By Al Lewis
DENVER (MarketWatch) — He was reared
in Mumbai. He has a black belt in tae kwon do. When he was a student, he
single-handedly occupied the Reserve Bank of India and would not leave until
its governor converted his rupees into dollars.
He came to the U.S. with only $50 in
his pocket yet earned valuable degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and Harvard University.
He marched into the offices of some
of the most powerful executives in America, demanded their business and got it.
Some say he was the one who digitized Wall Street in the 1980s — streaming
together all the data traders take for granted today.
He wrote best-selling books. He
revolutionized industries. He became a Silicon Valley billionaire.
The San Jose Mercury News recently
reported that he may in fact be more interesting than the “most interesting man
in the world” in those Dos Equis beer commercials — even though he does not
sport the white, Hemingwayesque beard and grows Pinot Noir in his front yard.
He is Vivek Ranadive, founder of
Tibco Software Inc. in Palo
Alto, Calif. And the legends about him are as endless as those of the
fictional, beer-peddling character on TV. Here, for example, is another one:
When his daughter was 12 years old,
he coached her basketball team, having never played the game. “I walked into
the gym and I was surrounded by all these 7-foot, ex-Division 1 dads, who were
coaching the other teams,” he recalled in a telephone interview.
He refused to quit. He also refused
to embarrass his daughter. Using only his predictive, analytical powers, he
took this team to the national championship game, and this David-versus-Goliath
fete was recorded for posterity by none other than “Tipping Point” author
Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. Watch a video profile of Ranadive.
The expression “think outside the
box,” has long been a cliche, but it remains interesting when Ranadive says it,
because he has actually done it. He is also fond of an overused quote from
hockey great Wayne Gretzky, who said he always positioned himself where the
puck is going to go. This remains interesting, too, because Ranadive positions
himself and his customers where the buck is going to go.
After coaching National Junior
Basketball, Ranadive became co-owner of the Golden State Warriors, making him
the first Indian-born owner of a National Basketball Association franchise.
Now, he is launching a mobile app
for the team that he says will revolutionize the fan experience and sell more
products.
It’s part social networking, part
customer-loyalty program, with a billion-dollar back end for support. It
analyzes data and responds in real time.
If you were to whine about a cold
arena hot dog on Twitter, you might instantly see a vendor offering to replace
it with a fresh one. If you were to tweet that you’re unhappy with your seat
because of the drunken fans shouting and spilling beer on you, you might get a
tap on the shoulder from an usher, who will guide you to a better location.
“We will know everything that’s
going on,” Ranadive said. “We will know how you feel, even before you start
feeling it.”
The app lets fans interact with
players and keep track of all the data in a game, and it allows the
organization to manage inventories. If there’s a huge surplus of pizza,
discount offers go out for pizza. If there are unsold seats closer to the
court, someone might actually get a chance to sit in them.
Let’s say you’re not at the game and
missing out on the chance to be shot with one of those handy T-shirt guns.
Well, with the new app you might get hit with a virtual T-shirt gun.
“Why should you miss out just
because you are not at the game?” Ranadive said. “You’ll become part of that
arena experience no matter where you are.”
If Ranadive can do this for
basketball, think about what he is quietly doing for the world.
Predictive technology Ranadive’s
company deployed for a telecom company in India revealed that whenever a
customer suffers six dropped calls in 24 hours, the customer often switches to
another carrier, so now after five dropped calls, the customer gets an
attractive offer.
A program it developed for a
retailer in the U.K. revealed that whenever someone purchases razor blades,
diapers and champagne, he or she is likely doing it on a stolen credit card,
and the transaction is halted.
Ranadive has built a super-secure
network for world leaders to interact with each other and foresee global
problems, from wars to natural disasters. He’d like to build one for the
Federal Reserve as well, feeding economic data into a system that makes small
adjustments in interest rates accordingly, and in real time.
“This is how everything will be done
in the future,” he said. “You don’t need a bunch of old guys who look at
something every three months to tell you whether the rates go up or down.”
One reason Ranadive has pulled off
so many successes is that he has learned to stay two seconds ahead. Hence the
name of one of his books, “The Two-Second Advantage.” He crunches data and
spots patterns he knows are likely to result in certain outcomes. And this
predictive technology has evolved to the point where it’s about to explode.
Data are becoming democratized. With
laptops, smartphones and social networks, data can flow instantly. And software
that puts data into a valuable context can avert many of the world’s problems,
from power outages and food shortages to terrorist threats and even financial
crises.
“A little bit of the right
information, just a little bit beforehand, is more valuable than all the
information in the world six months afterward,” Ranadive said.
This, he said, is the kind of
technology that finally will shake the global economy from its doldrums. And as
it deploys, we will see that our many crises are merely the pains of a
technological transition, on par with the industrial revolution, Ranadive said.
“The information is there to make
the world a better place,” he said. “I just want to make that happen.”
Or as the other most interesting man
in the world would say, “Stay thirsty, my friends.”
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