I recently went one-on-one with Ashray Urs, head of Logitech’s Streamlabs.
Adam: How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Ashray: I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was a kid. In second grade, when every kid was obsessed with beads, I convinced a friend to start a business with me. We sold gecko keychains first, then designed our own octopus toy built around a marble. It was a hit across the whole school. My teachers eventually pulled me aside and told me, in the nicest way possible, that I had to stop running a company in class. Growing up in Silicon Valley shaped how I see the world. Watching business change everyday life in real time made me feel like this was where I belonged.
After college, I joined Anheuser-Busch and took on a wide range of roles with increasing responsibility. By the end, I was working closely with the founders of the craft brewers we were acquiring and scaling. That’s where I saw firsthand how much creators and influencers drove the business. I knew there was something magical there. Streamlabs was backed by Sequoia and built for creators. The communities’ live streamers were forming were unlike anything I’d seen. I took on more and more, and never looked back. I don’t really believe in failure as long as you learn from it. Every setback I’ve had changed how I work going forward. The only real failure is the one you don’t take anything from.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Ashray: Prioritize product-market fit above everything else. Nothing else matters until you have it. Leadership has to stay close to the people you build for. In my case, that’s creators. It would be easy to just go to the office and work, but I make a constant effort to put myself in places where I can learn from them directly. I need to understand the problems they face today and where they want to go next. I often run the setup myself, and I learn something every single time.
You need to deeply understand every part of the business to solve problems well. Not to do everyone’s job, but because the best solutions usually sit between teams. Product, marketing, engineering, finance. You can’t see those connections if you only know your slice. It’s very easy to fool yourself about what’s actually happening in the business. Stay honest with yourself and keep things simple. Most of the time, the real answer isn’t complicated; it’s just uncomfortable.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Ashray: Hire people better than you. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you hired wrong. Hire adaptable people. The role you hired for will change, even faster now with AI, and the best people change with it. Own everything. Any problem is my problem, full stop. You can’t ask a team to take ownership if you won’t. Give difficult feedback fast. The instinct is to wait for the right moment, but that moment rarely comes, and the problem only grows. Address things head-on. People respect it, even when it’s hard to hear.
A small number of people drive an outsized share of results, and they’re in every department. Find them, develop them, and do everything you can to keep them. Take a long-term view on people. Everyone has ups and downs; life is complicated. The people worth keeping are worth being patient with.
Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?
Ashray: AI is shrinking the barrier between coming up with an idea and bringing it to life. We now live in a world where team members who don’t typically sit in a dev role can build apps and tools that ship to consumers. That’s going to change the way we do business fundamentally. I encourage everyone on our team to develop at least a foundational understanding of these tools, because the people who can combine their expertise with AI-assisted execution will have a massive advantage moving forward.
The rate of change with AI is incredible. No one can keep up alone, so the job of a leader is to set up the routines and processes that let people to learn from each other. Resisting change just means you get disrupted by someone who embraced it. Help your team understand how to actually use these tools, and keep looking at what others are doing that you could learn from.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Ashray: Clear communication. If people don’t know what you mean, nothing else matters.
Humility and willingness to adapt. Credit the team for the wins and own the failures yourself.
Total ownership. Any problem in the business is my problem. The moment a leader starts saying “that’s not my area” or blaming another team, you’ve already lost.
Long-term thinking while still executing in the short term. You have to prepare for what’s coming. There will be ups and downs, and the mistake is over-indexing on the present. The right call rarely looks urgent today.
Great leaders can spot the people who quietly drive disproportionate results, and they have the discipline to invest in them.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Ashray: I’m a believer in the theory of constraints. At any given moment, one bottleneck is capping the whole system, so you find it, fix it, and move to the next one. Leadership is no different. There’s always a constraint holding you back, and the job is to find it fast.
Reflect objectively. After something goes wrong, figure out honestly what you could have done better instead of explaining it away.
Get feedback from people who actually understand the work. Most feedback is noise. The signal comes from people who’ve done it.
Find behaviors and principles you respect in others and emulate them. You don’t have to invent your own playbook from scratch.
You can’t have an ego and improve as a leader. The moment you think you’ve got it figured out, you stop getting better.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Ashray:
- Get closer to the problem than anyone else. Most people lead from a deck or a dashboard. The edge comes from being in the room with the people you serve, hearing the problem in their words. You can’t outsource that, and it’s the one input that never stops paying off.
- Be honest with yourself before you’re anything else. It’s easy to fool yourself about what’s really happening, and most bad outcomes trace back to a truth someone avoided. Keep it simple, look at it straight, and the hard call usually gets obvious.
- Build the muscle to adapt faster than the world changes. Technology is collapsing the time between an idea and a shipped product, and that only accelerates. The winners won’t be the ones who know the most today. They’ll be the ones who can learn, drop what’s not working, and move before they’re forced to.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?
Ashray: Close the deals that matter. Some of our key platform integrations took almost five years to close. A couple of the right deals can secure the future of the business, so solve the most important problem for the person you’re selling to, not the easy one.
Marketing is competitive and dynamic. What works today may not work tomorrow. You need adaptable teams that can move quickly and drop what’s stopped working without getting attached to it.
Branding comes down to being authentic. It resonates broadly, and trust is everything. Like a million people have said before me, it’s very hard to build and very easy to lose.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Ashray: “If you torture the numbers enough, the data will say anything you want.” I heard that early in my time at Anheuser-Busch, when I took on a lot of roles working deep in the data. The stakes were high; a call on pricing or packaging strategy could mean hundreds of millions in revenue. Everyone has access to mountains of data, so the discipline is keeping how you look at it repeatable and straightforward. When you commit to a way of measuring something, stick to it. As a leader, I’ve found it’s critical to understand the trends, seasonality, and drivers deeply, because that’s what builds the intuition and gut check that let you question the right things. People with the best intentions will always show you data you should ignore, and your job is to know the difference.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Ashray: As your organization scales, repeating your mission and values gets more important. You’ll feel like you’re saying the same things too often right when people are starting to hear them. The goal is for anyone in the organization to lean on those values when making decisions, so the right call gets made in rooms you’re not in.
