Craig Walker has sold startups to Yahoo and Google, and his current business, cloud communications company Dialpad, is valued at $2.2 billion.
Still, the CEO says he learned his most important business lesson watching a "goofy" 1970s racing comedy, called "The Gumball Rally."
"What's behind you is not important," Walker says, paraphrasing a line uttered in the film by actor Raul Julia's Italian racecar driver character.
To Walker, 58, that sentiment reflects his belief in the importance of not getting distracted or unnerved by what his competitors are doing.
"As a CEO, it's like... Knock yourselves out. I don't care what you do," Walker tells CNBC Make It. "I'm not going to worry about your product [or] your innovations. I'll worry about mine. It makes it a lot easier not to get panicked by what other people do."
That's easier said than done, especially considering that Walker's Dialpad makes business communication software, including voice messaging and video conferencing tools, that are competing for customers with other multibillion-dollar startups like Zoom and RingCentral, as well as tech giants like Microsoft's Teams software.
But, Walker has been running internet communications companies for more than two decades, and he says he's seen "a lot of entrepreneurs" make the mistake of reacting to their competition: "They'll change their roadmap. They'll try to copy [their rivals], and it's just a bad way to build a big business."
Learning CEO lessons on the job
Of course, it helps that Walker has a strong track record in the tech industry, having steered multiple businesses to successful results.
The Dialpad founder and CEO is actually a former securities attorney who never planned on becoming an entrepreneur, even though he got a thrill helping early internet companies in the 1990s line up financing deals and plan their IPOs.
"I always thought, 'Man, [this] is awesome to be this close to it. But it would be even more awesome to be on the other side of the table,'" Walker says.
He got his chance in 2001. Walker had stopped practicing law and become a venture capital investor. When the internet bubble burst, an internet communications company he'd backed was floundering and in need of a steady hand.
Investors in the company — which was called Dialpad Communications, but is separate from Walker's current startup — installed Walker as CEO and he managed to turn things around within a few years, eventually reaching 14 million customers and selling the business to Yahoo in 2005 for an undisclosed sum.
"It's awesome to [take] on almost an impossible challenge and then actually [turn] the ship around," he says. "Once you've done that, and once you realize you're pretty good at it, going back to a law firm and being on the other side of the table again, it was impossible."
Later that year, Walker jumped right back into the fray by launching GrandCentral Communications, a startup whose software allowed users to make phone calls and manage their voicemail messages over the web. In 2007, that company sold to Google, also for an undisclosed amount. This time, Walker stayed on at Google for nearly four years, leading the transition of his former business into the Google Voice platform.
Working at an established tech giant like Google came with perks, like a cushy salary and shorter hours, especially compared with the life of a startup founder. Still, the entrepreneurial itch eventually got the better of Walker again.
Launching a startup can be "back-breaking work," Walker says, but he's found running his own business is ultimately far more fulfilling than feeling like just a cog in a larger machine.
"I was getting out of bed and [it was] the first time since I graduated from law school that I was kind of dreading going to work," he says.
In 2010, Walker launched Dialpad, partnering with Google's cloud technology to create a suite of AI-powered business communications software tools, including messaging and virtual meetings, that are now used by more than 30,000 businesses and millions of their employees, according to the company.
The company has raised a total of $450 million in funding to date, including a $170 million funding round led by private investment firm ICONIQ Capital in 2021 that gave Dialpad its current $2.2 billion valuation.
The main difference between Dialpad and his previous ventures, Walker says, is that he has no plans to sell this time around.
"This is very likely my magnum opus," he says. Without providing an exact timeline, Walker added that his goal is to eventually take Dialpad public, "build it into a big, important public company" and run it himself until it's time to retire.
It's an outcome that he views as allowing him to "be in control — I mean, as much as you can be — of your destiny, versus when you get acquired, [and] you lose that control," he says.
'You have to be an eternal optimist'
It can be difficult not to get caught up in what your competitors are doing, particularly when your rivals include Microsoft and Zoom, the latter of which saw its business skyrocket amid the boom in remote work during the pandemic.
Zoom went public in 2020, at the height of its popularity, and quickly became a $100 billion company, but the business has struggled recently to maintain growth as more workers have returned to the office and Microsoft has invested heavily in its own Teams platform.
To be fair, Walker and Dialpad face similar potential obstacles to growth. However, Walker is confident that Dialpad can continue to add to its roster of business clients, especially after recently launching its own generative AI platform, DialpadGPT, that's trained on a proprietary dataset of billions of minutes of business conversations. Dialpad is counting on that platform to help it compete with similar AI products being rolled out by Microsoft and others.
Still, that doesn't mean Walker is watching those other competitors too closely when making decisions about Dialpad's new and future products.
"I try my hardest not to really pay attention to what others do, because it's distracting. Who knows if they're gonna be good at it? Who knows if it's gonna work, right?" he says. "Let them go do their thing. And you just stick to your mission."
To pull off that approach, he says, it takes an unfailingly positive outlook, which is something that's helped him avoid too many "sleepless nights" over his decades as a CEO.
"You have to be an eternal optimist, and just extremely confident you have the best team and the best idea and the best way to go about it," he says.
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