Global IndianstoryRajeeb Dey: The British-Indian entrepreneur who became the WEF’s youngest Young Global Leader

Entrepreneurship

Rajeeb Dey: The British-Indian entrepreneur who became the WEF’s youngest Young Global Leader

Written by: Global Indian

(November 16, 2021) Landing a job or an internship where you aren’t just fetching coffee is no mean feat. Being able to find the right contacts, get your resume noticed, land an interview and eventually an internship or a job can be quite a long winded and complicated procedure. That’s where Rajeeb Dey, a British-Indian entrepreneur steps in. The founder of Enternships has been supporting entrepreneurs and fresh talent in the UK for more than a decade now.

Dey, who began his entrepreneurial journey as a student at age 17, has three successful ventures so far: Enternships, StartUp Britain, and Learnerbly. The entrepreneur has a tendency to help others through different platforms and associations and in recognition of his services, he was awarded an MBE at the age of 31; one of the youngest to receive the honour. Dey was also the winner of the O2 X Young Entrerpreneur of the Year Award and was named as the world’s youngest Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2012.

Delighted that ⁦@learnerbly⁩ has been chosen as one of 31 companies to join Upscale 7.0 by ⁦@TechNation⁩ alongside ⁦@perlegobooks⁩ ⁦@yotoplay⁩ ⁦@weareuncapped⁩ ⁦@gophr⁩ ⁦@VivacityLabs⁩ ⁦@ModernMilkman_⁩ ⁦ https://t.co/98iHNJ9tw8

— Rajeeb Dey MBE (@rajdey) October 12, 2021

Starting young

Born in December 1985, Dey graduated with first class honours from Jesus College, University of Oxford, where he studied Economics and Management. Incidentally, Dey launched his first venture Student Voice at age 17 as a first-year student at Oxford, for he felt that the voices of students between the ages of 11 and 19 weren’t heard. In his second year, he became the president of Oxford Entrepreneurs Society, a student society for entrepreneurs on campus. He went on to become its longest-serving president; it was around this time that he saw the opportunity for a new organisation that could bridge the gap between startups and interns. As president, Dey would receive a large number of requests from startups wanting to access his talent pool. That is when he came up with the idea of creating a simple listing page to match students and startups. This eventually grew to become Enternships, a thriving business in the UK today.

Talking to Hot Topics about his entrepreneurial journey, this Global Indian said, “My entrepreneurial journey started at the age of 17. At the time, I didn’t even know what the term entrepreneur was, I just felt that I wanted to do something to give school students a voice. I got a grant of £5,000 from a fund for social enterprises called UnLtd and that really kick started my entrepreneurial journey. I realised I liked coming up with an idea, setting something up and seeing it become a reality. That led me to join the Oxford Entreprenuers Society whilst at University, which I became President of in my 2nd year. That was a great experience and also gave me the inspiration for Enternships.”

Global Indian Rajeeb Dey

Having started as a job listing site, it soon became a go-to platform for graduates to find jobs in startups and the venture generated a lot of buzz. The portal has so far connected several students and graduates to roles in over 7,000 fast-growing businesses such as startups, SMEs and intrapreneurial firms across the globe. It was in recognition of his work through Enternships that Dey received the O2 X Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2009. Enternships.com was also one of the top 3 finalists in the Esquire Magazine New Business Challenge and the finalist in the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Life Academy Awards.

The need to upskill

According to Dey, one of the main benefits of working with a startup is the freedom one gets. “In a start up the role is often not so clearly defined, so it’s up to you to define what you are doing and to get stuck into all aspects of the business. You are not necessarily going to get pigeon-holed into doing one particular thing, your role probably pertains to the working of the business, so you have the opportunity to really learn from alongside the founder, or the CEO to find out how business really works, and in many cases you can create your own job,” he told Palatinate in an interview.

Dey spent three years looking at the learning and upskilling industry as well as the recruitment industry to see how he could positively impact candidates’ experiences. The entrepreneur, in fact, has had a large impact on the British startup ecosystem. He co-founded StartUp Britain, a national campaign founded with seven other entrepreneurs to encourage enterprise in the UK. The campaign was launched in 2011 under the David Cameron government.

Global Indian Rajeeb Dey

On an entrepreneurial roll

He then went on to set up his next venture Learnerbly to help companies nurture and develop talent through the program. In an interview with Forbes, he said, “At Learnerbly, we curate the best learning experiences, whether it be courses, coaching, conferences, podcasts, books, articles — the full breadth of professional development, recognising that people learn in many different ways. We want to connect you to the best learning that’s right for you in the way you like to learn.”

This he says is to help encourage holistic development of employees and steer them in the direction of possible new roles and career choices within the organisations they work at. Employees are matched to learning opportunities that are curated via peer-to-peer recommendations and insights from industry experts from companies like Google, Airbnb, and Unruly. With the market for professional learning being fragmented, Learnerbly makes it easier for companies to target staff development.

Dey, who calls himself the accidental entrepreneur, has certainly come a long way since his Student Voices days, as he sets about changing the way the UK startup eco-system, hires, retains, and develops talent.

Follow Rajeeb Dey on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Published on 16, Nov 2021

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Neeraj Kakkar: The man who’s keeping traditions and memories alive, one drink at a time

(July 28, 2021; 6.15 pm) What are some of your earliest memories? We bet it involves happy times spent with your family and friends over some cherished food or beverage. For instance, it could be chugging a chilled glass of buttermilk after a summer afternoon spent playing in the sun with cousins. Or it could be haggling with the neighborhood chaat wala for an extra cup of spicy golgappe ka paani. Or sneaking into the kitchen to take a swig from that jug of sherbet your mother had prepared especially for the guests due to arrive at any moment. Somehow, memories and food go hand in hand. For Neeraj Kakkar, co-founder of Hector Beverages, it was this need to keep alive traditional recipes and innocent memories that drove him to launch the Paper Boat range of juices. Made with all natural ingredients just the way our mothers and grandmothers did all those years back, the Paper Boat range offers 13 varieties of traditional Indian drinks. These range from the much-oved aamras, aam panna, neer mor, panakkam, chilli guava, thandai, sherbet-e-khaas, rose tamarind, and kokum. [embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clTxVEqpGtE[/embed] How it all began As a young boy growing up in Haryana, Kakkar was especially fond

aam panna, neer mor, panakkam, chilli guava, thandai, sherbet-e-khaas, rose tamarind, and kokum.

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clTxVEqpGtE[/embed]

How it all began

As a young boy growing up in Haryana, Kakkar was especially fond of Kaanji, a drink made of fermented purple carrots and mustard. His family lived in a large house that also accommodated several other families; their landlady Maati would painstakingly make a large pot of kaanji and place it in the patio. Each child was given a glass... one glass strictly. The drink was delicious and Kakkar always wanted more. He resorted to swiping an extra glass for himself when nobody was watching. When he was caught, of course, he got into trouble, he said during a TED talk.

Several years later, as a young man, Kakkar wanted to drink kaanji again; the flavors still fresh in his mind. He also wanted to introduce it in his line of products at Paper Boat, the company he had launched in August 2013 along with Neeraj Biyani, James Nutall, and Suhas Misra under the parent company Hector Beverages. The idea for Paper Boat came up during an office lunch between the co-founders as they mulled over potential business ideas. Commercial production of traditional Indian drinks was hitherto unheard of in a market that was largely dominated by carbonated beverages.

Paper Boat launched with two products: Aam Ras and Jaljeera; both well-known and well-loved across India. The idea took off and today the company offers several more varieties, some of them seasonal. The name Paper Boat too was specifically chosen to invoke a feeling of nostalgia. In 2016, Kakkar had famously said that every product launched by his company would have a tinge of Indianness; and the company has so far stayed true to his word.

[embed]http://twitter.com/paperboatdrinks/status/1405453555801083907?s=20[/embed]

From Haryana to the US and back

Interestingly, Kakkar had worked for nearly seven years with Coca Cola in India, before he did his MBA from The Wharton School in Philadelphia where he was a Palmer Scholar, one of the highest academic honors. He co-founded Hector Beverages with Biyani, Misra and Nutall in 2009 and they began manufacturing Tzinga, an energy drink. The company was backed by Narayan Murthy’s VC firm Catamaran and Bangalore-based Footprint Ventures had also invested ₹6 crore. By 2013, the company had raised a second round of funding of $8 million from Sequoia Capital and Paper Boat was launched later that year.

The team was bent on preserving traditional recipes and spent quite a few months on R&D. As they expanded their product portfolio, Kakkar still wanted to introduce his beloved Kaanji into the market. However, to his surprise the market was overtaken by the common orange and red varieties of carrots and farmers had all but stopped growing purple carrots. The teams research led them to find that purple carrots were being grown in Turkey. So Kakkar flew to Turkey, filled up a suitcase with 20 kgs of purple carrots and flew back to Delhi... only to have his entire stock confiscated. Crushed, Kakkar did the next best thing. He began importing purple carrot seeds from Turkey and had them planted in three cities: Palampur, Ujjain and Ooty. After 13 continuous trials they finally got a crop in Ooty and the company set about producing Kaanji. It's a different story that the drink didn’t pass the quality test and had to be temporarily shelved.

[caption id="attachment_6215" align="aligncenter" width="499"] For Neeraj Kakkar it was this need to keep alive traditional recipes and memories that drove him to launch the Paper Boat range of juices. Neeraj Kakkar[/caption]

Mentors who shaped him

While initially retailers were sceptical to stock the Paper Boat line, the drink eventually grew in popularity and is now available through various channels. But for Kakkar, who has been reinventing the whole ethnic beverage industry, there are key lessons he’s learnt from three mentors who shaped his perception of entrepreneurship. “First, Kanwaljit Singh, co-founder at Helion ventures, exposed me to the world of entrepreneurship during my internship period there. Kanwal encouraged me to work with a few startups in Bangalore who were doing interesting jobs. He also recommended food to be the best sector to start; when Hector Beverages was launched, he became our angel investor,” said Kakkar in an interview in Medium.

The second was Shripad Nadkarni, head of marketing at Coca Cola, and Kakkar’s former colleague, who helped them with the marketing and branding of the company. And the third was Narayana Murthy. “I would say the value system of our organization in some ways is a reflection of his personality. He has also been with us from day zero. He doesn’t interfere with our day-to-day work — he doesn’t tell us about what to do with our strategy, however on the value system, he has always had strong viewpoints and he kind of makes sure that we do not deviate from the right path,” he says.

Challenges to overcome

While the company saw an uptake in sales in FY2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected Paper Boat sales in a large way, given the lockdowns and travel restrictions. Airports and Railway stations were important touch points for the brand. While production was completely halted for a brief period in 2020, it gradually resumed as the lockdowns eased. Now, the company is looking to expand its online-only range of products in a bid to thwart the effects of the pandemic and its resultant losses.

Reading Time: 10 mins

Vandana Luthra the businesswoman who brought the winds of change to the Indian wellness industry

(October 16, 2021) In the late 1980s, when Vandana Luthra came up with the idea of a transformation center – offering beauty services, wellness and weight management programs for men and women all under one roof – many, including her financiers, were apprehensive. Some even dismissed her idea as too futuristic. Back then, the health and wellness industry were doing well abroad but were still unheard of on Indian shores. After all, it was an era when most women would head to their friendly neighborhood parlor, one would that often be tucked into the owner’s home, for their beauty needs. She painstakingly convinced people that her venture as a business model was both scalable and sustainable. Despite the naysayers, Vandana stayed persistent. The convincing took a while, but she secured a bank loan and the first VLCC transformation center opened up in Safdarjung development area in New Delhi in 1989. [embed]https://twitter.com/Vandanaluthra/status/1440666809519067155?s=20[/embed] Woman with a vision Fast forward to 2021 and the numbers speak for themselves. The VLCC health care operates in 326 locations in 153 cities and 13 countries in South Asia, South East Asia, the GCC region and east Africa; the company manufactures and markets 170 hair care, skin care and body care products along with functional and fortified foods, which are sold through one lakh outlets in India and over 10,000 outlets across various countries and e-commerce channels.

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Fast forward to 2021 and the numbers speak for themselves. The VLCC health care operates in 326 locations in 153 cities and 13 countries in South Asia, South East Asia, the GCC region and east Africa; the company manufactures and markets 170 hair care, skin care and body care products along with functional and fortified foods, which are sold through one lakh outlets in India and over 10,000 outlets across various countries and e-commerce channels.

Today, her chain of transformation centers VLCC is a brand to reckon with. Vandana’s work also earned her the Padma Shri in 2013, the Enterprise Asia Women Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2010, and the Asian Business Leaders Forum Trailblazer Award in 2012. She was also ranked 26th in the Forbes Asia list of 50 Power Businesswomen in the APAC Region and was featured in Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business in India list for five straight years.

Indian businesswoman Vandana Luthra

Long road ahead

But she is not done yet. "By nature, I am a restless person. Though I certainly take great pride in what the VLCC family has achieved, we have much more to accomplish," says Vandana during an exclusive chat with Global Indian. She says that the incidence of obesity continues to rise alarmingly and its related issues are a huge public health challenge. "The COVID-19 crisis has heightened awareness about proactive and preventive healthcare across age groups and that has made a leading Wellness & Beauty services and products player like VLCC even more relevant today. We have a significant role to play in this area," she says.

Vandana says she realized quite early in her entrepreneurial career that there were certain stereotypes that needed to be challenged. "Nutrition is the key aspect of providing wellness, weight management, skin and hair treatments for a 360-degree transformation. Though there were women out there who had very impressive qualifications in dietetics, very few had taken up that academic qualification to make a career in the nutrition domain," she says. Most women would only opt for these courses to attract good matrimonial prospects.

[caption id="attachment_13281" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Indian businesswoman Vandana Luthra Vandana with her husband Mukesh[/caption]

The Delhi girl with a mission

Born in New Delhi in July 1959, Vandana’s father Ram Arora was a mechanical engineer, while her mother Kamini an Ayurvedic doctor. Vandana did her schooling from Mater Dei School before graduating from Lady Shriram College in 1979. She then chose to move to Karlsruhe in Germany for her higher studies in cosmetology and nutrition.

Ask her what she makes of her journey when she looks back, and she says, "Over the years, I have become far more aware about issues than I otherwise would have had I been focusing only on the transactional aspects of creating and nurturing successful businesses," says the 61-year-old.

Recalling her own experiences, the entrepreneur says that one of the first issues that a woman grapples with when embarking on a professional journey is self-doubt with respect to work-life balance. "This issue may be less acute today when compared to two-three decades ago but women continue to struggle with it. If one takes a look at the traditional, stereotypical role of women as homemakers, they will realize that women are inherently good managers, balancing work and home. So, one need not obsess too much about balancing different priorities, it comes naturally to women," says Vandana, herself a mother of two.

"Our 3,000-odd colleagues across 12 countries are the torchbearers of VLCC's success," smiles Vandana. She credits her husband Mukesh and their two daughters who helped her ride the tide throughout her entrepreneurial journey. "Then came along my VLCC family which has grown over the years and has always been my strength," smiles Vandana, who was appointed the first chairperson of the Beauty and Wellness sector skill council, an initiative that provides training under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana scheme, in 2014.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4WHiAs2WAM[/embed]

Giving Back

While her work keeps Vandana busy, it is the Amar Jyoti Charitable Trust, of which she is the patron, that is close to her heart. Founded by her mother, the trust pioneered the concept of educating children with and without disability in equal numbers from nursery to class eight; it has over 800 children in its two schools. Vandana is also the vice chairperson of the NGO Khushii which has projects like telemedicine centers and a remedial school catering to 3,000 children.

On Brand India, Vandana explains how it has evolved over the years to become a multi-faceted icon. "Today, brand India stands tall among the community of nations for its reputation as a unique tourist destination, splendid in its diversity, for its status as a growing economic powerhouse, for its attractiveness as a large and lucrative market of over 1.3 billion consumers, for the respect it commands as a talent nurturing pool for outstanding leaders in the global corporate world. The list is long," says Vandana, who has authored two books on wellness and fitness.

Follow Vandana on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Reading Time: 8 mins

Meet Leena Pishe Thomas, the UN-invited speaker who works at mitigating climate change

(December 3, 2021) Sustainability campaigner Leena Pishe Thomas was the star speaker at the recently concluded World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) event at Geneva. As founder, Global Business Inroads, Leena was invited to speak about the role of IP in sustainable development and taking green innovation to international markets. Quite the expert on leveraging technology to provide sustainable solutions to mitigate climate change, adopt renewable energy sources, and life sciences, this wasn’t the first time Leena spoke at a UN event. Her first was at the Global Solutions Summit in 2018 in New York. [embed]https://twitter.com/leenapishe/status/1463002058370564102?s=20[/embed] What got Leena interested in this field? “Back in1990-2000, there were some truly innovative energy efficient solutions available – but not in India. That got me thinking - I was intrigued why there was no knowledge or action, considering for centuries, we had been following sustainable living practices. Why weren’t we developing sustainable technology?” she questioned. That led her towards sustainable solutions. Today, she is an expert working with governments and private entities the world over — the European Commission, US government, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka, apart from with some UN agencies. Her work includes cross border innovation collaboration between startups in Europe and India; facilitating collaboration for digital transformation, lead

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Today, she is an expert working with governments and private entities the world over — the European Commission, US government, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka, apart from with some UN agencies. Her work includes cross border innovation collaboration between startups in Europe and India; facilitating collaboration for digital transformation, lead green change and biodiversity projects. “Some of our biggest achievements have been in the spheres of biodiversity and landscape restoration projects in India as well as working with communities here to help digital access to set up sustainable processes for agro forestry product processing,” explains the girl, who was born into a family of entrepreneurs.

Starting in an industry at a time when sustainable business was almost unheard of in India, today, she is a regular face at UN events, introducing various stakeholders to the need to scale technology to mitigate climate change and achieve sustainability goals. Incidentally, she had appeared on BBC on these topics as well.

From Bengaluru to the world

The quintessential Bengaluru girl, chose to study science till high school before switching to a degree in history and economics at Lady Shriram College, Delhi. Determined, she even considered IAS. However, after graduation, she married her then boyfriend, Shibu Thomas. “I gave up an admission for post-graduation in the US, chose marriage,” she tells Global Indian.

Leena was 23 then, and she continued to study and work. International business fascinated her as did environment goals. She landed her first job with the Indo French Chamber of Commerce and Industry and also got her MBA from ICFAI, Hyderabad through distance education. Within a few months of marriage, Leena started up with SNL (1999) which focused on international business and environment technology at age 24. Shibu, then a restaurateur, became her angel investor.

[caption id="attachment_17130" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Global Indian Leena Pishe Thomas Leena at the WIPO event in Geneva[/caption]

Around this time, Leena also began consulting with the Alliance to Save Energy for United States Agency for International Development (USAID), working with state governments in India to transition to energy efficient solutions to cut costs. “We helped local municipalities work towards energy efficiency for municipal water utilities and streetlights,” she says, adding, “This was probably one of the most impactful projects we worked on as until then local governments didn’t have measures to ensure energy efficiency.”

She could have it all

In 2005, when Leena had her second daughter, she shut SNL and took a 1.5 year sabbatical. Her next role was with the Clinton Foundation, and it turned her perspective towards using technology for climate change mitigation. She was instrumental in starting and establishing Clinton Climate Initiative programmes in India. “I worked with the Foundation from 2007 to 2009 and it was everything I believed in. Motherhood also changed me in a big way. My ideas became clearer, and I became confident. It’s what gave me the push to launch GBI in 2009,” says Leena.

Incidentally, there was a time after her wedding when she had contemplated giving up her career altogether. “I’ve always been very family-oriented and didn’t mind putting my career on the back burner. It wasn’t easy juggling the kids, a home and a career,” she smiles, adding, “That’s when Shibu stepped in and convinced me to continue working. He showed me that I could have it all.”

Global Indian Leena Pishe Thomas

Winds of change

Setting up GBI with her own income, she turned the spotlight on her expertise. “The company has been focusing on discover (discover technology to showcase methods to the community), develop (develop new green tech), develop and then deploy this technology into the market,” explains Leena, adding, “I began GBI as a private sector company to make it a way of life, not just something that governments have to implement.”

She feels that sustainable living is two pronged: environmentally-friendly and lasting, and that electric vehicles are going to define the next decade for the world and India. “The focus is going to be on green mobility in the years to come. India is coming up with a lot of homegrown innovation in the EV sector. When GBI detected this trend five years ago, we began to support innovators working in the space.” GBI has now developed and launched an online portal for technology collaboration – www.globaltechinterface.com too.

On the path to success

Today, 12 years since its inception, GBI is a company that is scaled for growth. Two years ago, in 2019, they began going international, setting up offices in Europe, US and UK and project teams in Malaysia and Sri Lanka. Shibu, her husband, who co-founded GBI, is actively involved in managing the business aspect of GBI and focuses on the company’s international expansion.

[caption id="attachment_17131" align="aligncenter" width="606"] Global Indian Leena Pishe Thomas Leena and Shibu at GBI's Europe office in Bulgaria[/caption]

For Leena, her entrepreneurial instinct stems from her upbringing. Her grandfather Pishe Narayan Rao, who was orphaned early in life, would sell safety pins on the footpath in Bengaluru’s MG Road to survive. “He worked his way up, and soon set up his first store at that same spot. Today, PN Rao Suits is well-known across the country, and has branches in several cities,” she adds. Her father and mother too led by example. “My mother opened several doors for me, and encouraged me to try so many things. It helped me build the resilience to do a lot in a day and make it count,” says Leena, who loves to unwind after a long day by cooking and watching global cinema on OTT platforms.

Follow Leena Pishe Thomas on LinkedIn and Twitter

Reading Time: 10 mins

Mohit Aron: The Indian-origin techie who went from building Google File Systems to be known as ‘father of hyperconvergence’

(October 27, 2021) Back in the day, when someone wanted to launch or run an IT firm, they had a number of things to check off their lists: buy computer servers from one vendor, storage from another, and then connect the two with expensive networking before running applications. Needless to say, the process was cumbersome, expensive and hard to manage. That is, until, in stepped Mohit Aron, an enterprising Indian entrepreneur, with a solution that changed the way the IT industry functions. He built an IT framework that combines storage, computing, and networking into a single system to reduce complexity and increase scalability. Today, Aron is known as the Father of Hyperconvergence, the main technology at his first startup Nutanix, now a public company valued at over $5 billion. He then went on to set up Cohesity, which develops software that allows IT professionals to backup, manage, and gain insights from their data, across multiple systems or cloud providers. His ingenuity earned him the CRN Top 25 Innovators of 2012 title; in 2016, Cohesity was on the list of 10 Storage Emerging Vendors You Need To Know, and was also listed as one of the Top 25 Disruptors of 2016. From Chandigarh to the world Born and brought up in Chandigarh, Aron grew up with parents who encouraged him

25 Innovators of 2012 title; in 2016, Cohesity was on the list of 10 Storage Emerging Vendors You Need To Know, and was also listed as one of the Top 25 Disruptors of 2016.

Global Indian entrepreneur Mohit Aron

From Chandigarh to the world

Born and brought up in Chandigarh, Aron grew up with parents who encouraged him to expand his horizons. His father worked with the Indian Forest Services, while his mother was a homemaker. In the India of the late 1980s computers were still relatively low on the popularity charts and therefore not everyone’s first career choice. However, Aron had heard people say that computers were the future; it piqued his curiosity. With a high JEE rank, the Chandigarh lad found himself a spot in the prestigious IIT-Delhi's Computer Science stream in 1991. The institute had just received a donation of mainframe computers from a British company and the blinking lights and futuristic sounds at IIT-Delhi's computer center had Aron hooked. It was a whole new world.

This curiosity and interest soon developed into a passion and he would spend hours programming: Unix, C and C++ became his best friends. According to an interview in YourStory, Aron said that he soon came to be regarded as one of the best programmers in his batch. “I would get lost in the world of coding. It was a world of its own and nothing else mattered while I was at it. It was all science with no room for ambiguity, only logic,” he said.

[embed]https://twitter.com/ramgopal_rao/status/1450118749491646465?s=20[/embed]

Soon after he graduated from IIT in 1995, he moved to the US for his Masters and then PhD in Computer Science from Rice University in Houston. It was here that his passion for the subject grew; he specialised in distributed operating systems. During his PhD, he built the first scalable web server, the concepts of his research were used by IBM in running the web server for the Olympics in the 90s.

The beginning of a fruitful journey

Aron began his professional journey with Zambeel, a California-based data startup, as a principal software engineer before joining Google as a staff engineer. Here, he was an integral part of the team that built the Google File Systems, that are still used by the tech giant to store and manage data.

Incidentally, Aron was offered a job by a Google engineer soon after his PhD, but he chose to forego it to join Zambeel, which was building distributed storage technology, an area that fascinated him. As luck would have it, the dotcom bust put a spanner in the works for the startup and Aron was once again approached by the Google engineer. This time, he decided to take up the job as it was clear to him that the company was going to be a game changer. That Google engineer is Jeff Dean, the brain behind the company’s tech projects and the current lead of its AI division.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXOp_e9Xzb4[/embed]

His time at Google taught Aron how to build big systems that could be scaled. By 2007, he was ready to branch out on his own and bring his learnings to the real world; but he didn’t know the first thing about building a company. So, he joined data warehousing startup Aster Data Systems where he learnt what to do and not to do when building a startup. A couple of years later, he was confident enough to build his own company and he founded Nutanix in 2009 along with three others from Aster. It was here that he pioneered the concept called hyperconvergence (hence, the moniker). The idea caught on and today Nutanix is a public company worth over $5 billion.

In 2013, Aron launched Cohesity, a company with an estimated $300 million in revenue and growing at 70% annually. Cohesity is backed by Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, and Wing Ventures. According to Aron, data growth is exploding while also becoming increasingly fragmented, which makes Cohesity the perfect fit in today’s world. The Global Indian entrepreneur is working towards making the company a single platform to manage all forms of data in an easy manner. Some of Cohesity’s clients include the Hyatt chain of hotels, Novartis, and a smartphone major. It also recently partnered with Amazon Web Services to manage cloud data as a service.

Global Indian entrepreneur Mohit Aron

Giving Back

For an Indian who’d landed in the America of the 90s with less than a thousand dollars, Aron has come a long way. And he isn’t one to forget where it all started for him. With this in mind, he makes it a point to give back in whatever way he can. Be it through technical and entrepreneurial sessions, mentoring young entrepreneurs or donating to charitable organisations. Aron, who is on the engineering advisory board for Rice University, is also involved in encouraging Work2Future, a San Jose-based foundation that helps people find employment and provides career guidance to those who need it.

He recently donated $1 million to his alma mater IIT-Delhi to help fund the institute’s computer science and engineering department. The fund will be used to support the faculty’s research activities and ensure that students can attend conferences, workshops, and competitive events in India and abroad.

Follow Mohit Aron on Twitter and LinkedIn

Reading Time: 10 mins

Shivani Siroya: Indian American entrepreneur in Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list is changing lives one microloan at a time

(August 25, 2021) Did you know that only 31% of the world’s adult population is covered by a credit bureau and around 3 billion adults are considered financially underserved? Take a look at any of the thousands of small business owners in developing nations and you will realize that most of them lack financial options to improve livelihoods. It is statistics like these that drove Santa Monica-based Shivani Siroya to launch Tala, a fintech company back in 2011 as a way to bridge the financial gap in emerging markets. Today, Tala has raised over $200 million in venture funding from investors like Female Founders Fund, PayPal Ventures and Revolution Growth and has disbursed more than $1 billion in microloans across countries like India, Kenya, Tanzania, and the Philippines. [embed]https://twitter.com/shivsiroya/status/1146563257123004416?s=20[/embed] Tala’s customers typically have no formal credit history, a major deterrent for the financially underserved when it comes to applying for and obtaining loans. What the enterprise does instead is, rely on its own data science to assess risk when approving loans. The company’s mobile platform provides loans for as less as $10 to $500 (some times up to $1000 too) and by using technology to provide opportunities to those underserved by the financial system. The mobile lending app featured twice on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 company list and 38-year-old Siroya was also featured in Fortune’s 40 Under 40

approving loans. The company’s mobile platform provides loans for as less as $10 to $500 (some times up to $1000 too) and by using technology to provide opportunities to those underserved by the financial system. The mobile lending app featured twice on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 company list and 38-year-old Siroya was also featured in Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list in 2020.

From investment banking to entrepreneurship

[caption id="attachment_8168" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Listed in Fortune's 40 Under 40 List, Tala's founder Shivani Siroya is changing lives one microloan at a time. Shivani Siroya, founder Tala[/caption]

Born into a Rajasthani family, Siroya grew up in New York where her mother, a doctor, moved in her 30s to provide her family with better prospects. Siroya went on to do her BA in Government and International Relations from Wesleyan University, Connecticut. Following this she did her MPH in Quantitative and Health Economics from Columbia University before taking up her first job as an equity research analyst with UBS Financial Services. She also worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers as an associate but found these jobs disillusioning according to an article on Medium.

This was when she took her first step toward solving a problem: she quit her investment banking job and joined the United Nations Population Fund where she studied the benefits of microcredit programs. For the next 2.5 years Siroya worked on recording the habits of 3,500 people across Africa and India. She would follow her subjects to work, the market, and home to tally how much they spent on food, education and bills. This firmed up the belief she’d held since childhood – most people could be trusted to make smart financial decisions. However, what troubled her was the fact that her subjects couldn’t get credit to grow their businesses since banks viewed them as high risk. Siroya began loaning some of them her own money and based their credit worthiness on the information she had documented.

Her desire to do something beyond the regular 9-to-5 stemmed from the fact that in her family work was always synonymous with doing something bigger than oneself. In an interview with Career Contessa, this Global Indian said,

“Work has always been about finding something that you truly love and can pour yourself into. Growing up, I loved comics and wanted to be a superhero that could change the world. I saw this in my mother, a doctor, who allowed her patients come to see her on credit because she knew and trusted them—I learned early what credit and trust could mean for a person’s life.”

Siroya who grew up in New York but spent a lot of her childhood in Rajasthan, says that this gave her a global perspective. Her parents taught her to understand how differing access to resources and opportunities can impact one’s ability to be successful and affect the choice and control one has over their destinies.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSR8G8mfp84[/embed]

The genesis of Tala

By 2011, Siroya launched Tala and developed an Android app that gives instant credit scores to people in emerging markets. The credit score is based on daily-life data from their smartphones and the company also acts as a lender granting microloans to a mobile wallet. Over the years, the company has garnered over 4 million customers and has disbursed loans upwards of $1 billion through its platform.

Tala’s model is built around what Siroya calls “radical trust”. Customers share their cellphone data with Tala and in return the company gives them an unsecured, short-term loan. The loans must be repaid in 21 to 30 days and Tala’s repayment rate is above 90%.

On the global stage

Her work has earned her global recognition: Siroya has been an Ashoka Fellow since 2013 and in 2018 was nominated by Melinda Gates as a Wired Icon. Tala itself has featured twice on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list and Siroya was named in Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list last year.

Talking about women entrepreneurs, Siroya told Career Contessa, that she needs to trust herself.

“In the journey from idea to the company, I’ve learned the importance of developing expertise and listening for insights.”

She recommends entrepreneurs do their homework, identify their hypothesis and test it and listen to their customers. "Don’t come into the conversation assuming you already have the answers. If what they’re saying about your product or service is something you don’t want to hear, or hard to respond to, it’s in your best interest to listen. Your success depends on it,” she says.

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