I recently went one-on-one with Jay Chandan, CEO of Gorilla Technology Group.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Jay: I got here the hard way. I grew up in India in a very modest household. I was not the first in my family to graduate. We had doctors and professionals around us, but money was tight, and nothing was handed to me. The turning point was leaving India for Singapore with not a penny to my name. No network, no safety net, no capital. In truth, I started from scratch and sometimes less than nothing, because every mistake had a real cost. That experience forces you to become practical very quickly. You stop romanticising business, and you start respecting execution. From there, I built. Some ventures worked, some did not, but all of them taught me that optimism is cheap and delivery is expensive. The setbacks were the real teachers: hires that did not work out, projects that looked clean on paper, then turned messy in reality, cashflow pressure at exactly the wrong moment. Those moments pushed me towards discipline: facts over stories, cadence over chaos, and ownership over excuses. Over time, I learned how to channel intensity. Operating across countries, as I do in my business, means noise every day. I am not one of the calm ones, and when I react, the room reacts with me. So, I learned to separate signal from noise, decide fast, and drive the next controllable action. Trust is fragile and reputation compounds faster than revenue, so I do not compromise on integrity while pushing for outcomes.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Jay: Scaling is not growth with more people. It is growth with more control. The first step is choosing a problem that matters and solving it in a way customers will pay for repeatedly. If you cannot explain the value in one sentence and prove it in one deployment, you are not ready to scale. Second, you have to turn delivery into a machine. I obsess over cadence, metrics, and accountability because they remove drama. Every function needs clarity on what good looks like, how it is measured, and who owns the outcome. Third, you scale by being deliberate about where you play. Countries and customers are not just geography and logos. They determine regulation, procurement cycles, data requirements, and how fast cash converts. If you pick the wrong combination, you can look busy and still go nowhere. Finally, you must protect efficiency while you chase revenue. Scale kills companies when margins erode, cash flow stretches, and governance lags behind growth. To combat this, I use CCOPER as a discipline when leading my teams. It’s not a slogan, but rather our North Star and a framework I have created by which we measure every initiative, every market move, every team, and every individual. It stands for:
- CC – Customers and Countries keep us grounded in real demand
- O – Operating discipline forces repeatable execution
- P – Product keeps us honest on what we can deliver
- E – Efficiency protects the engine
- R – Revenue converts delivery into compounding growth
This is how you become a sharp, disciplined, unstoppable machine.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Jay: I hire for ownership and candor. Talent without spine is just theater. I set a clear bar, I measure it, and I act on it. People respect high standards. If someone is consistently missing, I do not stretch the process for months to protect feelings. I keep the organisation direct: fewer layers, faster decisions, no sugar coating. Additionally, bad news does not get better with age, so I always lead with the bad news first. I also make sure the company does not bottleneck at me. If everything needs the CEO, I have not built a team; I have built a dependency.
Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?
Jay: AI is becoming infrastructure. Leaders should stop thinking of it as a tool that sits on top of the business and start treating it like electricity: it changes cost structures, speed, and competitive advantage. The winners will not be the ones with the loudest model claims. They will be the ones who can deploy AI reliably at scale with clear economics. Data governance and security are becoming non-negotiable. Regulation, sovereignty, and cyber risk are rising everywhere. Leaders should understand where their data lives, who can access it, how it is protected, and what happens when something goes wrong. If you bolt security on later, you will pay for it twice. Edge computing is moving closer to where decisions happen. Real-time analytics, computer vision, and automated response are shifting from cloud-only to hybrid environments that demand resilient connectivity and operational discipline. The practical takeaway is simple: focus less on hype and more on deployment, trust, unit economics, and control.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Jay: From my learnings, an effective leader is not a motivational speaker. An effective leader drives outcomes through people by following these principles:
- Candour: truth early, fix early.
- Clarity: few priorities, clear decisions.
- First principles: reality over politics.
- Learn it all mindset: curiosity beats ego.
- Standards: performance is expected and rewarded.
- Independence: leaders who run without the CEO bottleneck.
- Purpose: high care and high accountability.
That is the mix I aim for every day.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Jay: If you want to take your leadership to the next level, stop chasing style and start building substance. I ask for feedback early, I take it without ego, and I change behaviour fast. Then, I put an operating cadence in place that forces truth and speed, clear metrics, clear ownership, and direct escalation, so we do not confuse activity with progress. I also work on temperament. During high-pressure moments, leadership becomes visible. I am intense by nature, so I have learned to channel that intensity into decisions and outcomes. I judge my effectiveness by how independently my people can operate. When an excess of decisions needs my input, there is a design flaw.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Jay: My best tips are the ones that survive reality across countries: cash flow, operating discipline, and trust.
- Protect cash flow like oxygen. I care less about booked revenue and more about gross margin, collections, and payment terms. In the real world, especially across markets, cash conversion is what decides whether you scale or stall.
- Build an operating system, not a hero story. Companies that rely on heroic effort eventually burn out; companies that win build structures that perform under pressure. Everyone should know what matters, how it’s measured, and who is responsible. Clarity creates speed and reduces politics. It turns strategy into execution.
- Guard trust as if it sits on the balance sheet. Put facts on the table before they become problems, deal with them decisively, and don’t chase wins that cost your credibility.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?
Jay: Sales, marketing, and branding are not three separate functions. They are one loop: promise, proof, and repeat.
- Sales: I keep it brutally practical. Do not pitch features. Diagnose the problem, quantify the cost of doing nothing, and commit to an outcome with clear success metrics. Keep qualification tight, control the stakeholders early, and fight for payment terms that protect cash flow. A deal that looks big but pays late and delivers messy is not a win; it is a liability.
- Marketing: Clarity beats creativity. If I cannot explain our value in 15 seconds, we have not done the work. I anchor the message on what we deliver, why it matters, and why we are credible. Then I repeat it relentlessly across every channel and every market. Consistency is what scales, not noise.
- Branding: Stop thinking logo and start thinking behaviour. Brand is what people say about you after the first deployment, the first incident, and the first invoice. Deliver on time, communicate early, own issues without excuses, and treat trust like capital. That is how you build a brand that actually converts.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Jay: The best advice I ever took seriously is to embrace failure, because it is not the opposite of success; it is the tuition fee. I have failed plenty. Deals that did not close. Ventures that did not work. Decisions that looked right then proved wrong. Every time it stung, but every time it taught me something I could not have learned in a classroom: how to take a knock, correct course quickly, and come back tougher. Failure has been a step on the pedestal of success for me. I get up every time, stronger and harder. I still do!
