The founder and CEO of Workato, Vijay Tella, joins us in this new episode of our unicorn leaders series on the Without Borders podcast.
Workato, the leading enterprise automation platform that helps organisations work faster and smarter without compromising security and governance, is Vijay Tella’s fourth start-up. After around three decades as an entrepreneur in the integration space, Vijay is able to share some great advice on how to build a successful company. He selects culture as the most important element and stresses the value of thinking deliberately about the founding team as it is going to establish the cultural cornerstones of the company. Vijay also suggests prioritising core guiding principles over values – having some guardrails for how things can operate in the company.
Another key lesson from Vijay is that communication and being connected is the hardest challenge a company faces. In his own words, ‘you can never communicate enough’. That is why for him it is so important to always be on the front foot looking for new ways to enhance the connectedness of the team and have everyone on the same page. Not for nothing, Workato has a highly engaged workforce – they are the number one computer software industry company for whose employees are amplifying their presence on social the most. Workato employees are consistently sharing their company’s content within their own networks, increasing awareness, website traffic and generating new business.
The interview, as ever, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast.