Scale Like a CEO

Scaling Success: Inside the Journey of Rajeev Shah, CEO of Celona | Scale Like a CEO

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 32

Share episode

Factories still run on clipboards while our phones stream 4K video. That disconnect is the real digital divide Rajeev Shah set out to fix, and he walks us through how Celona brings private 5G to the hardest industrial environments—and what it actually takes to scale a company built for mission‑critical reliability.

We get candid about the first sale every founder makes: recruiting exceptional people from comfortable roles. Rajeev shares how he screens for low ego and a true growth mindset, why role modeling beats slogans, and how explicit values like “customer success” and “think big, act small” translate into daily decisions. The conversation turns real as we dissect the moment delegation went too far, dashboards looked fine, and the team still missed a quarter. That shock forced a reset on go‑to‑market, leadership expectations, and the uncomfortable truth that the strengths that win at 20 employees can stall you at 100.

From there, we map the tension every scaling company faces: protect stability for mature customers while chasing the next S‑curve of “unnatural” growth. Rajeev explains how to separate experimental bets from core operations, keep quality high, and align not just on a grand vision but on the very next step. If you care about industrial IoT, private 5G, leadership development, or building a culture that actually ships, this conversation gives you field notes you can use tomorrow.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a founder who needs it, and leave a quick review—what’s one next step you’re committing to this week?

Rajeev:

The path to those big ambitions being fulfilled is to take it one step at a time. And so from an action perspective, when you start to think too big, then you can get paralyzed by the size of that vision. And so we always encourage internally each other to say, look, that's a big vision. Let's just figure out what our next step is. Let's just get that done. Let's celebrate the success of that small win. And we keep doing enough of those, we'll get there.

Speaker 01:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO, the podcast where we dive into the minds of successful founders and business leaders who've mastered the art of scaling. Joining us today is Rajiv Shah, CEO and founder of Salona, a company revolutionizing wireless connectivity in industrial spaces. Get ready for an energetic discussion packed with insights on team building, leadership, and navigating the challenges of rapid growth. Let's jump right in.

Justin:

So much for joining me on Scale like a CEO to get us started. If you wouldn't mind, just give me a 90-second intro to you and your business.

Rajeev:

Thank you, Justin. Pleasure to be here. So my name is Rajeev Shah and one of the founders and CEO of Saluna. And Saluna is a young company that's focused on the problem statement to say, how does wireless in really tough-to-reach places like industrials and manufacturing refineries get really solved to solve what we consider kind of a different type of digital divide? We sit in offices and we are permanently connected in our homes and everywhere. But you go to some of these really industrialized vocations, and there is such a lack of connectivity that any concept of digitization or AI-powered automation is really fundamentally blocked by that. So we have really focused on that infrastructure layer, and we are bringing that by bringing the power of 5G in the hands of these industrial organizations.

Justin:

That's great. Well, I can think of a few areas around the country that we other than industrial, like with 5G is pretty bad that you could pop in there too. I'm curious, what makes you unique in the way that you're solving problems for your customers?

Rajeev:

I've always been a believer that uniqueness comes from what you decide to focus on. I think that's got to be the first place you start. And one of the early decisions that we said is while 5G is very powerful to us as consumers, the incremental benefit there is not the thing that's most exciting to us as wireless technologists. What was most exciting to us was the problem statement for these industrial organizations. And those organizations, we believed, they were still living in an analog world of paper and pen-based analog operations. And the reason was those were very, very hard to connect places. And the problem statement there was not just ringing wireless, but doing it in a way that worked securely because they were very mission-critical operations, doing it in a cost-effective way so that these businesses could afford them. And then doing it in a way that felt consistent with the way they ran the rest of their IT operations. And so that was a very different problem statement than traditional cellular players had when they were trying to build nationwide networks for consumers. And so once you start from a different place, it opens up a whole different trajectory of innovation. The second thing that makes us unique is once you said, okay, if that is the problem we are going to focus on, the question was what was the right team that could actually deliver on that? So from day one, we were focused on a very unique DNA, both from a technical competency perspective, but also cultural mindset, work ethic, and how we thought of the customer. So that was the second thing that has been there to say focus on the right problem statement that we would want to stay in, and then build a team with the right DNA. And then everything else follows. There's, you know, the product differentiation, technology differentiation, business model, it automatically follows if you get those two things right.

Justin:

I love that. And I and I agree. Like if you find the right problem and then find the right people to solve it, you can you can move really fast. I'm curious, you know, as you if we go back to kind of the beginning and you were really starting to build that team, going from, you know, a team of one or two to getting to 10 or 20, you know, as you were starting to identify some of those people, what were some challenges that you faced and how you overcame them?

Rajeev:

Yeah, I think the first challenge is that is the first sale you make. The first sale you make as a startup founder is to the team that you're trying to convince them to join you. And so you're trying to convince these people that as much as you eventually try to convince a customer that the product you sell is the right one, you're trying to sell to the team that your vision is worthy of their time and attention. And that is a that is not a trivial challenge, especially if you're trying to attract high quality talent. Because high-quality talent wants to is getting wooed by every person. And so one of the greatest examples was a couple of the very early senior people we hired, they were in very, very senior positions in some great established companies, candidly making great money. And we were going to have to sacrifice, ask them to make a sacrifice, but not just them. I had to have a conversation with them, potentially their families, to say this is why we still think the vision is worth pursuing. And we think in the long run, your family will actually come out on the positive side. Because in the short term, it usually isn't. You are asking that family to sacrifice a lot. So really convincing that team that this is the right thing was one of the hardest things. And it is always a hard thing if you are going for talent that's worth it. If you're getting talent convinced to join you very easily, more often than not, you're probably compromised on the quality of the talent.

Justin:

It's an interesting conversation around kind of taking some of these bigger players that were at bigger companies. I was literally just the other day having a conversation about how that can be really challenging because oftentimes when you hire top talent from these bigger companies, they're used to having a lot of resources, they're used to having a lot of consistency and structure. And so I'm curious how how did that work bringing these these folks into a smaller company where you have to, you kind of have to do everything. You have to wash the dishes, you have to take out the trash. There's no job that's not yours. How did that how did that work?

Rajeev:

Yeah, I look, I think that's a great point, and you're always going to have some mixed results. We have been, I think, both partially lucky, and I think we did a few things right, that the probability and percentages we have had have been more than our fair share. When it comes down to a few key things, number one, you do have to include that in your selection criteria. You have to try your level best to understand the human being on the other end to say, even though they're coming from the big company, are they showing any signs? Number one, of any form of ego. Number two, are they displaying some signs of the growth mindset where they are motivated by the idea of trying something new to grow and not just to grow in things like career ladder path, money, et cetera? So you have to firstly evaluate as best as you can the other person if they are showing those traits. And after you have done that, I think you rely on two or three things. Number one, big lesson in everything you want to do, I think, in a company, you have to role model it. Because eventually, if you as a CEO and founder are doing it and the other founders are doing it, anybody joining the team, it's very hard for them to say, oh no, no, no, I'm not going to do it. So, number one, you have to role model that. You have to role model every trait of behavior you want. And from a big company perspective to a small company, I think every person who came in saw that to your point. My job as a CEO in that first one year was to do everything that the rest of the team did not want to do. That's your first job. And so you role model it the right way. And you're then fortunate enough, in my case, our CTO Mehmet Yawuz, he was coming from Qualcomm. He had been a very senior VP of RD there for over a decade, uh, held over 350 patents, used to leading teams of hundreds of engineers. And then he came in and he was an extraordinary role model. And so it's very hard for somebody else to come in as a team member number five or six, look at someone like Mammoth behaving this way and say, no, I'm going to behave any different. So I think those are your first and foremost things. Try your level best to evaluate and then role model like crazy. And you'll still have an occasional person that doesn't fit. And then you'll have to either try your level best to coach them into this or be ready to say that that was not a good fit.

Justin:

Yeah. So I'm hearing two things we're screening for is that the ego. So we're looking for low ego. And then the second, and this is something that I always screen for, it doesn't matter what position I'm hiring for or looking at, is growth mindset. Yep. Because that's absolutely what differentiates those who are adaptable and can move with an organization. And then the other element, absolutely agree, is that that role modeling of making sure that you are showing the way of I will I will do all of these things that are someone might say, quote unquote, below my pay grade, right? I'm going to do all of it because we're building this business together. I love that. Along the role modeling thing, it's just making me think about another recent conversation I had about the role of values in an organization, because values, whether you put them on the wall or not, are either explicit or implicit based on our behavior. And so I'm curious what role that plays, kind of what values you've aligned to and what role that plays in how you hire and kind of grow the company.

Rajeev:

Yeah, I think that's a very good point. Look, we started with a few e-core values. Our number one was we like every startup should, but it's shocking how few actually pull it off, is we said we will be obsessed with our customer success. And we chose the word customer success very intentionally because the intent was it's not just enough for the customer to be satisfied with what you're doing. If you are not making the customer actually successful, then you haven't actually disrupted in a positive way. So that was our number one core value that we were constantly screening for, trying to role model every single day. The second thing that we said is we have this phrase internally saying, think big, act small. And it was an intentional pun on the fact that we did not want to constrain our ambitions. We were a young, small team taking on massive giants in this telecom sector and enterprise sector, where we said we are not going to accept that we cannot meet our customers' goals just because we are smaller. So we want our ambitions to be unconstrained. But the path to those big ambitions being fulfilled is to take it one step at a time. And so from an action perspective, when you start to think too big, then you can get paralyzed by the size of that vision. And so we always encourage internally each other to say, look, that's a big vision. Let's just figure out what our next step is. Let's just get that done. Let's celebrate the success of that small win. And we keep doing enough of those, we'll get there. And so I think those have been the two core values that we have tried from day one to embody. But then, you know, the other part of what you said is very true. Those were very stated. We've talked about them. We try to do this day to day. But there are other things that just creep into your organization and you will not even know it. There are parts of the founder's personality that creep in. There are parts of new team members, they bring in values. And, you know, as a founder, you just wake up one day and say, huh, I didn't realize. But that's kind of good or bad. That's kind of become a core value of this company. And when it's good, you really want to grow it. And when it's bad, you're like, okay, time to really nip this in the bud. So the implicit ones are the ones that I spend more time these days really intentionally thinking about and trying to say, okay, is this something that I want to encourage? Or is this something that I now need to really take effect on?

Justin:

It sounds like you have a really good grasp on the culture of the organization and are constantly working to make sure that it's going in the right direction. So that's incredible. And it also sounds like from the beginning, you kind of hired in a well-experienced senior team to kind of set the company up. And, you know, in my experience, watching watching companies grow, there's usually this point where where you get from you start at the founder or maybe a couple of other people, then you get to about 20 to 30 employees. And that's when you really have to think about that first leadership bench. Who's the team that's going to get me through? And it sounds like you had that, you hired that team from from the outside, but you've now gone past a hundred employees. And so I'm curious, there there has to be typically there has to be some sort of organic growth for your leaders to continue to scale the company. And so I'm curious, tell me a little bit about how you've gone about some of that organic growth of building leadership capability.

Rajeev:

So I think number one was when we first built the leadership team around the company that directly is working with me, I was very intentional about the fact that I wanted experience on my side. I'm a first-time CEO founder, and I wanted people who had been through the journey multiple times. So I could lean on their experience. So if you look at our entire team from our CFO to our SVP of sales to our head of engineering to our CTO, they have all done multiple successful companies. Many of them have had IPOs, multiple IPOs, multiple M ⁇ As, and so on. So having a team that has seen the journey is irreplaceable because it is not actually about the strategy or the actions that they are replicating. More than anything else, it's the emotional temperament that comes with that experience. No high is as high as you think it is, and no low is going to kill you as much as you are scared it will. So you need a team that's going to firstly know that without you having to remind them, and to an extent, sometimes remind you that you might be overreacting and you're okay, we will cover this. So that was step one. Having an extraordinarily seasoned, experienced leadership team around me really helped us grow. And that really has seen us through paths that have been up and down. To your second point, as we further grew, it is an interesting journey, and I'll tell you that it's not always been perfect. Is every one of those people that you first bring on, as you said in the first 20 to 30 people, and you're bringing on your first set of execs, you have to ask the question, is this person ready, like you said, to be hands-on, to be ready to get into the weeds and do the work themselves while being a strategic leader. And as you get to the next level, their teams grow, and they in turn now need to delegate. They need to get better at not just doing the things in the weeds and actually not papering over the cracks potentially that are showing in their organization. And that is the next level of scaling, where me as a leader and we each other are no longer just worrying about our own effectiveness, but starting to think about our teams and then teams teams under us. That is, I think, a very it's a challenging phase for a company because the very strengths that made a leader a great exec leader from 20 team members to 60 is now potentially going to come in their way. And they don't like hearing it, right? When you tell them, now you are really saying you're criticizing something for which the ill effects have not yet been seen. And that's really a hard one. Because rightfully they would say, hey, look at my last 18 months. I've done so well. My team's done so well. Why are you saying I'm doing anything wrong? But you can see that they are hitting the scaling challenge within their function, within their team, within the cross-functional collaboration. And I think that those are those have been challenging. And those have been challenging for personal leaf as a company. And we have learned, we have learned how do we navigate that through combination of uh honest, transparent conversations, one-on-ones. Uh more team level, we have had to go off and spend a few hours as a team together to say what is going on and where is this happening and how do we get there. And in some cases, just do transitions. Just recognize that there is a point where we have to change the leadership and we have to do a transition. And those are tough. Those are really tough. Because as I said, the hardest part of those transitions, unlike a big company, when you let a person go because they're not doing well. Here you usually let a person go because they're doing too good a job of what they have done. And it's coming in the way. And that's the most counterintuitive actions you take when you're scaling a company.

Justin:

Yeah, it's that that part of scaling is really challenging and getting being able to effectively delegate, knowing what to delegate down and how to grow that team. Can you give me an example of one of the most challenging times in kind of that that delegation dilemma and how you got through it?

Rajeev:

So we went through a phase. We had not yet found product market fit as a company. We were spread to thin trying to find what is the class of problems that the customers really want to use our technology for. And we were expending a lot of resources, both money, time, people, stress, and not finding it. And weirdly enough, at that point, we might have gone a little too far in the delegation. And so we as a leadership team had lost touch that, hey, while we were seeing customer wins and we were seeing revenue growth, it did not mean that we actually had a scalable go-to-market machine. And so we had to actually really look deep and say you might have to change this. And as I said earlier, those are the toughest conversations because the usual KPIs suggest everything is looking great. And so your next level of leaders and then the leaders under them can't internalize why we are even having these really tough, introspective conversations. And I think those were some challenging discussions we had internally. But you could see that you were there was trouble lurking around the corner. You had to kind of see it. And we actually had two versions of that. One is we kind of predicted that it would happen. And so we tried to do a round of those conversations and we got resistance and we couldn't go through. And then we had to miss a quarter pretty badly. And then we said, well, we kind of saw this coming. And now we have to take the action, which is more than just some conversations. And so that those were interesting discussions. And that to that actually phase of the company, we had some leaders transition out. We had some leaders really grow into their roles way fast what we had initially expect into them. And we instituted a whole new set of processes. We got a whole new set of cultural values built into the company at that time. And it was a really interesting time of the company, very stressful. But now when I look back at it three years later, it feels like one of those moments you recognize as a critical growing function for the company.

Justin:

Yeah, it sounds like it sounds like it was a very crisis point that leads to transformation and growth on the other side. Yeah, and it's I'm also I'm hearing elements of alignment in there and how challenging it is when you're scaling to also keep everyone aligned to the vision of the company and working together effectively.

Rajeev:

Yeah, and I think alignment is I've said this in a few forums. The final vision is somewhat easier to align on. What is a lot harder to align on is the next step. Because you could draw a map to say I need to go from San Francisco to LA. And there are three roads to go by. And when one of the jobs as a leadership team we are constantly doing is trying to figure out which is the best part, which is going to use the least resources, which is going to get us there the fastest. And if you've taken a road trip with a teenager, that's not always the easy thing. And there's a lot of similarity to having a company where there are a lot of smart people and everybody believes they know what's the fastest way to get there.

Justin:

Yeah. So, Rajiv, what's the future look like at Solano?

Rajeev:

I think we are at yet another point of that inflection of scaling. We've crossed that first inflection. We have had a couple of two or three great years. I think the thought that has been driving me and a lot of the leadership here is you know, how do you get the next level of scale? Because one of the things about venture-funded technology companies is we don't live in the world of linear scaling like most businesses do. Most businesses would be overjoyed with the kind of growth you organically get in companies like us. But we are built for non what I call unnatural scale functions. And so we are at that point where we are now once again saying you have a scaling function running. What are the two or three bets we make that can then tell us what does that look like? And that is interesting as an organization because you're going back to, in some parts of your company, behaving like a very young startup again. In the other parts, you need to behave much more maturely. And so now you're almost managing two cultures and then keeping them in balance. And so I think that is both culturally, tactically, programmatically, a very fun thing. And we just had a rather challenging couple of weeks where some of the customers who are on, I will call the mature curl, basically saying, no, no, no, hold on. You started behaving a little more chaotically again, and we have had these couple of support problems, and that's not what we expect with from you at this stage. And when we diagnosed it, we realized that it was because we were trying to go faster on some of the bets we are making, and that crept in here. So that's an interesting challenge now to say how do you maintain the entrepreneurial uh risk-taking ability now when you have a customer base and a market that actually wants stability. So balancing that to generate that next phase of unnatural growth is the next challenge.

Justin:

Yeah, well, that sounds like a fun challenge and and you know, definitely one that exists when you're trying to keep keep status quo with one part of the business and then you know go for something new and different in another part, and that could definitely be challenging. Or Rajiv, I've really enjoyed the conversation today. If folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do so?

Rajeev:

Email the old school way is still the best. It's rajeev at saluna.io. I tell everybody that I try my level best to have a 24-hour SLA on email. And so if you want to reach me, just drop me an email.

Justin:

Great. Well, thank you so much, Rajiv. Thank you, Justin.