Adobe CEO: If I was growing up right now, no way I’d leave Hyderabad to go to USA

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen

If he was growing up in Hyderabad currently, Adobe Chief Executive Officer Shantanu Narayen says he wouldn’t leave the city to go to the USA at all. Addressing the inauguration of the TiE Global Summit’s inauguration in Telangana’s capital city in the presence of IT Minister KT Rama Rao, the Hyderabad-origin CEO was bullish on the environment in the city.

Speaking about his time at Adobe — where he completes 25 years next year — Narayen said that his goal as CEO is to just say they cannot be in a position where all they are trying to do is preserve the status quo.

Addressing entrepreneurs, Narayen said that the biggest treasure of any company is its people.

“We're in the intellectual property business, and pre-COVID when people worked in the office, we used to say our intellectual property goes home every night and hopefully they come back the next day. The way you try to stay young and curious is to really surround yourself with these scary smart people,” Narayen added.

On his experience during the recession which was soon after he took over as CEO in 2007, Narayen said Adobe’s revenues fell 25 percent as it was considered a discretionary purchase and it was at that point that the company moved to a subscription model. The company’s revenue dropped further as revenues are recognised upfront, and the market capitalisation went down to about $6 billion, and eventually got back up and is now over $150 billion.

“The thing that I would always tell entrepreneurs is that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” he said.

Narayen added that one of the things that happen when executives become senior is that people stop telling them when their ideas are bad.

“Suddenly all my ideas seem like good ideas, except when they are college graduates. it's amazing how much college graduates inspire you by the force of their ideas and by looking around the corner, so I try and pay it forward,” he added.

He said that at Adobe, they took a leaf out of the venture capital community’s book to invest in good ideas.

"In larger companies, you have to get everybody to say yes, and nobody to say no…I want to be the company where if somebody has a good idea, and you have one executive who's willing to say yes, then we fund it. That’s very different as we know from other companies, but a model that we see as a pioneer,” he added.

“The biggest attribute that you have on your balance sheet is your relationship with customers. It's one of those things that takes decades to build up, but you can lose overnight if you do the wrong thing,” he advised.

For the future, he said that along with starting his career in Hyderabad if he was starting now, he would think about the confluence of what's happening between technology and healthcare.

“Of all the technology trends that I'm really excited about…that's an area in particular that I think is fascinating and an area where people are going to incubate a whole bunch of companies and with the population of the world, I think there's going to be a significant amount of good that can be done, and a significant amount of money that can be made,” he said.