Throughout South Asia, everyone from small children to big-shot businesspeople look forward all year to Diwali, a holiday that lasts for five days of fireworks, lanterns and celebrations with family and friends. Diwali is also important to the business community, since it marks the beginning of India’s fiscal year. Like the winter holiday season in the West, Diwali is a time when people reconnect with their loved ones, share special meals, and exchange gifts and sweets.
In the early days of OpenGambit, when our only office was in India, we wanted to acknowledge the Diwali season by honoring our employees. After all, a company doesn’t succeed or fail because of one person — every member of our team is an expert with their own unique technology background, and their innovative problem-solving skills are vital to every project we take on. So we started a new Diwali tradition of giving each employee a gold coin.
Gold is symbolically linked to Diwali, since part of the reason for the holiday is a celebration of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. But the coins also represented the promise of our growing business. A gold coin on its own is a valuable thing, but like any valuable gift, it also presents a choice: you can sell it and spend the money right away, invest its value to see how the future treats it, or keep the coin, store it away somewhere safe, and know that no matter what happens next, you’ll have something to rely on.
Back in those days, we didn’t know where the company was headed. We couldn’t foresee that we’d eventually move our headquarters to Durham, North Carolina, a land of barbecue and basketball games, where plenty of people have never even heard of Diwali. But we knew that each of our employees was an asset like a gold coin in our pocket — because the ability to innovate, to create new solutions as fast as the technology can create new problems, isn’t something that can be devalued over time like the knowledge of a particular programming language or operating system. Like gold, those skills will always be prized, no matter how the landscape changes around us.