Guild CTO Rohan Chandran Makes His Own Momentum 

Rohan Chandran is the Chief Product and Technology officer at Guild, an education benefits company that works with large employers like Target, Chipotle, Hilton and PepsiCo to train their workforces and create career mobility for employees. Two constants in Chadran’s adult life have been playing cricket and tapping into the power of momentum to lead successful companies.

How important is cricket to Chandran? He chose to attend Stanford University based on the quality of its cricket club. The club’s quality did not live up to his expectations, but it gave him a platform for success. He became a founding member of the cricket media site Cricinfo, later acquired by ESPN, and a member of the Stanford Supernovas Cricket Team, an alumni team that recently hoisted a league trophy.

And cricket taught him something else that matters in business and sports: momentum. 

People tend to talk of momentum as a wave you ride. Chandran sees momentum as a “trigger moment” when a spark is created. “But to create that momentum, there has to be some intentionality around it,” he said. “If you’re playing cricket and the opposition makes an error, what creates the possibility for momentum isn’t the error but the leader’s readiness to react quickly and say, “Ah, a spark! How do I latch on to it and take advantage of that situation?”

In the podcast, Chandran argues that momentum in business is subject to mass times velocity. “You can’t easily adjust the mass or heft of your business in an instant, but the speed is under your control,” he said.

This means that momentum works differently depending on the size of an organization. “With CricInfo, we were the first live sports on the internet,” he said. “It was just us saying we’re going to go hard at this and everything may not work, but we created momentum.”

Later, at Yahoo, Chandran and his team proceeded with greater caution. “We had a team we called ‘the paranoids’ whose job was to predict all the things that might go wrong.” The paranoids dulled momentum at a $6 billion revenue company where mistakes could be costly. 

Whether you’re riding a wave, seeing which way the wind blows or catching a spark, leaders will enjoy Chandran’s deep thinking about seizing the day, with lessons that include:

• Hiring for leadership potential as well as technical expertise.

• Anticipating the moment when it’s time to pivot as an organization.

• The importance of team “gestalt” in high-performing teams.

A major supporter of soccer giant Manchester United, Chandran vividly recalls the year 2016 when a much smaller club, Leicester City, won the English Premiership over far bigger rivals. “They communicated so well with each other, and they had each other’s backs,” he remembered. “As a result, the whole was bigger than the sum of its parts.”