Navigating Career Paths: Insights from An IIT-IIM Graduate and Entrepreneur
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Introduction
In the competitive landscape of modern careers, making informed choices is critical for success. This article delves into the career journey of Ganesh Balakrishnan, a multifaceted professional and entrepreneur with degrees from prestigious institutions like IIT Bombay and IIM Bangalore. Ganesh’s story encapsulates key challenges and decisions faced by professionals, especially those venturing into the realms of consulting and entrepreneurship.
Early Years and Academic Background
Growing Up in a Middle-Class Family
Ganesh's story starts in a humble middle-class setting. His father was an engineer, while his grandfather aspired for him to enter the prestigious Indian Administrative Service (IAS). This familial influence shaped Ganesh's early ambitions, leading him to pursue engineering.
Academic Journey
He completed his schooling in Nasik and moved to Orissa for his 11th and 12th grades. Despite the challenges, he excelled and cracked the IIT Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), ultimately enrolling in IIT Bombay, where he pursued a degree in Mechanical Engineering.
The Corporate Leap: From IIT to IIM
Work Experience in the Core Industry
After graduating in 1999, Ganesh embarked on his corporate journey with Ingersoll Rand. His leadership program there paved the way for diverse experiences across different business units, providing him valuable insights into corporate dynamics.
Pursuing an MBA
Recognizing the importance of a management degree and the potential for career advancement, Ganesh decided to pursue an MBA at IIM Bangalore while juggling his responsibilities at Ingersoll Rand. His experience there helped him understand the broader business landscape.
Transition to Consulting
Joining Bain & Company
After completing his MBA, Ganesh joined Bain & Company, where his consulting journey began. This role brought unique challenges, particularly during the economic downturn of 2007-2008, but it also provided invaluable problem-solving skills that he applied throughout his career.
Lessons Learned in Consulting
- Rigorous Problem-Solving: Consulting emphasized breaking down problems into manageable segments, a technique that’s beneficial across any career path.
- Networking Opportunities: Ganesh cultivated a robust network during his time at Bain, which proved advantageous as he transitioned to entrepreneurial endeavors.
Entrepreneurship: Launching Flatheads
Foundation and Vision
After his consultancy tenure, Ganesh ventured into entrepreneurship by co-founding Flatheads, a company specializing in customizable shoes and clothing. His journey exemplifies the risks and rewards of startup life, moving from the structured corporate environment to the unpredictable startup ecosystem.
The Bumpy Road of Initial Ventures
Ganesh’s initial attempts at launching a retail analytics firm, Windsleeve, faced challenges in monetization. Yet, he and his partner reallocated their focus towards a payment solution, which became Momo, launched around the time when mobile apps were booming.
The Evolution of Momo
Launch and Growth of Momo
Momo was a mobile payment solution that catered to restaurants and retail stores, facilitating seamless transactions. Ganesh leveraged the networks from his previous roles to gain traction in a competitive market. The app experienced rapid growth, attaining nearly a million subscribers.
Acquisition and Market Shifts
Despite its success, the market shifted as major players like Flipkart began developing their own payment solutions. Ganesh's foresight led to conversations centered around acquisition, which ultimately culminated in Momo being acquired by Shop Clues, an early unicorn in the Indian e-commerce landscape.
Reflections and Career Takeaways
Evaluating Career Decisions
Ganesh reflects on his journey, highlighting key factors that influence career decisions:
- Navigating Market Dynamics: Understanding market trends is crucial in assessing the longevity of a venture.
- Networking: Building and maintaining professional relationships significantly bolsters career progression.
- Continuous Learning: Emphasizing adaptability, Ganesh's diverse experiences illustrate the importance of lifelong learning in achieving long-term goals.
Conclusion
The narrative of Ganesh Balakrishnan’s career illustrates the multifaceted nature of professional development. From his foundation in IIT and IIM to his impactful roles in consulting and entrepreneurship, he exemplifies how to blend education with practical experiences. Aspiring professionals can draw inspiration from Ganesh's journey, strategizing their paths in this dynamic career landscape.
companies tailor their uh roles that they offer to the way the campus is right if your campus
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
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
[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
my grandfather was ias incidentally so my grandmom wanted to make me an ias officer but that didn't happen so they
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
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
for you to crack the je and were you sure kenny iit jhanai or you would have been happy with any engineering college
eventful uh his time of all the examinations where i was writing couple of examinations actually in quarantine
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
list secretly i just wanted to get away from that place but yeah eventually bombay happened but when you're entering
or for you it was yeah it's it's good it has happened but like no big deal because some people
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
fighters you fight martha then there were studs who fight martha they liken then there were
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
again introverted small town kids suddenly coming to bombay number one and then iit bombay were the bunch of you
if you're from a metro and you go into an iit your resume is so accomplished extracurricular
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
i'm from the previous millennium uh that was the y2k boom right so a lot of people wanted to get jobs um
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
placement session i decided that i will just go and try out whatever job is available uh there was a company called
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
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
so we said cello let us try this out and i wanted to move back to india anyway uh i had spent four years
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
making decent amount of money doing well so cat like a booth uh q after having already done a masters
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
hiring to deciding on what roles the early stage people must do to go into the u.s and getting projects for our
then i should at least earn what the management guys are on right i should not be on an engineering salary
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
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
i was mighty pissed about it but the rest of the calls were there um i had also gone to spgn for their uh
you know top five top 10 and then try as much as you want into that um and uh yeah eventually bangalore
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
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
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
aspects of what they're teaching hr was one of my favorite courses which everybody hates in campus
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
so getting the right role in uh post mba it is a little bit of a challenge for people with higher work experience
experience level calling me in the first first week and telling me you think you're in the indian institute
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
that we understand and operations and supply chain but then there are so many other things that open up uh yeah it was
because of the experience you wouldn't get that many opportunities uh some companies just wouldn't have
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
people is also very different right job replacement toxic the questions you are asking versus the
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
most of your life i was there for three years to turn eight to eleven again tell us about that life as well sure
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
equity for that matter uh right so got into consulting consulting was um because it was that time where you know
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
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
linked to every possible industry and at the ceo levels right so uh it's a very different kind of a network which can
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
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
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
and take up a piano role which i always wanted to do which is why i got into general management in the first place
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
think this again highlights the uh power of networks whether it's the consulting network the iit network im
career goals and we kind of help you know people get together there are weekend sessions there are there are
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
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
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
regions in shanghai and we were learning from them and what they were doing as well so there was a
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
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
typically a lot of people have this conversation in post-work beers he immediately turned around and said
backgrounds and two different points of view completely and two different competencies right he comes from a
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
cracking the consumer's buying mindset is something that both of us enjoy uh right doing on a day in and day out
that was the space that we wanted to get into for sure consumer side and understanding what the consumers want to
startup idea was we should do something in the retail analytics space where we understand the consumer mind map they
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
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
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
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
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
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
did you sell that company or did you convert that into momo what happened no we shut it down
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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