at any point there are people who are reinforcing you and supporting your strategy within your team. And it's not just you propping up a strategy is just much more powerful. So, we were able to achieve that get the consensus, if not consensus across everybody, but across enough of majorities or had buy-in from the leadership, to take the company in the direction forward. And that helps sustain it, because, it's the team that's interacting with everyone else in the company. And they have to be the ones reinforcing our direction, reinforcing the strategy. I've got their buy-in, then I've got that continuity going and ability to make some tough decisions and make our way through some, long term where we have to make corrections. 

Sanjay Swamy  7:47  

So, you move from the role of CFO, which sort of was really more of a COO role, practically speaking in the latter part of the first four years, and in the tech product company, and of course, you've been at Intel, for several years but also mostly in finance roles. What was the fundamental change in moving from managing the expenses and the business plan, to all of a sudden saying we need to spend money, we need to do this. We need to do that.

Byas Nambisan  8:12  

Yeah

Sanjay Swamy  8:13  

And how did you handle that?

Byas Nambisan  8:15  

The biggest change for me was, with Bobby and me, it was like Captain and Co-Pilot. We did many of the similar things, but, that was an opportunity always bounce off of each other. And we'll debate with each other on decisions, and go forward. And that's one of the things that  was hardest for me, as I went forward, the initial part, is I didn't have that one single point. I did have a team, but I didn't have the equivalent of that Pilot-Co-Pilot relationship. And so often a lot of the decisions now are just me versus, Bobby and me bouncing it off of each other. That was the hardest transition really, for me to make. The other hard transition for me to make was, putting on much more of the sales outgoing hat. So, being the inward execution, growing that side skill was also a change for me. It's a continual learning experience. I think, it doesn't matter. To me at 2014, we were still in the nascent stages of ramping the business and growing the business, and I've been with the business long enough that I don't feel different. I don't think the company feels any differently, but me either. So, that hasn't been much of an issue. 

Sanjay Swamy  9:31  

I'm going to go a little off topic here and then talk about something that you do that, to me actually was one of the things that contributed a lot to my confidence that you'd been an amazing CEO. it's actually what you do in your garage. So, not many people know about this, and I'll tell you later, what he's called by the neighbors. But Byas, tell us about, what you really are passionate about?

Byas Nambisan  9:54  

My real passion is about restoring cars. So, I build cars, I restore them all by myself, I do build engine I build suspension, brakes, upholstery, paint everything in my garage by myself. And I've always loved doing that, I love doing this as a kid, had the opportunity while in the US to go to a junkyard, buy old beat up cars, restore them and figuring out how to restore it back to factory perfection, to me was my stress reliever and my passion. Always loved it and I do it and I'll jump on with Sanjay alluded to. So one day a delivery guy came to our house, I was coming and I called him and I asked him where are you? He's inside. He said Sir, I'm in front of Mechanic Walla's house. Where's your house? So, apparently the security guys and all the local staff in Palm meadows, call me Mechanic Walla.

Sanjay Swamy  10:55  

But, I think that's the passion for product and I think that carries through, one of the things Byas has done in the early days Ezetap is to make our own devices, although now the company is purely a software company, in doing in enterprise wide payment acceptance. And so, we had bought a 3D printer to test some of the prototypes. And one week I was in HSR, I walked into the office and here was Byas printing a part for his car. I need to replace something. So, he actually has a 3D printed part in his car. 

Byas Nambisan  11:24  

One of the things working on cars, talking to them, I is when you start working on old cars, you say, okay, your car is in stage X, you say I wanted to go straight up to stage Y, where it's perfect, and you draw a straight line between that and say, Okay, I'm going to start working on it, and it's going to go up towards that stage of perfection. And you start working on it real, uncover that reality is it's not as straight line, you actually start going down first, car actually gets worse because as you pull it apart, you realize there's more things wrong, or things that you thought you could be an easy fix actually take long though, and you have to stay persistent with it, you have to have the belief that you can still pull it out and go through, so that persistence that drives you up and towards getting it correct and done. And to me, that's a life lesson that to me translates into work as well I figured through Yes, there's going to be problems but now I have confidence that you know, I'm going to stick with it, I'll see that turn around, I'll see that move up. Because, I've done it so many times in the car world and I have the confidence that you have to deal with it, it will happen and you got to learn how to follow though that. The other thing you learn is when you're doing this, you need to have attention to detail. You gotta, think about all the possible consequences, how things come together and fit together. What's your budget of all of that in what's your objective, where you getting to other things so that otherwise you're going to spend a lot of money and get an unsatisfactory result. Again something that translate even in our business and products I get involved into. Walk me through exactly how does it work, asking all the right questions. 

Sanjay Swamy  12:58  

So, Ezetap has evolved its business, its target market, focus areas, solutions over the years. And now that you've been as CEO of the company, I think just about your first time around this week, how do you describe Ezetap now, and what's the next two years hold in store? 

Byas Nambisan  13:15  

A payment platform company that has a powerful platform, flexible modular platform not only for enterprise solutions, but also for merchant solutions. And I think that both our ability to be fast modular platform is going to allow us to drive and innovate in areas which are rapidly changing and drive that innovation and build a company. Payments itself is a small piece. There's lots of things around payments that are equally important, whether it's reconciliations, value added services, etc. and our ability to deliver all of these pieces will be key in delivering our growth over the next two years.

Sanjay Swamy  13:57  

Byas, always a pleasure to chat with you. People may not know Byas and I actually went to the same school together. He's a few years junior to me. We didn't really know each other then then of course, he corrupted himself by going to the number one competitor school of ours. (laughs). But it's great to have a fellow Josephite on the show. And thank you so much. 

Byas Nambisan  14:16  

Thank you Sanjay.

Sanjay Swamy  14:17  

All the best at Ezetap

Byas Nambisan  14:18  

Always great talking to you. Thanks. Thank you.