Navigating Career Paths: Insights from An IIT-IIM Graduate and Entrepreneur

companies tailor their uh roles that they offer to the way the campus is right if your campus

average work experience is two years they will typically bring roles which are

you know with two years of experience so getting the right role in uh post uh mba it is a little bit of a challenge

for people with higher work experience i've got my career set out

boss i'm a very confused guy right i postponed my decision on what to do as far away away as possible and

consulting helped me do that as well right to have a business card which has a name of a multi-billion dollar company

on it right suddenly you step out and your business card says nothing it just has your name

and nobody recognizes you anymore [Music] [Music]

[Music] so guys our next guest is

also a founder [Music]

has also started a company sold a company has gone to

iit iim then went to bain to do consulting ganesh can we have you on stage please

[Applause] so ganesh is the founder of flatheads uh he has flat head t-shirt flat head shoes

uh and we'll obviously talk a lot more about that if i look at like you know ganesh balakrishnan iit bombay

i am bangalore that sounds like a clone of a lot of people uh you know with similar sounding names who went to

iit went to iim etc but i am sure there is a story because everybody has a story so so how

did you how did you make your career choices early on and why did you enter

engineering tell us about your early years classic middle class family dad was from hl

hindustan and that engineer so engineer banana

my grandfather was ias incidentally so my grandmom wanted to make me an ias officer but that didn't happen so they

wanted to make you things you didn't have any aspiration

and we were in a small township right where were you so i grew up in nasik

until my 10th in in a township which is the hl township which is about 40 kilometers away from

the city um and then last two years 11th and 12th i was in orissa we moved after 10th right so

all my friends uh in 11th and 12th were uh basically oreos uh speakers right and i knew i

didn't know the language so that's how the story happened um and it's a very small town koraput is a very

small uh district in orissa and we are way out the nearest city vishakapatnam is about six hours away right so

engineering that was the story of you know like how how easy hard was it

for you to crack the je and were you sure kenny iit jhanai or you would have been happy with any engineering college

oh i wrote all the entrance examinations that were out there or iit milia

but and incidentally while prepping i had chickenpox as well so it was a very

eventful uh his time of all the examinations where i was writing couple of examinations actually in quarantine

as well but uh yeah eventually got into iit bahabi uh you

know in the counseling session i pretty much filled everything that was possible starting from you know computer science

uh in in iit delhi or iit madras to start with and then eventually you know got got into mechanical engineering in

iit bombay um that's where i was one good thing was i had actually my father told me

i purposefully put kharagpur at probably one of the most bottom-most parts of the

list secretly i just wanted to get away from that place but yeah eventually bombay happened but when you're entering

iit uh did you know that it was a big deal

or for you it was yeah it's it's good it has happened but like no big deal because some people

feel uh they're upset okay like i've just

entered iit so i'm now good for life what was your mindset at that time when you're in school it's a very small

group of people that you interact with right and then suddenly you walk into university and they're

like so in in in itb we had like grades of people right there were

fighters you fight martha then there were studs who fight martha they liken then there were

gods right when you see those gods it's a very

different you feeling like what happened

why am i here and why do you even deserve to be here right so that that kind of but did you end up becoming the

god or where were you oh no no no i was a fighter always [Laughter]

fight man and there were a couple of gods in the wing who used to help out so examples

again introverted small town kids suddenly coming to bombay number one and then iit bombay were the bunch of you

know intelligent uh uh super natural guys out there

if you're from a metro and you go into an iit your resume is so accomplished extracurricular

sports may represent your spit state level when you're from a small town you have

no idea what all this is right you walk in there and it's like boss right so uh it yeah it was an impostor

syndrome to begin with but then everybody finds their place over the time in in college right when you were

at iit the goal was to get a job no um we were so 95 is when i was in 95 to 99

i'm from the previous millennium uh that was the y2k boom right so a lot of people wanted to get jobs um

me i i wanted to be a core engineer right i wanted to be a mechanical engineer

because that that was the field that i had chosen or whatever it was given to me

but i thought i had chosen it eventually uh so there are two or three parts right plans for me but at that time i did not

want to do coding at all i was i was the one guy who said miracle i don't want to get into computer science at all i'm

going to get out of it and i actually applied i took my gre and then i applied an event to the us to do

my master's so i'm a masters from penn state in refrigeration as well what happened after that why did you come

back where did you work and then how did im happen so late relatively yeah um so interesting 99 i

graduated uh peak of the y2k boom went abroad did my masters 2000 uh is when we were sitting for placements right in the

so there was a fall placement session and a spring placement session during the fall

placement session i decided that i will just go and try out whatever job is available uh there was a company called

ingersoll rand which was hiring so i went and gave the uh interview and got through their

so-called leadership program which basically puts you in different business units every year for for a period of

three years after which you can decide uh what you want to do recipe confused and then we'll figure out what to do end

of the fall 2000 placements the market crashed after that whoever had postponed their

decision to spring of 2001 placements ended up doing their phd and their postdoc and then you know getting

getting into the college line of teaching and stuff like that but uh yeah i just escaped the the uh bust uh by

getting a job so you didn't lose your job in the bust no no it was a core industry right yeah i know but i i mean

my conviction of not doing coding was actually proved out and i was very happy that i got into insole rand at that time

yeah so so do you did you do the entire three years there and did you go through across all the strains so um i worked

there for three years uh and then at the end of the three years when i had to decide what to do um ingersollin was

just starting up their engineering center in bangalore specifically for the refrigeration and thermodynamics unit uh

they had a refrigeration unit which makes bus air conditioning and refrigerated trucks and stuff like that

so we would so my boss who became my boss later here was just setting that up uh so had a quick uh

discussion with him sounded very exciting right buddy company under the company

so we said cello let us try this out and i wanted to move back to india anyway uh i had spent four years

there had fun but uh it just felt uh the job there felt a lot more um

monotonous you could see what is going to happen you know 15 years down the line where are you going to be because

it was a massive organization right uh 30 billion dollars in revenue um and you know every role was defined for

the next 15 years of your life let's try this out and let's see where it goes so move back here yeah so then

you came back here but like again i mean you obviously must have been

making decent amount of money doing well so cat like a booth uh q after having already done a masters

so this is almost like getting one more additional degree what was the logic behind that

yeah my hobby is collecting degrees man so incidentally once i moved back here i

got married very funny thing happened right i decided when i got out of iit to get into the technical career path right

which is why i did my master's in refrigeration and went into that but then the leadership program was more

supposed to be grooming you for a more general management career path and then when i

moved here what i was actually doing was building a company from scratch it was

almost an entrepreneurial venture right so um you know getting into everything from

hiring to deciding on what roles the early stage people must do to go into the u.s and getting projects for our

team to handle and handling the p l the entire thing our general management karna

then i should at least earn what the management guys are on right i should not be on an engineering salary

then might as well try and try and do the mba incidentally i was five years into work

x um so my idea was not to get into nim my idea was to you know go to isb isb was just starting

up at that time uh it was about two three batches in at that time right so my idea was to get into isb i had missed

the window for gre but then they had a provision that you could

do the cat you could write the cat and if you if you qualify um then you can write the gre later uh before you uh

before you join right so i said tk i made this decision in august 2005. i said tk

two three months and then took the cat number uh and i had no idea that this will happen

honest to god uh patani but uh got through calls incidentally ahmedabad did not come

i was mighty pissed about it but the rest of the calls were there um i had also gone to spgn for their uh

uh you know experienced mba one year course i had also given the interview for isbu

rather you anyway seem to have a habit of filling up the whole

everything you are going to do that's the thing to at least pick

you know top five top 10 and then try as much as you want into that um and uh yeah eventually bangalore

happened and that was great because my wife was working here she's an i.t engineer so

best place for us your im experience uh i mean you would have been amongst the few i mean

although i think bangalore had always admitted a lot of work experience folks uh do you feel you should have gone to a

one-year mba maybe done an mba abroad with more experience folks what was your feeling about that um

very different experience than i am bangalore i have to say

for one in iit you are with peers who are of the same age group but in i am i was the

oldest in the batch so they used to call me tata in the batch second i was married so there was

married accommodation on campus my wife loved it because there was no kitchen for two years

and her office bus used to come right outside campus so she used to go so us

she was financing me of course so that was another part which i enjoyed um but uh

in terms of the experience uh yes i i i always had a feeling that i were

overqualified for campus um in terms of learning it's great because you already have worked enough so you

can actually understand what they are teaching in the mba school it is not just an extension of another

classroom from undergrad to grad you actually grasp a lot of that business

aspects of what they're teaching hr was one of my favorite courses which everybody hates in campus

right organization structure in hr and

that has helped me a lot later in life but yes that so that was one uh issue for

sure uh that i just seemed overqualified if you look at the placements process for example right uh companies tailor

their uh roles that they offer to the way the campus is right if your campus average work experience is two years

they will typically bring roles which are you know with two years of experience

so getting the right role in uh post mba it is a little bit of a challenge for people with higher work experience

so that is something that i felt i remember my seniors who were in the same kind of

experience level calling me in the first first week and telling me you think you're in the indian institute

of management it is actually an indian institute of analysts because ultimately [Laughter]

so yeah there was a little bit of a reality check there but on the plus side of it

as an engineer you don't know that so many career options exist again right there is not not much exposure there uh

as soon as you walk in there you're like whoa what is this there is you know investment banking there is strategy

consulting consulting consulting and then there is what we always know

from the core industry is sales with their marketing right that

that we understand and operations and supply chain but then there are so many other things that open up uh yeah it was

it was quite a you know revealing experience in that sense

but were you ever anxious about placements or once like during summers especially because

because of the experience you wouldn't get that many opportunities uh some companies just wouldn't have

roles for you at all so um anxiety

worst case scenario i had actually had my conversation with my boss before i left uh

uh uh ingersoll rand worst case scenario i could have gotten back to ingressol rent right um

there are enough jobs out there for people from the core industry to go back into the core industry in management

roles as well so i don't think that was a big uh issue at all there was only an upside to

look at and the way you prep and the way you talk to

people is also very different right job replacement toxic the questions you are asking versus the

questions the rest of the people are asking so there is a

you tend to stand out a little bit so that helps right so you get noticed very quickly

so on the career path side as well again

right you think that i've got my career set out

on what to do as far away away as possible and consulting helped me do that as well right management

consulting consulting when you work across industries you work across functions and you try to understand as

much as how companies run and then decide where you want to go after some time right so hence i said tk

consulting sounds good so tell us about your bain years did you enjoy consulting

uh was it what was that experience like after having worked for a core industry for

most of your life i was there for three years to turn eight to eleven again tell us about that life as well sure

here's the second part of the placement story right 2007

all of us get placed one of the best placements on campus right

and then the crash happens half the people get laid off from their investment banking jobs right they don't

even get to join their companies they get their joining bonus though which is a great thing but

uh and again i'm saying good that i didn't get into investment banking or private

equity for that matter uh right so got into consulting consulting was um because it was that time where you know

revenue was hard to come by uh it was a lot of um

uh cautery it was a lot of hard work it was a lot of prospecting and a lot of uh trying to figure out which client will

pay you money right uh so um and again you know the fancy offsides that people do we were

you know we brought it down to aggravated right

uh so budgets were also constrained but on the work experience front

definitely uh one of the best learning experience for me the amount of rigor that people have

in consulting in the process of problem solving right uh it is unbelievable and that that helps you

every day of your life right so every time you get to a problem which you cannot solve you you learn to break it

down to chunks that can be addressed uh uh right it's a it's a very um what do i say rigorous model of learning

by doing uh which which is uh i think if anybody is thinking about getting into a career in consulting this is one

of the best things that you will do and of course the network right um uh again iit i am network

but here you also have a network of people who are

linked to every possible industry and at the ceo levels right so uh it's a very different kind of a network which can

actually help you a lot in your professional career going forward right small

snippet when i decided to leave after a period of three years from bain the reason why we were leaving was also

we had enough of guru graham actually uh good going with that time uh we decided to come back to bangalore both

of us hated gurnam it wasn't to do anything with consulting it was more to do with gurugam um so

when we decided to move they actually had the company actually had a

uh an outplacement kind of initiative it was more informal but they would actually help you connect

to people that you would want to go and work with right um i had never seen that coming from the bangalore uh this thing

you see three months notice periods and people being miserable at the end of it that so it was exactly opposite there

and with good reason right because eventually you will become a you know potentially you will become a client of

theirs um and they need believers out there in the market as well but that's a beautiful model of how you treat your

employees with dignity and uh how they come back to you because you know you've done good by them uh so that

those kind of experiences really helped and that is where the network power comes in as well right

so um you left bain and obviously you got an out

placement uh from being into again i think a core industry

and what was that about then did you suddenly feel like uh you didn't enjoy the non-consulting life

uh or were you looking forward to getting into a p l responsibility again like what was your mindset at that time

yeah so consulting may um the role is more like birbal right you are an advisor you don't do much

you tell them what to do and then hopefully help them take the first couple of steps to do it

but you're not really doing it you're not really in the thick of the action taking those decisions

i think that i felt was missing because in my previous work experience we were taking all the

decisions right so i was kind of missing that a bit so i wanted to get into that kind of a role

again and honeywell here in bangalore offered me that opportunity to come in

and take up a piano role which i always wanted to do which is why i got into general management in the first place

right so um again it was a small intrapreneurial venture uh they they were building india

for india businesses uh with core honeywell technology so trying to figure out what the customer wants here what

the customer use cases are here and then build products and solutions for them um so got into that incidentally uh

when i walked into the interview room uh i met one of my old friends from iit bombay uh who i met for hadn't met for

15 years a guy called utkarsh he was doing his master's in design in the industrial design idcit bombay

right so when i walked into the interview room i'm like and then we walked out went for a chai

and that's how the interview happened um so yeah it was an easier uh you know

interview than most most other places and got in god and quickly yeah no i

think this again highlights the uh power of networks whether it's the consulting network the iit network im

network uh wherever you work and um just a plug from my side you know at all

tuning we started a concept called club all tuning which essentially helps people

uh to be part of a you know club of people who are super driven towards achieving their

career goals and we kind of help you know people get together there are weekend sessions there are there are

mentorships and you get to be a part of that you know for a three month 12-month period

you become part of a slack community as well uh and uh so do check that out uh you know there is already a wait list uh

to get into it uh but we are going to go live from may with our first session so do have a look at that and just that

highlighting it because ganesh has been talking about networking like five times in the last uh you know 30 minutes or so

so i'm saying that you know he went to iit went to im got a chance to go to bain but not everybody gets

that chance and you know we at least try and make that happen for more people so ganesh coming back to you startup

now let's talk about what happening in the last 10 odd years where you've just essentially been you know part of the

startup ecosystem so there is this five-year reach that i usually have right

looking back if i try to build how my career has progressed it is first five years engineering career next five

years management career i mean next five years right that's that's how it is broken

down um so um post the honeywell experience

incidentally honeywell the group in which we were part of very

very high performing diverse group of designers of engineers of uh you know marketers uh it was like a mini startup

ecosystem in itself right and you know sales and marketing experts as well uh so learned a lot again in

that group it was like the chosen best of honeywell india put together and that that microcosm again was

unbelievable and they had similar setups in czech republic in the emerging markets

regions in shanghai and we were learning from them and what they were doing as well so there was a

lot of cross-pollination of ideas happening that that was unbelievable

to work in such a big organization again honeywell is a multi-billion dollar company and work in

still small groups uh like almost like a skunk works right the guy who interviewed me utkarsh

we ended up working very closely together we were handling the piano together right um

and uh during that time um what we realized was that what um the kind of work we were doing

increasingly we felt like yeah if we would have done this outside it might have been an interesting thing to do

right outside of the honeywell corporate uh environment so after two years we were just sitting

together and having a i don't know chai beer uh in the evening um and we said yeah

[Music] as a topic i didn't expect him to react right

typically a lot of people have this conversation in post-work beers he immediately turned around and said

i was just waiting for somebody to ask me i was like huh okay this is interesting

and what really sparked it was the fact that we were two people from two different uh

backgrounds and two different points of view completely and two different competencies right he comes from a

design consumer experience right ethnography and insights from

watching customers right that kind of a background creativity background and i come from

the you know ppt excel model market size numbers kind of a background uh p l kind of a background that that

seemed to work very well when we were doing this in honeywell and we said yeah maybe we should try this out outside so

what was it that you all decided to so basically was there an idea it was just yeah that's what it was there was no

idea so you became entrepreneurs because i wanted to become entrepreneurs not

because there was a bright idea okay we wanted to do something in the retail sector um

cracking the consumer's buying mindset is something that both of us enjoy uh right doing on a day in and day out

basis we talk about this for hours on end all the time um right and

that was the space that we wanted to get into for sure consumer side and understanding what the consumers want to

do so are actually the thought fuzzy thought not really a full formed

startup idea was we should do something in the retail analytics space where we understand the consumer mind map they

call it right um that was the intent which we got out we again

the networks were there honeywell also works in the retail sector so we had to connect to a lot of the you know working

cxos in the retail sector here right and when you're in the job and when you're in the thick of it it's very

hard for you to focus on what you want to do outside and again we are we are in to our careers for about 15 years utkash

was already into his career almost 18 years right so at that you know

mid management level it is very hard for you to take time out for a side hustle right um so we said yeah

let us try this out so what is the name of the company what did you start tell us about that so we started a retail

analytics firm called windsleeve so we were going and talking to retail companies getting their data and

analyzing it to get give insights on what consumers are buying and hence so it's an analytics b2b product pretty

much pretty much that's how it started so was it easy to get your clients

immediately nope well once so 15 years you have a

business card which has a name of a multi-billion dollar company on it right suddenly you step out and your business

card says nothing it just has your name and nobody recognizes you anymore right so that was one one big root shock that

you get and we are not people just two years out uh of college trying to get and do

something with full length in the world we are saying sorted we will we will end up cracking this

anyway once you get out and that shock hits you and then for the six next six months you don't get a paycheck in your

bank it's when it starts really hitting right um so um that first journey we could not monetize

we ended up doing a couple of side projects for what the retail guys actually wanted

but it wasn't the analytics piece that we could monetize very well but as part of that one thing we

realized was that when we said that we will give you intelligence about your customer right

everybody turned back and said how will you prove agave analytics of hokia and you tell me that this is the

customer how do i get my customer back into the uh into the store and if the customer

comes how do i prove that he has come from me from this specific initiative from this

you know analytics and intelligence everything tended to end at that point where the customer comes and purchases

right and we said yeah if we have to prove that something is happening because of you there is that

one piece of the customer purchase where the conversion actually happens right they call it a sales conversion

um and that is where the proof of the pudding is whether you have actually succeeded in getting the right customer

to you to buy and buy what you wanted to sell to him he said maybe that is the space that we

should attack and that's how momo happened um so what happened to winsley when like

did you sell that company or did you convert that into momo what happened no we shut it down

because again there was a friends and family investments and stuff like that it was

kind of messy in terms of a structure um when we were looking at you know doing momo

so momo is a mobile payments app that we launched in 2013 just to give you an idea uh payments at restaurants retail

stores uh the toll road nice road in bangalore reviews to power so each shop and commute this was 2013 uh 3g launch

weather in you know suddenly apps were a big thing on your phones um and we saw a white space there um right

on google paper that we were trying in 2013. again it was otp based payment it was payment gateway on your mobile

that's that's pretty much what it was there was a lot of friction but still it was very novel in terms of a concept and

uh we wanted to try that out we we felt it was a you know world changing idea and the beauty of it was you you knew

exactly what the customer was where he was going and what they were buying because we had a live build feature as

well so you come to fandom you order a couple of beers you order food we get your live bill on your phone so we have

the data of that which we can analyze and then we started a marketing engine from

you know restaurant owners to send offers and coupons to you guys uh to customers to come back uh to the to the

restaurant as well so that was the intent again the same consumer mind map but manifesting in the b2c side

uh because this is a payment business uh it's a very thin top-line business right

i'll be patient with now you will know what the pnl of that business looks like um

it is it is a very thin wafer thin top top line business which means that you have to be a vc

funded growth company right eventually when you will get to millions of transactions is when you will actually

start making positive unit economics you will have to put fight right uh that that we knew very well going in uh and

hence uh we said you know let us figure out what the adoption curve is and let us figure out how this

should grow as fast as possible so it was a proper growth business that we wanted to get into

so how many users did you have and how big did it become and why did you stop doing it after some

time um so uh we kicked it off

2013 we ran it for about two and a half years bangalore and then pune and then we were

launching hyderabad uh moving to bombay pune was a testing

ground for launching bombay as well just moving to bombay we raised a vc round we got to

almost uh a million subscribers transacting on the app um right um that was a great uh achievement as far as uh

you know understanding what consumers want and trying to get them in and positioning it as a tech forward funky

brand which people would want to try out uh did that here uh right uh incidentally it wasn't even

though it was a tech product uh it was marketing was all offline right yeah we used to have waiters wearing our

t-shirts uh you know standees on the tables uh bill bookman like how i pay with

right all those things we used to do we used to do right flash mobs and stuff like that inside

inside the uh restaurants uh to catch attention so it was a very uh uh offline focused marketing uh

effort which we really uh took through because if you have to pay uh using your phone on on a location

just downloading it is not enough right it's not like book my show where download kali or ticket book earlier you

still have to go to the restaurant so unless you see it at the restaurant it's it's hard so it was a very

counter-intuitive uh customer acquisition strategy in that sense for a tech business so we learned

a lot from what is actually tech and what is non-tech and how how is a tech driven versus a tech enabled business uh

run right so great experience we ran it for about two and a half years when we started getting into the next round of

funding what we realized was that um a lot of the e-commerce players in the market uh

flipkart was looking for a payment solution to build in so everybody

started hitting scale and they realized that they need payment infrastructure as the core part of their business right so

uh flipkart was looking eventually they bought phone pay ola was you know building all our money quicker who who

was building their quicker wallet uh shop close was there who just turned unicorn at that time

all of these people were looking for payment infrastructure and uh when we spoke to kalyan who was at tiger at that

time he helped us connect to all his portfolio companies delivery was

looking for payment solutions as well for their cod payment logistics right

so when we got connected to all of them and we started talking to them all of them said yeah uh it's great you you can

be the payment layer like what razer pay is doing right now but guess what we want to build it in-house and we have

enough capital to build it it's a build or buy decision and we want to you know have it in-house so then all of

those conversations turned towards acquisition conversations and if the price was right we said okay

why not let's try this out and eventually we got acquired by shop clues shop clues was a unicorn at that time um

and uh it was a you know two-year lock-in cash plus stock kind of a deal um i wish i

would have retired and become a you know investor by now but uh got to get keep the cash of it but the stock didn't go

where we intended it to go but great experience with e-commerce

which then is the segue into the next side of the story of the next five years of my life you also need to figure out

that the market is large enough and it is something that is worth attacking right if you're making if you're a big

fish in a small pond pond philippi chotard would you rather be in the ocean where you're playing you know in a much

bigger game that is what i would like to do right play in something that actually matters that is what uh

you know i would look at [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Music] you