Short Takes: Where Science Meets Culture

Raj Prakash: Zifo is all about culture. There’s a culture of playing to win. We call it what is called intent and intensity of action. Every action is measured in terms of intent and intensity of action, not just on result.

Darius Teter: Cultivating a winning culture is paramount, but every action doesn’t necessarily need to be purely focused on the outcomes. Celebrating successes, navigating challenges, and especially learning from losses fosters both resilience and growth.

Raj Prakash: Of course, you lose, but it’s a team sport. It’s fun, it’s tough, but winning it together or playing it together, even losing it together, it’s fun.

Darius Teter: Welcome to Grit & Growth from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the podcast where Africa and South Asia’s intrepid entrepreneurs share their trials and triumphs, with insights from Stanford faculty and global experts on how to tackle challenges and grow your business. I’m your host, Darius Teter, the executive director of Stanford Seed. For all the CEOs and founders who are listening, Stanford Seed will soon be accepting applications for the 2025 class of the Seed Transformation Program. This 10-month intensive program will start in January, and it includes a combination of face-to-face teaching, networking, and virtual learning. Founders and CEOs of companies based in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Indonesia, with annual revenue of at least $300,000, are eligible to apply. To learn more, please visit stanfordseed.co/apply.

Today we bring you another installment of our series of short takes, bite-size stories of amazing entrepreneurs like Raj Prakash, the co-founder of Zifo.

Raj Prakash: We are a science first, people first company. We are technology informatics, data services for science.

Darius Teter: Zifo is one of the largest global pure play science informatics companies, with over 1,800 employees. Zifo focuses on the technology for collecting and analyzing data for the inference and findings that lead to basic scientific discovery and, ultimately, to new products.

Raj Prakash: It all happens in the scientific space. Labs, experiments, clinical research, and a variety in this environment.

Darius Teter: Zifo’s technology has been instrumental to the development of medications and vaccines for global viruses and illness.

Raj Prakash: We have done close to two dozen initiatives helping a variety of COVID initiatives, vaccines, therapeutic candidates.

Darius Teter: These successes derived from their early decision to bring in a broader set of skills aligned with their customers’ unique needs.

Raj Prakash: India has a lot of technology services companies. They’re all generalists. Science is a specialized area. Technology, as a generalist, people are really focused on order-taking, instruction-driven work. You’re not really closer to the problem. It is about once the problem is defined, it’s about executing the solution. We want to be closer to the problem. Defining a problem is complex. We have fantastic people who are bilingual in nature. They speak the language of science as well as technology, so they reduce the frustration for scientists to interact with them.

Darius Teter: This approach has really paid off. Today, they work closely with many of the largest global biopharma companies.

Raj Prakash: We’re talking about drug discovery programs, which are multibillion-dollar programs – high value programs, high-intensity things, data, confidentiality, criticality, IPs being involved. We showed the persistence and tenacity, and just lucky too.

Darius Teter: Raj is downplaying the intentionality that went into building Zifo’s thriving culture. It’s a people-driven mechanism that encourages persistence and tenacity to get results.

Raj Prakash: There is a culture of playing to win. We call it what is called intent and intensity of action. Every action is measured in terms of intent and intensity of action, not just on result. You play to win, of course you lose, but it’s a team sport. It’s fun, it is tough, but winning it together, or playing it together, even losing it together, it’s fun. We want to be a place which is highly valued as a great place to work. We are listed as one of the great places to work for seven consecutive years. Our trust index has been more than 85 percent consistently year-on-year.

Darius Teter: Team engagement and empowerment are prerequisites for revenue growth, but Raj has a broader definition of what it means to grow.

Raj Prakash: It’s just not revenue, it is a multidimensional way. So even when we worked on our goals and transformational plan, it is quantitative in some level, it’s a lot qualitative. Nobody looks at how do you really optimize in terms of inward looking, contracting things, it is all about how do you expand. By growth, it is about opportunity to people, opportunity to explore self. It’s doing something impactful.

Darius Teter: Many times over, Zifo has been recognized as one of India’s fastest growing companies, working across research and development in multiple verticals, including pharma, biotech, chemicals, and even oil and gas. Since 2019, when Raj and his co-founder, Vanchi [Vanchinathan Sendhamizh], participated in the Seed Transformation Program, Zifo has grown their revenues more than fivefold. I mentioned at the outset that we’ll be accepting applications to the Seed Transformation Program starting this month. So let’s hear from Raj about how the program impacted him and Vanchi.

Raj Prakash: We were roughly one tenth of what we are today. As founders, none of us had any formal B-School education. We have been all like in a tribal way, experiment everything, iTrading, and making it happen. Books and listening to individuals has been our education. Seed is a composite, comprehensive program for people like us who never had a formal business education, business management education. It gave us the lingo, it gave us methodology, it gave us templates, and a great set of people. It also helped us to benchmark some of our business practices. In fact, we realized there are certain things we do that are really, really good, in terms of culture and people. If not for Seed, I don’t think we would have even had this appreciation.

Darius Teter: Raj also highlighted the power of networking in his cohort.

Raj Prakash: We would’ve done business with at least a dozen Seed companies, so it’s almost like pre-qualified, trustful relationships where you can easily go and engage, both give and take. It’s so powerful.

Darius Teter: I’d like to thank Raj for sharing his story as well as his experience within the Seed Transformation Program. Raj’s story exemplifies the power of a growth mindset to drive business performance and make a positive global impact.

Erika Amoako-Agyei and VeAnne Virgin researched and developed content for this episode. Kendra Gladych is our production coordinator, and our executive producer is Tiffany Steeves, with writing and production from Nathan Tower and sound design and mixing by Ben Crannell at Lower Street Media. Thanks for joining us. I’m your host, Darius Teter. We’ll be back soon with another episode.