Even CEO’s Look to Others for Guidance

Do you, yourself have a mentor? And what traits did you look for when selecting a mentor?

So I don’t have a formal mentor, no. But I work and have worked with amazing people that maybe unbeknown to them, I look at them and consider them as mentors. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. Pradeep Sindhu is a founder of this company, Juniper Networks. And he really taught me like just countless things, but most of all, how to distill the most complex problems down into first principles and to come up with elegant solutions to those problems. Scott Kriens, who’s an early CEO at Juniper, but now the chairman of the board, who’s in my view, like the shining example of grace under pressure. It doesn’t matter what the level of adversity, he’s always calm, collected, very constructive. And even my late father, who just taught me the importance of work ethic, and was probably the biggest influence when it came to my passion for engineering today.

Well, what did your father do? He was an engineer also?

He was an engineer. He was an engineer as well. He was a civil engineer, but definitely instilled that passion for building things from creating great products.