I was traveling and I found a lump on my way to India, and it turned out to be cancer. It was stage two. And then of course my first reaction was, you know, maybe I should quit and focus on my health because, you know, who knows where this is going and how long I have.
I'm Sydney Shaw and welcome to South Asian Trailblazers.
Hi everyone. Thank you all so much for being here tonight. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Sydney Shaw. I am the founder and CEO of South Asian Trailblazers, and we are a media platform, community, and agency dedicated to elevating leading South Asians. And it is such a delight to have you all here tonight.
A question I am often asked these days, particularly on the West Coast, where I know we do not come enough, is what was the origin story of Trailblazers? And it actually started with a project senior year with my best friend Kylo, who's actually sitting in the audience today for the first time. Like any good seniors with senioritis, we decided that for a class, rather than writing a 25-page paper, we should do a podcast because talking was much easier than writing. And that planted a seed in my head because it was a creative outlet. We were talking to amazing leaders. And a year later, I had graduated from college and I was looking around me and realized that I had no connection to the culture and community that I had had my whole life. And so I thought to myself, what is the easiest way to build that connection again in this new professional chapter? And I thought, why don't I talk to cool South Asian leaders and understand how they sustained that connection for themselves and how they got to where they are in a way that could inform and inspire our own journeys. And so that was the genesis of Trailblazers. We've since burgeoned into a community, an agency, and tonight is very special for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, our live podcast format is one of our favorites across the US, but it is our first time tonight bringing it to the West Coast with none other than Revathi. So, thank you all for being here.
And secondly, and more importantly, I'm so honored to say that we're co-hosting this event in partnership with Pratham USA. Pratham has been a pioneer in championing education across the world, particularly in India where there are still systemic gaps. And so I'm going to let the leaders of that organization, Radhika and Maggie, who've been incredible collaborators in this event, tell you a little bit more about Pratham.
I'll introduce myself. I head partnerships from Pratham USA, an organization I've deeply, deeply respected way before my time at Pratham for the impact that they've been able to create. A big thank you to Sydney and South Asian Trailblazers for just doing what you do and creating this space and this community. It's really impressive and inspiring. And thank you to Revathi for being here tonight and giving your time and lending your voice to being an inspiration for so many, so many people in this room and beyond. Thank you. As someone who understands firsthand the importance of community, I'm especially grateful for the opportunity to gather today in this room with everybody. Many of you are hearing about Pratham for the first time. So thank you for being all hands on, wanting to know more, learn more. We have a lot of opportunity that Maggie can talk a little more about as we progress into the evening. But we really do believe that community is not just about connection, as Sydney said. It's about enabling each one of us to thrive. And at Pratham, we believe that honestly, that belief is in the heart of all the things that we do. Our north star is deep, sustainable impact. And we know meaningful change can only be created when we look at holistic development of communities, especially in low-middle-income countries like India. So I'll take the next few minutes to introduce you to the work that Pratham actually does in India and beyond. This happens to be Pratham's 30th year of doing the work that we do. So it's a big year for us to celebrate. It's a very important year, and we as a team, as an organization, are doing a lot of reflection on what's gotten us to where we are and why we are successful. In 1995, when the co-founders Madhav Chavan and Farida Lambay visited a small balwadi classroom in Mumbai, they realized that the majority of the kids could actually not read or do basic math. So while India was on this momentum of getting very high enrollment into school systems, there was not real and actual learning happening. So we were not setting our generations up for success. In short, Pratham's programs were created to meet this large and urgent need at scale to help kids catch up at the right level. So if the cause resonates with you, we'd love to continue this dialogue tonight and beyond. And I pass it over to Maggie to share a little more about how you can help engage yourself.
Awesome. Thank you so much. It's so lovely to be here with all of you tonight. So my name is Maggie. I oversee all youth and young professionals initiatives at Pratham. And I'm very excited to be here with a young professionals event. Young professionals, loosely defined, anyone early, mid-career, whatever you feel young represents to you. So, so happy to be here. I've been with Pratham for coming up on three years now, and it's been such a joy for me seeing younger generations get more excited and more involved and more philanthropic in nature. And so, as Radhika mentioned, Pratham's programs are enormous in scale. And what lies behind that scale, I want to emphasize, is people like all of you. It's truly the thousands of donors, of volunteers, of advocates across the United States that power Pratham programs in India and beyond. And so as I've worked more and more closely with young professional Pratham advocates across the country, I'm so excited and inspired by how much desire I see within our generation and others to make an impact. But I do want to recognize that for young people, it's often difficult to know where to start and how to get involved in philanthropy in the first place. Many of my peers have told me that they see philanthropy becoming a part of their lives many, many, many years down the line. They want to give, but they also want to be more stable in their career, have more money to give, or feel that they have enough time to research and identify organizations that matter to them and that they know 100% they can trust. And that's very fair. But I want to emphasize today that giving back doesn't have to be difficult and there are ways that you can get involved right now. If you've been inspired by what Radhika shared about Pratham's mission tonight, I encourage you to learn more at our website. It's just www.prathamusa.org. And I also recognize, you know, if you're anything like me, you very much feel that time is incredibly valuable to you and it's a very important part of your life and what you hold on to very closely. But I want you to take the moment to think if you give a little bit of time, you can exchange that time for community, for mentorship, and feeling that you've made a difference in other people's lives. And an easy way to do that is to help me and to help the Pratham team establish a young professionals community and young professionals board here in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have a young professionals board in New York and we want to meet and exceed everything that they're doing here and show the West Coast exactly what we can do. That's all from me. I'm going to pass things over to Sydney now and thank you all so much for being here today.
Thank you so much to Radhika and Maggie again for your partnership and collaboration in this event. Now for what you all have been waiting for. I have the privilege of introducing our honored guest tonight, Revathi Advaithi. So at Trailblazers, we are all about cutting beneath the surface. So I have to first tell everyone a little bit about you to set the stage. So Revathi is the CEO of Flex. She started her career many years ago when she immigrated to the US and started her career on the shop floor at a factory in a little town called Shawnee, Oklahoma. She would go on and hold leadership roles at Honeywell, the diversified industrials company, and eventually be recruited back to Eaton, where she would serve as president of their APAC region's electrical business and then their America region's electrical business before ascending to the role of COO of their global electrical business. In 2019, she was tapped to serve as CEO of Flex, where she's accomplished many things, including a transformational pivot of the business. The list really goes on in all that she's accomplished. She serves on the board of Uber, Catalyst.org, MIT. She's been on various presidential committees, and truly has accomplished so much and blazed so many trails, and it's such an honor to have her here today. Thank you for being here.
Thank you for having me, Sydney. I'm excited to be here. I've followed you for a while, so...
That is the biggest compliment. So, as I said, I think a lot of us have heard about the work that you've done at Flex, but sometimes I think it's important that we set the stage and help people understand where you come from. You were the youngest of five sisters in India. You lost your father at a very young age. Can you tell us a little bit about that upbringing, how those setbacks shaped your values and ambitions?
Yeah, sure. So I am from Chennai, so I'm a Tamilian. And my parents, my dad worked for the oil refineries, and in those days in India, people were building the oil refineries. So we would get transferred from town to town as they built the oil refineries, and we followed my father's career through that. So moved around a lot all across India. And my dad unfortunately passed away in an accident when I was 15. So it was not expected. And we, I have four older girls, and like in India, you know, you have five girls, it's not an easy situation when you lose the person who is the main breadwinner of the family and was kind of the support system. My mom came from a farming family, not educated, didn't have, you know, any income. And so we were absolutely at a crossroads at that point in our lives. And till then life was very cushy, you know, we had all the support system one could have, and then we went from that to basically nothing, right? Financially really struggling, didn't know where the next kind of meal would come from. And in India, there's nothing more difficult than a young widow with five girls. I mean, like that is like the most difficult situation. You put everything together. The stigma of being a widow, on top of that not having money, on top of that having five girls, it was just, you know, it came together in a big way. And so what shaped me after that, of course, is watching my mother, you know, through all these years, really overcome all adversity and really put her goals first, find a way to make things work, super optimistic in how she found a way to make things work. And so she's been a big part of our journey and how that shaped kind of the rest of my life. But we always talk about this, me and my sisters, we're like, you know, that day when we all kind of grew up, April of 1983, maybe if we didn't suddenly grow up that day, life would have been different for us. And that definitely was kind of the starting, I would say, of a lot of what happened after that.
Absolutely, thank you for sharing that. You've spoken at times about how you made a unique decision in your family to pursue mechanical engineering at the Birla Institute of Technology, and you've also talked about how you weren't exactly a star student and almost failed out, which is very difficult for us to imagine given where you are today. So can you talk about that experience, why you chose to pursue mechanical engineering, and the role of education and what it played in your life, especially as we're sitting here with Pratham today?
Yeah. So, you know, my family comes, all the girls in our family, they all came from very kind of liberal arts type of background. So my father and mother had this rule, which was pursue your passion and then do whatever you want with it. So we weren't the typical engineering-doctor family. And so my sisters followed very unique things like political science, anthropology, those kinds of majors, which at the end of the day doesn't really pay much. Right? So...
Exactly. So by the time it came to me, the fifth girl, it was very clear that, hey, somebody needed to make a living, right? And financially we had a lot of difficulties. And so I was very clear, I'm going to follow the traditional path of engineering or doctor because we need a job and we needed the money. And I couldn't stand the sight of blood, so doctor was out. So it became an engineer. I was a very good high school student, like you have to be in India, and so came to Birla Institute of Technology, which is not an IIT but a decent engineering school. And I chose mechanical engineering only because, you know, in those days computer science, electronics was the big thing. I thought I wanted to do something hands-on. I didn't know what mechanical engineering was, but it sounded hands-on. So I was like, okay, this makes sense. So obviously no research on any of this, but I didn't want to be a chemical engineer because my dad was one. So I chose mechanical just because I thought, oh, it sounds like it's hands-on, and so let's go do that. Didn't think much about, oh, girls didn't do it, it's going to be heavy stuff, none of that. Didn't know any of it. So I ended up in Birla Institute. I was the only girl in the class. The overall engineering population was like 10% girls in the overall class of that year, but in the mechanical engineering class, I was the only one. I probably did the least research in choosing this degree. And the reason I talk about not doing well in college and almost failing out is because I think it's important in the Indian-South Asian context to some extent. There's an expectation that everybody is an A student. Everyone goes to top schools, and it's all, you know, your path is just charted and your course is just envisioned in a certain way by your family and all of that. I think it's important to talk about not everyone who is successful comes through that lineage, right? So I had a very rough college life in the sense that I experienced everything that one should do in college, which was had fun, you know, partied a lot, did not prioritize education, you know, did all of that, and really struggled through college in a big way. And I remember, you know, in India in those days, I don't know if they still do it, the grade cards came home, right? They would mail it to your house. And I remember trying to intercept the postman to get the grade card so my mother wouldn't see it. And the postman unfortunately knew my mother really well, and he said, absolutely no way. I know what you're up to. So my mother gets the grade card. You know, this is at the end of my first year. And she looks at it and she's obviously very disappointed because we didn't have the money for this. Like, I was going to a college which was expensive. She was being judged for sending her daughter far away. It was all a challenge, and here I was failing college. And so my mother, in her usual calm way, looked at it and she said, 'Well, we have two choices.' She said, 'Either you finish college and you pass and get a job, or I can just get you married.' She said, 'There's enough friends of mine whose sons really are very interested in having an arranged marriage with you. So like, choose the direction.' She knew very well like this would be motivating, right? So, and it worked really well. So, I was very determined. If nothing else, I needed to graduate. So, I didn't have to get married to one of my mom's friends' sons. Nothing against any of them, but so yeah. So college was really rough. So, I graduated, barely graduated, and got through and then ended up with a job, thankfully, at least to kind of make things after that. But that was my college experience, and mechanical engineering, being the only girl, is not a smart choice, but you know, somehow got through that. So I still remember my workshop instructor, first day of workshop class, looked at me and said, like, why did you take this? Why did you take mechanical engineering? He said, you know, you're going to faint in the workshop class because it's hot, it's heavy work, and so if you want to like quit, this is the time. And I'm like, you know, the option to quit didn't exist. And the best part about the whole thing was like guys fainted in the workshop and I didn't. So that was success. So I had stories like that that kept me motivated. But yeah, it was an interesting experience in college.
I love that. And I think your mom's been talking to my mom because she uses the same tactics on me. So make this work or get married.
See, I know a lot of you are smiling because you're experiencing it too.
A lot of South Asian moms around, and we know how to make that work. So, another part of the uniqueness of your experience is that around 1995, you get a call from your sister. She says, 'Hey, come to the US.' And you end up taking a job with Eaton, but not just any job. You end up taking a job as a supervisor on the factory floor in Shawnee, Oklahoma, a town of 20,000 people. What was that like? Why did you make that decision?
Yeah. So my sister had got admission to do anthropology in University of Oklahoma, and she was getting paid. She got a, whatever, what do you call that? A teaching assistantship, all that stuff. So she had some money, and so she's like, hey, like you also come join college, maybe like, you know, we'll have the money to do this together. So I was like, fine. So I come to University of Oklahoma, sign up for my master's, and then the minute I signed up, I realized, why am I doing this again? I was bad in college to begin with, and now I signed up again to do a master's in engineering. And I'm like, okay, this is all wrong. Let me start looking for jobs. And I started looking for jobs really fast, again, needed the money desperately. And I ended up with a job at Eaton in Shawnee, Oklahoma. I always say that maybe one of the reasons they gave me the job was because nobody else wanted to live there. But I don't know, you know, immigrants, right? We make things work. And $38,000, you know, as my annual income then was pretty big for me. And so I took the job. But I say that it was a fantastic experience. More importantly than anything else, being in small-town America was a huge part of what the American journey became after that, because you got to live and experience America in a way that was really local, right? This is not the things that we had read about. This wasn't like the Manhattan skyline or anything, right? So people's lives was all about their kids' soccer games and the football games, and you know, it was a very different life altogether. So you had to get to know what that felt like. And you know, had a name like this, nobody could say the name. You know, when you walked into a grocery store, you looked unique. I think the Friday night event locally was barn dancing or square dancing, right? So that's all there was to do. So you really learned a lot about what made people who they are, like what was exciting to them and why was it so different than the things I knew and I grew up with. So I think it was really a huge start of spending the time to really get to know people for who they were. And loved the experience. You know, my first, one of the guys I worked with in the shop floor invited me to go square dancing, and I was like, what is that? And, you know, this is like pre-Google days, right? So he's like, well, you come on, I'll tell you. So I show up at this place, and it's this giant barn, you know, and all these pickup trucks with gun racks at the back, all that stuff, right? And I literally walk into this barn. I think the music stopped. Like, I think people just all stopped and looked, like thinking, like, who the heck is she walking in here? Right. And then of course then it restarted, and then you know, you kind of get in the flow of things. But it was just everything was such a unique experience and was so different that it really taught me a lot about America in a way that I don't think I could have experienced if I didn't live in small-town America.
Absolutely. And you've alluded to this a lot, but I'm curious, what do you feel are the lessons you learned in those early experiences that eventually positioned you to become a Fortune 500 CEO?
I think most importantly, enjoying the process of understanding the psychology of people. Like the shop floor people I worked with weren't motivated by me wanting to do a lean workshop or let me do this. None of that mattered to them. What was important to them was where can I get my next notebook? Can I get time off to go watch my son play? There were very important things that were, you know, unique to them. And the things that were motivating me was not important to them. Didn't matter that I had a degree or any of that. So the idea of understanding the human psychology at the person level, enjoy that experience because you can't pretend to, you know, do this and enjoy it because it's for work and then you can get the best out of people. I think that was the most important lesson. And I didn't know it was a lesson then. But falling in love with that experience and then enjoying it over and over again through every job I had, I think really eventually kind of led to who I am and where I am today.
Absolutely. And Eaton just marked your foray into the industrial sector. But it's interesting because I feel like in the '90s a lot of South Asians with your degree were pursuing careers in IT. I mean, what drew you to this sector?
I had not taken computer science. All my friends had gone into it, and like, I don't think I could have done anything with like coding or anything. Like, I didn't know what that meant. And like, I was still a bad engineer, remember? So I could like physical things, like in the shop floor and doing things like that, and you know, I could do well. But like, the idea of going into IT, and then my vision was you're stuck behind a desk and you're doing these things, that's what it was all about, was not appealing to me. I needed human interaction. I needed hands-on things. I needed like to see people and understand what I did and the impact of it. So really the whole IT wave just went through me. Like, I just did not even think about it because I didn't know what to do with it and I knew I wouldn't enjoy it. So as all my friends migrated that way, I kind of stuck to my swim lane of just continuing in industrial businesses and enjoying that.
Absolutely. And you stuck with it first at Eaton and then eventually at Honeywell. You're in middle America. You've started this career in industrials, which is not exactly the most diverse industry and is pretty male-dominated. I mean, how did you navigate that as an immigrant and woman of color in that era?
I'd say to a large extent, you know, every move I made, so I was in Shawnee, Oklahoma. From that there, my next promotion and move was to Hutchinson, Kansas. So if you drop a pin in the middle of America, it'll be in Hutchinson, Kansas. So, a little bit more people. I think like 40, 50,000 people. So, slightly bigger town. I did meet my amazing husband there, who's here in the audience here today, Jan. So that was, we, I do tell people that there was no one else to date in Hutchinson. So we ended up dating each other. So that's how we met. It's worked for like 30 some years. So all good. But so to some extent, I think you develop a thick skin, and maybe it's the immigrant in you that doesn't focus too much on the little things that affect, you know, my kids these days and that, you know, people think of today. What are those little things, you know, like whether it's a gender story or whether it is, you know, color of your skin story, right? So the gender story plays out all the time because, you know, I recently talked about the only way to figure out how to get an order or get a customer to be happy with you or, you know, to talk to you was to go on these hunting, fishing, golfing trips. And I didn't do any of them. Those days I was also a vegetarian, so like the hunting thing was, you know, fishing was definitely was not. So you had to like say, okay, how am I going to make this work? So I had to go on a hunting trip, right?
Yeah, yeah, of course I did. And it was, you know, if I could get a sales order out of it, it was victory. Though I will tell you, I did a hunting trip only once, and then after that I never repeated it. But we do still have that deer thing in our house. So you did it because one, you wanted to experience why that was important to them and what was happening in that venue where they're making all these decisions and talking about, you know, work. So because of that, you want to be part of it. So I would get involved just because of that. I'm like, hey, you know, if there's no other way to, you know, figure out what is going to happen with work or sales or things like that, you have to get involved. So instead of feeling left out, I would be thick-skinned and invite myself in, and they wouldn't know what to do with me, so they'd have to invite me, and then I would be there. And was that effective? Oh yeah, very effective. Very effective because I think when people get to know you, they forget gender and color of your skin and all of that doesn't become important. These things are only important when you don't know the person. When they are somebody unknown, it's easy to have these judgmental things about them. But when you get to know them, you're just a human being who's just like you with the same stories. And so Jan and I have friends, you know, from all those days, and we still go back, right, for weddings and things like that from our prior lives because when they get to know you, the differences just fall away. So I would say, yeah, it is effective. But sometimes you have to be thick-skinned to let some stories fall away. Know what to ignore, but you know, take a stand wherever you need to take a stand. So that balance, I would say, is really important. So yeah, there were enough stories where gender played a role, where color of the skin played a role, and you know, I was in the electrical sector, which was all about distributors and reps and small-town America, and you know, that was part of my life. I had to, to get an order, I had to go skeet shooting. I mean, that was just how it worked. And so you would just do it. And you know, I've made a lot of friends through that journey.
Thank you for sharing that. In 2008, you eventually end up returning to Eaton after spending some time at Honeywell. And it seems like this really starts to mark your eventual foray into the C-suite. You serve as president of APAC and then the American region, and then you go on to serve as COO of the global electrical business. Was there a moment when you were like, huh, maybe I could be CEO of a company?
Definitely not at that time. I don't, yeah, I don't think the CEO thing ever occurred till it actually, you know, you end up in the C-suite. So, no, I don't think I was thinking about it in those days. I mean, I was enamored. I think you and I talked about this before we walked in here. I remember still seeing Indra Nooyi on the cover of Fortune when the Most Powerful Women list came, and you were like, 'Wow,' this was like early 2000s, and you're like, 'Who is she? How is this even possible?' And but you never thought like you could do that. It was just more about you're just fascinated and in awe of somebody who could do it. So no, the C-suite thing never occurred to me for a long time. It was probably after I became COO, then I thought, oh, okay, this is one job away, maybe this is possible. But yeah, the move from Honeywell to Eaton was important because I had spent seven years at Honeywell, and Honeywell, you know, those days had a very strong culture of results-oriented, revolving-door culture. And, you know, did very well there, and had some rough spots too, right? So but at some point I was like, hey, do I enjoy this culture? You know, is it really for me? And when Eaton called, I felt like, you know, the time was right to be able to kind of go back to Eaton. And they told me I could come to the electrical business. I said, 'Hey, I want to work in China.' Because that time Jan and I had decided we wanted to make a move to China because seemed like a lot was happening there. We had two young kids by then, and we were like, 'Hey, China would be a cool place to go. Let's figure out who'll let us go to China.' So I asked Eaton, and they said, 'Okay.' Yeah. And so that was a big reason for rejoining Eaton because they let me go to China. So yeah, that's a very interesting way to make a career decision.
Yeah, that career decision happened because it's actually even better than that. Jan took our young son, who isn't here today actually, he, that time, this little boy, he took him to a grocery store, an Asian grocery store, and Pranab was like, 'Oh, this thing smells,' or something like that. He was like three or four or something, and Jan was like, 'Okay, we need to go to another country so the kids can experience all this and not turn out to be like this.' So, you know, and then we're like, 'Okay, where should we go?' Yeah, that was, he's like, 'They need different cultural experiences,' and we're like, 'Oh, where should we go?' And we're like, 'Oh, what about China?' And then that's how China happened.
And was it your boss in China who had never previously worked with a woman before?
Yes. So when I talked to the CEO at Eaton, I said I want to go to China. He was like, okay, fine. You know, work for a year in Pittsburgh and we'll send you to China. And he was doing a C-suite reshuffle. So I didn't know I was going to work for this guy, and he was a really, supposed to be a really tough guy. So he got the job of chief operating officer for electrical, and he was told that he's going to have to take me and I was going to run Asia-Pacific. He wasn't a happy camper because he didn't get to recruit me. So first day I walk into his office and I sit down, and he's like, 'Okay. I was told you're going to get the job to go to Asia Pacific.' And I was like, 'Yeah.' And he's like, 'Well, you know, I just want you to know I've never had a woman work for me who was successful.' And I was like shocked. I was, of course, I'd seen a lot in my life by then, you know, but didn't expect that direct, you know, feedback. And so all I did was I paused for a second, then I just laughed because I didn't know what to do, and I was like, 'Okay, I just have to prove you wrong.' And that's all I said, you know, because I didn't know what else to say. But I worked for him for seven years and got promoted three times after that. So I'm assuming it worked out eventually. So I, safe to say, I think it...
But it was a running joke with him, and I would always keep telling him, 'Hey, remember that?' And so yes, and when he retired and I took his role, I mentioned that at the retirement party. So yeah, yeah, yeah. So it definitely, there were many, many incidences like that where, you know, being a woman in an industrial business, a woman with a name like mine, and somebody who didn't have the deep electrical background, didn't grow up with it, all of that, those were really difficult qualifications to be in the jobs I was in. So you got judged all the time because of that. And every time I had this, I would just think, 'Okay, I just have to prove you wrong and hopefully someday you'll work for me.' In my mind, I would just think that.
I mean, it sounds like you're no stranger to the adversity, but I'm curious. I mean, looking back, obviously things have worked out pretty well, but in that moment, how are you motivating yourself to keep going in the face of a boss saying something like that or someone commenting on the color of your skin or not being able to pronounce your name or saying something to that effect?
You know, there are many moments where you think, you know, it's not all as easy as I'm explaining it here or making it sound. There are enough moments where you kind of go home and you unload and you think, okay, what the heck, like why, you know, and what do you do about this? And, you know, there's one story that really sticks. And so we were in China, and we loved our life in China. So we were there for three years. We had two young kids, and you know, for a young family, China was a great experience because you had help at home, right? And you had somebody who did your laundry and cooked for you, which was a huge experience for us. And suddenly you had time for your kids, and so we were just loving living in China. And Eaton at that time decided to do an acquisition of a company, $14 billion. Our market cap then was $8 billion. So they were kind of betting the farm on this acquisition. And so it was a big electrical acquisition. I was part of the strategy and building the game plan and all that. And when this acquisition was finalized, they said, 'Hey, we want you to come back to the US to run this.' And I didn't want to. I had such a happy time in China, particularly from the family situation was great. Like, you know, didn't have to do laundry was an important thing. And I was like, I told them, I was like, 'I don't think so. Like, I am enjoying this part. I'm not going to come back to the US.' And they're like, 'Are you kidding? Like, you know, you're going to run $10 billion of the company revenue. It's like three quarters of our revenue. It sets the stage for what happens next. Like, how could you say no to this?' And of course, Jan, like, you know, most decisions in my life, said like, 'Why would you say no? We should just do this.' And so we pick up from Shanghai and move to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So was another amazing decision, right? So nobody's happy, right? Shawnee, Hutchinson...
And no one's happy. And so anyway, we make the move, and, you know, kids are in local school, and, you know, everything's kind of set. And this acquisition's going to close, and just before the acquisition's closing, the CEO goes and tells the people we're acquiring that, 'Hey, you're all going to work for Revathi.' And it was the absolute kind of old boys' club, right, in the other company. And so they basically said, 'There's no way we're working for a woman.' Wow. And it was a different word that was used, which I won't use here. And so he comes back, he's just paid $14 billion for this acquisition, right? And he's like thinking, 'What am I going to do? I've committed to her, and here they won't work for her.' So he comes and he talks to me, and he says, 'Hey, Revathi, they say they won't work for a woman.' And I was like, 'Okay.' Okay. I was like, 'What did you say?' He said, 'I haven't said anything. I wanted to talk to you.' And I'm thinking, 'Are you kidding me?' Like, 'I just picked up my family and I moved.' Right. And so I was really mad about that. And, you know, I looked at him and I said, I was like, 'Well, you have to do what's right for you because you have bet the farm in this acquisition, and I have to do what's right for me.' I had no idea what I was talking about, by the way. I was thinking, like, what the heck, I'm going to have to go home and talk to Jan about this. And so I go home and then I tell him, and, you know, his response to almost everything is like, 'Calm down, sleep on it. You know, let's talk about this tomorrow,' knowing by tomorrow I'll at least have a better attitude about the whole thing. And so that was a huge pause, you know, because it basically, I felt like it was very unfair. And there were many unfair situations in my life, but that was a very significant moment. And I started doing, like, looking, talking to recruiters, doing all that stuff, and trying to see if, like, hey, what should I be doing? But by then, Eaton realized that I was, you know, serious about leaving, and they decided to give me the job.
So yeah. So I ended up inheriting this whole team that didn't want to work for me. They're all great friends of mine, by the way. I know all of them, their families, their kids. They still insist they never said that. But yeah, so, you know, you have many moments like that. So it's not as rosy as it seems. I think the thing you have to stick with is what is right for you, right? I always said that if I wasn't happy, I wasn't going to do it, right? Because at the end of the day, it's a job, right? You can go find another job, but you can't find happiness. So you have to have a little bit of bravado that I'll land on my feet, right? And I'll figure this out. So I had the attitude always that life is short. I wasn't going to compromise. And okay, if you didn't want me, I'll go do something else. No idea what the something else was, but hoping I'll figure it out eventually. So there's enough stories like that that are littered throughout the journey. I do look back at those and say some of them you got lucky, some of them you put up with. And then eventually it all kind of adds up to this.
Yeah, that's such a powerful sentiment. It's almost like power posing your way through life and hoping it works out. I want to come to Flex next, but I want to spend a second double-clicking on something you alluded to, which is it is notoriously very difficult for women to manage the competing demands of work and family. And I think this is a growing concern for a lot of women in this generation who are obviously higher educated and pursuing employment and faster-paced careers than ever before. Can you talk about your experience...
Navigating that? I mean, like making shifts from China to here where you had less help and what that's looked like for you.
Yeah, I would say yes, it's very, very difficult. I think particularly even if you have all the help and support, you also have the competing demands of women thinking about what their role is, what should be their role, and kind of the upbringing of the child. You know, I very early on when we decided to have kids, we were very clear to both sets of parents that you have to sign up to help. This is the beauty of the South Asian family, right? It's like we're like, you want us to have kids, you have to play a role in this. And they were like, absolutely. Right. So, for the next 18, 19 years, you know, my in-laws and my mother took turns, you know, to help us in through England. We were in England when my son was born. Back here and then China and then back. And so they played a big role. We hired a lot of people to help us wherever whenever we could afford it. There were many times we couldn't afford it. There was seven years where one of my sisters lived with us and she worked and she lived with us and she literally brought up our kids during that time. And then Jim and I had these rules about, you know, each one could only travel 50% of the time. So whoever got the spot on the calendar first got it. So calendar plays played a huge role in our 25 plus years of marriage and so we had all these things that helped in terms of, you know, thinking about the kids and how to navigate it. And there were many moments. I recently was talking to a women, particularly when kids are in middle school and high school, a lot of women actually, that's when you go through the maximum pressure in terms of should you continue working or should you, you know, spend time with your children because that's when they're going through all their social issues. And I had those moments, right? And I think my son has written a blog a long time ago when he was in high school. It says, 'Who says my mom can't have it all?' It was a retort to the Anne-Marie Slaughter article about women can't have it all because I was having a really bad day one day with my daughter who was insisting I had to make it to a science fair that I couldn't make it to. And I was like, oh, I can't do this, I have to quit, right? And there was moments like that. And, you know, he said, mom, I can go to the science fair. And she was so excited, she loved having brother there versus mom, so it kind of cancelled drama and, you know, I didn't quit and all of that happened. But I think those periods are very, very difficult. So you have to look at each one of them and say what decision are you making at that moment in time that's right for you and your family. And Jven and I have had many moments like that, right, where we have said either you should take a backseat or I should take a backseat and how do we navigate this together? And I think that's if you decide to have children, that's going to be part of the journey. And not only the physical support system, but I would say the mental, emotional support system is really, really important. And I surround myself with family. I surround myself with friends who are great for this to brainstorm through this. And then of course, you know, if you're lucky, you'll end up with a partner like mine. And then that makes the journey complete.
Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. I have to say this is a question I always struggle to ask because I find that for myself and for other interviews I often watch, we never ask this question of men. And I hope that we can get to a day where it's an irrelevant question for anyone that we're talking to. So I appreciate you being so honest about that experience and I'm sure it's what made your journey possible in ascending to the role of CEO of Flex in 2019. You've talked about how you were tapped for various roles in the industrial sector, but you said no. Flex came along and you thought, huh, this is an interesting challenge, which is fascinating because the stock wasn't doing particularly well. The business was hyper concentrated in all these commoditized segments and the CEO who'd been CEO for 12 years was on his way out. Why Flex? Why say yes here?
Well, I mean, I knew I'd have to kind of stick with the industrial theme if I was going to be CEO because Honeywell, Eaton, all industrial, you know, sexy sectors like oil and gas, aerospace, electrical, you know, that was my background and my heritage. And when I was COO, that's when we started talking about like, hey, should I think about CEO roles? And I knew like at Eaton it would be a long wait. And when people started asking about industrial company CEOs, I knew that if you're in an industrial company CEO, even if you have a large market cap and all of that, change takes a long time, right? Innovation takes a long time. Like when was the last time a circuit breaker was redesigned? I mean, like it from the Westinghouse days, it's like the same thing. So you knew that the innovation cycles were long and everything like to make to do transformation in an industrial company takes a long time. Eaton took 15 years to become from an automotive company to a diversified industrial. I just didn't know whether I wanted to do that for 10, 15 years and wasn't intrigued by that as much. And maybe I would have done it if Flex didn't come along. And when it came along, the thinking really was as simple as, hey, the stock was like seven bucks. And it felt like a quant problem to solve. It was like, I think I can double the stock. Like, it was pretty much that intense thinking. And like, how hard could it be? There are like three people in this space, in the competitive space. They all are fiscally irresponsible. I think I could fix this. So I thought so J and I talked and he's like, yeah, do it for a couple of years, you know, it doesn't work out you could go do something else. I was like, yeah, but failure would be quite public because it's a public company and like, you know, what would you guys think? And he's like, who cares, right? And so we had to tell the kids of course that hey, listen, if mom fails, it won't be pretty, right? And they didn't know what it meant but they were like, okay, fine, whatever. And so it was pretty simple as I wanted to do something different. Nobody was going to give me a retail job or a software tech job. And this felt it was different enough. And I think I was not as enamored by market cap as I was enamored by being able to really drive shareholder value. One of my favorite books is this book called Outsiders, which talks about CEOs and shows case studies of CEOs and it's all about shareholder value. So, I was enamored by that and I felt like, oh, okay, I could do this. So I wanted to just take this stock from like seven bucks to 14 and that would be victory and I thought, okay, let me try this.
Wow, that's not like a crazy rigorous approach to taking such an intense job.
Yeah. Yeah. No. And then we got to move from Pittsburgh to California. So it's always location, location, location, location.
So it's interesting because this whole idea that you're talking about how with industrials companies, it would be much more difficult to embark on a transformation. You led a pretty strategic pivot for Flex in coming in in 2019. You pivoted the business from these hyper commoditized segments around smartphones and laptops to building the infrastructure for AI, cloud, healthcare. Can you talk about how you saw around that corner and decided this is what we need to do and led that transformation of a company that spans 30 countries and 140,000 people?
Yeah. So Flex, for you know if you don't know, we're a contract manufacturing company and we're the name behind the name brand. So we make things for other people and we make everything. We'll make everything from consumer products like vacuum cleaners to hair straighteners to very complicated things like autonomous car compute, you know, to healthcare devices to kind of, you know, data center products. So we do a little bit of everything. And of course consumer products like cell phones and all of that is what, you know, you're really famous for in the beginning. So when I came in, you know, the contract manufacturing company everyone knows about is somebody called Foxconn. So there's Foxconn, Flex, and a third company called Jabil. I looked at the business models and I felt like to be a publicly traded company in the US you have to deliver value in terms of financial improvement year-over-year and you didn't get to do that in a highly commoditized business like cell phones because product life cycle was really fast. So innovation cycles were really fast. So you had to really make sure that through that cycle you were super competitive. And with cost of capital the way it is in western economies, right, you're not like Chinese economies, you didn't have the same luxury. So it wasn't that difficult to figure out that hey, you should exit all these highly commoditized and markets. Of course, executing that is hard because who's going to, you know, have a CEO come in and say, I'm going to like make all the businesses smaller, kind of hold on with me as I go through that. It's not a super, you know, popular decision. But that's what I did. I said, 'Well, for the long run, you should exit all those.' It of course helped that we were Huawei's biggest supplier when the whole first trade issue happened. So, we had to exit that really fast. And then at that point, I made the decision to focus on long life cycle, higher value, more complex to-do products so that you could get value for it. It was as simple as that. And then it doesn't sound simple at all. By the way, I always say strategy is about making two decisions in whichever job you are, whichever sector you are, whichever end market you are. The first and most important thing is what's your portfolio look like? What are your products? Will customers love your product and your portfolio? And will they pay for it? That's like the most important decision you have to make. Once you figure that out, then you say, 'Okay, how do I execute that in the most cost-effective, most efficient operational way?' Those are the two decisions you have to make in every job. Doesn't matter if it's software or retail or manufacturing or any of that. So, I apply that same framework to everything, right? So, the first framework was get the portfolio right, exit the things you weren't getting value for, and focus on the ones you were. And then really drive operational execution so you can, you know, execute the strategy. Now, one thing we did do that I think worked out to be a good thing was coming from my background of electrical and deep down I'm just an electrical energy kind of person that's been the longest part of my career. I wanted to do something in the electrical space. I realized Eaton was like integrating all these compute racks for data centers. Oh, sorry. Flex was and I was like, 'Wow, they're doing all these computer racks for Flex and they're going to be very power hungry someday.' And this was pre-Nvidia and all that. So, and I was like, let's buy a few power companies and integrate that into compute integration for the data center. So, not a super technical person, but that was the vision of what I was trying to do. Knowing that everything was going to get computer hungry. So I ended up buying a few electrical companies and we were doing compute integration. So then we ended up being the only company today that actually does compute and power for the data center at the same time. And that has been a huge pivot for us.
Wow. And you started leading this pivot shortly after you first ascended to the role of CEO which was in 2019. COVID follows months later. We've obviously also seen a lot of geopolitical volatility over the last six, seven years. I mean, can you talk about how your role as CEO has evolved and what you expected it to be, especially when we're living in times where there's new tariff impositions. Obviously, there was the recent legislation that was announced around H-1B immigration. I mean, everything is changing so rapidly. Flex is powering some of the most important products in industries that are coming to the forefront today. How are you thinking about your role as a CEO also from the personal perspective of being an immigrant and a woman and adding all that perspective into this role?
I'd say most CEOs today will tell you that the CEO role is very different than what it was in my parents' generation, right? You got to have life cycles in those days. So, you had like a five-year run or a 10-year run before the next economic cycle. Think about this. There was like 2000 the year 2k issue and then it was eight years later 2008 before the next economic crash came. So you used to get like these decades of gaps, right, to make big pivots and big decisions. No CEO's life is like that anymore. Every day you get up you're not sure what you're going to encounter. And so you have to mentally be ready to know that that's the job you've signed up for. Now things like COVID are such game-changing incidents like you have no idea what to do with things like that. But whether it's that or whether it's tariff or whether it is, you know, wars, you just have to be ready for have a good playbook for risk mitigation. Know how to execute that day in and day out no matter what is thrown at you. And you have to have a sense of resiliency and calm to be able to deal with it. And that is any CEO's life today. If you've signed up to be a CEO, that's going to be your life. And you just have to adapt to that and know how to deal with it.
