The IESL Ray Wijewardene Memorial Lecture "Nobody to Leader: Achieving Global Leadership with Software" I gave on September 7th, 2017 in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

1. Nobody to Leader: Achieving
Global Leadership with Software
Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D.
Founder, CEO and Chief Architect, WSO2
Lt. Col., IT Advisor, Sri Lanka Army
Ray Wijewardene Memorial Lecture, September 7th, 2017

2. Ray

3. By the end of this talk ..
.. you should believe that:
• Software is eating the world
• Software allows anyone anywhere to compete
• Some people are doing it already
• Entrepreneurs refuse to let things be
• Making excuses is inexcusable
• Unfortunately, everything I say today applies
globally and not just to Sri Lanka

4. SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD

5. Software is eating the world
• Essay by Marc Andreessen in the Wall Street
Journal in 2011

6. Automotive
Old New

7. All Transport
• Self navigating vehicles
– Planes, trains and automobiles
• Intelligent traffic routing
• Self maintaining

8. Hotels
Old New

9. Healthcare

10. Legal

11. Crime / War

12. Oldest profession …

13. Virtual Reality = Reality?
• Tourism?
• Entertainment?
• Education?

14. Politics
• Not yet

(imagine if we could export politicians? WOW!)

15. (Or elephants)

16. SOFTWARE AND COMPETING
GLOBALLY

17. What software do you use?
• Gmail, Yahoo mail, Outlook
• Office – Word, PowerPoint, Excel
• Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram
• Adobe
• Windows / MacOS / Linux
• iOS / Android
• Salesforce? Netsuite? Oracle?

18. Where does it come from?

19. Where does it come from?

20. Why do you use “foreign” software?
• We all want best global brands
• Localization is common with machine learning
– E.g. Google voice recognition now supports
Sinhalese!
– (Tamil has been supported for a while)
• Good software doesn’t need local support or
training
• “Cheaper” not a good answer to “Free”

21. Software is Global, not Local
• Selling by information asymmetry is over
• Selling globally doesn’t require physical
presence
• Local cannot be protected with barriers
– (Unless you manage access to the global Internet;
e.g. China)
– No barriers to entry for anyone to any market
• Regional concept is meaningless

22. DID YOU KNOW?

23. • 2 million users in 190 countries
– Largest markets: US, UK, Germany, India
• Profitable and growing for last 5 years
• 100% made in Sri Lanka
– Team of 20 people
– ZERO direct sales
• Registered in Australia, raised $300k
Chandika Jayasundara

24. 4Axis Solutions
• 13 million downloads of Drawing Desk
– Casual drawing product
– 10,000 downloads a day
– Top rated app for iPad in US/UK stores
• Started in 2012 as 3rd year students at Univ of
Moratuwa IT faculty; now 14 people
• No funding, profitable
• Registered in Singapore
Dumindu Harsha

25. Paraqum Technologies
• Hardware programmed in software
• Started in 2013 to promote electronic product
development
• World class performance hardware for HEVC
and DPI
• 30 engineers, no funding
• Registered in Sri Lanka
Dr. Ajith Pasqual

26. AdroitLogic
• Enterprise middleware – ESB and Integration
• Profitable, no investment taken
• Customers including Walmart, SGX and Kuoni
• 26 people
Asankha Perera

27. • 400 enterprise customers in 31 countries
– 9 in Sri Lanka
• 485 full time employees, 448 in Sri Lanka
– All product design, development and innovation
from Sri Lanka
• Raised $40+M, about to be profitable
• Registered in US

28. There are others in Sri Lanka
• My apologies for not mentioning you.

29. What is common about these?
• Passion, passion, passion about the problem
• ZERO concept of local or regional market
• Razor focus on quality
• Want to win the market, not be a “player”
• Energy to keep going despite challenges
• Belief that we are not second class
• Only one of them was founded by a “young”
person 

30. ENTREPRENEURS

31. Life is full of problems
Question is, what do you do with them?
• Complain
• Ignore
• Do something

32. Learn to see problems
• Note them when you experience them
• Observe others experiencing them
• Predict problems that will come in the future
because of some other change

33. Become a visionary
• Close your eyes and see a future that doesn’t
yet exist
– Render it in detail
• Can you see a path from here to there?
• Learn to tell that story
• Can you convince others to follow you down
the path?

34. Do something: education is key
• To see and make a path you need to have
tools – knowledge and continuous education
• Not just about (or even) formal education
– No one can ever stop learning
• Landing a rocket back vertically is hard, but
not that hard if you know the science of it

35. Age is not key
• Focus on “entrepreneurship education”,
“ideation”, etc. targeting 20-somethings is silly
– Trying to replicate Mark Zuckerberg is foolish; the
next one will happen without your (or my) help
• What does it take to solve hard problems?
– Knowledge and experience
– Young and foolish
• Your entrepreneurial age is not how long
you’ve lived

36. Example: My Father
• Funded in 2012, award received in 2016
Maj. Gen. (Rtd) Kamal Fernando

37. Example: Ray
• Everything I remember seeing about Ray was
with him having white hair

38. MY ADVICE
(BUT REMEMBER HOW MUCH YOU PAID FOR IT)

39. To consumers
No one uses Creately or 4Axis because its made
in Sri Lanka. So:
• Demand the best
• Don’t accept 2nd class because its local
• Push local to be the best

40. To enterprises
• Give the new guy a chance
– Prakash Iyer, CTO of @Road/Trimble
• Don’t require big revenues before you trust a
local business – use your judgement
• Buy based on current needs not RFPs
– Quote from local company to WSO2 some years ago:
“your product was fine but other one had more
buttons”
• Don’t discriminate against local businesses
– Leave your ego at the door

41. To government
• Where are the companies I mentioned
registered?
– 4AxisSolutions – Singapore
– AdroitLogic – Singapore
– Creately – Australia
– Paraqum – Sri Lanka 
– WSO2 – US
• Why??

42. To government
• Policy consistency
– Taxes – annual revision to national tax policy is an
utter joke
• Make it easier to do business
– Intellectual creative workers need to be easily hired
and fired
• Establish reasonable and non-discriminatory
corruption
• Get the hell out of the way
– Software doesn’t need your approval or help; thanks!

43. To entrepreneurs
• Stop making excuses, or stop calling yourself
an entrepreneur
• Think big, then think bigger
• Think global domination, market leader
• Share your opportunity with your team
– E.g: ~30% of WSO2 is owned by employees

44. To entrepreneurs
• Leverage Sri Lanka’s experiences for global
application
– E.g. Travel, security, garbage, corruption

45. To investors
• Don’t focus only on 20-somethings
• Demand world domination thinking
• Risk more to solve big problems which can
give bigger return
– Older entrepreneurs have more at risk and can’t
manage with no real salary
• Don’t take 30% of company for peanuts

46. To “industry”
• Stop focusing on $1B, $2B, …, $5B revenue
– Only applies to selling people, um, “services”
• Stop focusing on “xx people employed in IT”
– % of Sri Lankans in IT more than India even now!
• Software companies generate value massively
disproportional to revenue
– Between 5-20x revenue
• Celebrate failure
• Learn from Israel, not India

47. To IESL
• “Software engineers are not engineers”
– Um, really?

48. CONCLUSION

49. Software opportunity is real
• And its massive
• People numbers don’t matter; tiny Sri Lanka can
take on the world
– And are doing a tiny teeny bit
• We do have one intrinsic advantage
– Young (20-something) people who are willing to
sacrifice weekends to learn
– But need to learn to solve problems, not just be
accountants, managers, marketers or lawyers
– And need to remember that ALs is not the make-or-
break in life

50. Software and international politics
• Software dependency is loss of national
independence
• In the last war, we couldn’t buy weapons
without meeting their conditions
– Welcome to international politics
• In the next war, if we are dependent on
external services we can be “shut down”
easily

51. Future of software ..
• Today’s software
– Connecting people, applications and devices
• Programming genes (e.g. CRISPR)
• Programming nano scale
.. is the future of the world.

52. Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011