Basab Pradhan , the global head of sales, marketing and alliances at Infosys has resigned.
In 2005, he had quit Infosys and started his own company called Gridstone Research.After 4 years there, he quit his own company and rejoined Infosys !
Here is what he wrote when he quit Gridstone Research:
From tomorrow I will no longer be CEO of Gridstone Research. Once again, as I have done twice before in my career, I step into the unknown.
I devoted the last three and a half years to our journey at Gridstone. We set out to build an important technology company serving the capital markets. However, Gridstone’s market, the investment managment industry, has been going through one of its worse downturns ever. Needless to say, budgets have been slashed and Gridstone had to take cost-reduction measures to adjust to the new reality.
A few weeks back I started feeling that my presence was no longer necessary for the company and that the rest of the management team was strong enough to carry on with the good work without me. I asked the board to relieve me of my duties as CEO. My colleague and co-founder P R Ganapathy (Guns) will be the new CEO and take over my responsibilities.
I continue to be a big supporter of the company and a believer in its vision. I will stay on the board of the company to help it in whatever way I can. Even in a down market and with a reduced cost structure and I am confident in the team’s ability to see it through.
So what now? I don’t have any well laid out plans of what I am going to do next. The only thing I know is that I am going to take my time. There is no reason to rush into anything and every reason to make a careful, considered decision. The last few years have been entirely focused on the capital markets. I need to reconnect with what’s happening in other industries, in the US and in India. So the first thing I am going to do is meet people who are in the flow of what’s going on. There’s nothing like a conversation with a smart businessman to clear out the cobwebs.
Basab Pradhan was smart enough to see the writing on the wall.He knew his own company was doomed and so started looking out for outside opportunities.This is indeed the first instance I know where the captain instead of manning the ship slinks out !I still remember the shock of Gridstone employees when they came to know that Basab Pradhan has quit their company…many of them had joined because of him.