{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Fit Happens: Why CEOs and Leaders Succeed or Fail","title":"Why 85 Percent of New CEOs Are First Timers, with Anand Eswaran","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3266,"description":"What actually makes a leader fit a job, when the written job spec says one thing and the company needs another? That is the question at the center of my conversation with Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam Software, a 15 billion dollar company that exists to put data back together after ransomware attacks, outages, and some of the worst days a company ever has.\nAnand is a first time CEO who will tell you, bluntly, that he did not match the spec the board wrote for his own job. The posting called for a proven CEO with a product engineering pedigree and an industry veteran as backup. He was none of the three. We talk about why the board hired him anyway, and why that story connects to a much bigger pattern in executive fit and hiring a CEO: the research shows roughly 85 percent of newly appointed S&P 1500 CEOs are first timers, and there is very little statistical difference in performance between first time and repeat CEOs once you control for the momentum they inherit.\nWe trace Anand's path from a childhood in Mumbai taking apart radios and the family's first computer, through grad school in Missouri, into a career that moved through consulting, services, sales, Microsoft Digital, running Microsoft's enterprise business, serving as COO of RingCentral, and finally to Veeam. He describes it as a series of nonlinear steps rather than a planned climb, and explains why that range matters more than a straight line when a board is thinking about leadership fit.\nWe also get into what changed for him operationally once he became CEO: learning to delegate without abdicating, rewiring his relationship with speed, and what he calls firing the operator inside himself. He talks about culture as a concrete operating discipline rather than a soft idea, how services experience shapes retention and expansion in a SaaS business, and how he is using AI inside Veeam, from a bot paired with every seller to the deeper question of trusting the data a model is trained on.\nThis is a conversation...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/0AtGMO0HN5UCZe2_wf8pfE5Ad7xGwtuc4BOCVD_dVlA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8yNTdl/MDY2MDQyMDAzMmFk/MWIzNjMwMzMwZjFh/NTRmMS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}