Yogesh Pandey

Ursula Burns: The first black women CEO of a fortune 500 company

It all started with a woman, living in the rough and tumble public housing projects on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, believing that educating her children was the only solution to all her problems, mostly poverty. This woman was Ursula Burns’ mother.

“We were poor for sure but my brother and my sister and I were shielded totally form this poverty and we were shielded by this one person and that was my mother”, says Ursula, who was ranked by Forbes magazine amongst the most powerful women on the planet. She adds, “she was a frantic every day to try to make sure that we were safe and fed and educated”.

Her mother used to make $4400 a year, half of which was spent in sending her three children into a catholic school. Ursula remembers her childhood and says, “we got dental care by her (Ursula’s mother) cleaning the dental office. We got healthcare by her cleaning the doctor’s office”.

So, when Ursula completed her schooling and was looking forward to start her college life, her primary motive was to choose a degree course that would help her earn lot of money. After doing some research she came to know that Chemical engineering promised a carrier with the maximum monetary gains. She applied to various colleges and got admitted to Brooklyn Polly.

At Brooklyn Polly, after attending the first lecture, she realized two things. First, she wasn’t good at chemistry. Second, she hated the subject. Disappointed, she decided to stick to her previous plan of being a teacher, which she had abandoned after knowing the salary of a teacher. She also thought of becoming a nun or a nurse.

Fortuitously, her advisor suggested her to look out for other branches of Engineering. Ursula Burns settled for Mechanical Engineering and in her own words, ‘rest is history!’

She was hired by Xerox in 1980 as an intern and a year later she was made a permanent employee. About the time when she joined the firm Ursula recalls, ‘when I joined in 1980 there were literally and virtually no women in engineering.’ She also adds that the absence of any black women in the engineering department became a significant advantage for her. Being different from the crowd she was easily and frequently noticed.

She slowly climbed the ladder of numerous positions before becoming the CEO of the company, thirty years later. She appreciated Xerox’s policy of not asking her to become something or someone they want. All they wanted was her hard work and efforts and in return provided her with ample opportunities. One of the reasons, she admits, that she stayed at Xerox all this time through was that the company stood upon their promises.

Besides Xerox, Ursula Burns has served on numerous professional and community boards, which includes Exxon Mobil Corporation, American Express, Boston Scientific, National Association of Manufacturers, University of Rochester, the MIT Corporation, the Rochester Business Alliance, and the RUMP Group. She is also among the founding Board of Directors of Change the Equation, which is an organization that focuses on improving STEM-based education in the United States.

Ursula became the first black-African women CEO of a fortune 500 company. In 2014, Forbes ranked her the 22^nd most powerful women in the world.

In a speech she delivered at MIT she recalls an advise her mother gave her: Where you are is not who you are. ‘…until I became the president of Xerox and I started to realize that if you don’t check yourself early you’ll start to become these ugly people these ugly leaders who think they’ve so much and that they’re so far away from the people who actually make the world go.’

In the same commencement speech at MIT, from where her own son graduated, she concluded by saying,

‘The measure of money is the least important measure over the long term.’

Yogesh Pandey

Yogesh Pandey is the author of the novel, The Pragmatic (2016). He is currently pursuing his masters from Fergusson College, Pune.

He also runs a YouTube channel named Hard Reads, which is all about books and reading. He is an avid reader and is doing research in the field of Astrophysics.

Sridhar Vembu: How this man from India created a 500 million dollar company that competes with Google?

India, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Yogesh Pandey

Sridhar Vembu is living the dream of every entrepreneur. He is constantly chased by VCs and he is rejecting them! The company, who are the makers of online Zoho Office Suite and other similar products, has reached to an extent where Mac Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, is desperate to buy the company, due to nervousness of getting out-beaten. But Sridhar rejected his offer as well.

Beginning of an era

Sridhar Vembu belongs to a modest middle class family, situated in Chennai, India. He completed his schooling from a government aided school in Tamilnadu. He then went to IIT-Madras and obtained his undergraduate degree. At IIT, he met Tony Thomas, who was three years senior to him, and who is the co-founder of AdventNet, which later became Zoho Corporation. Later on, Sridhar moved to Princeton University, in 1989, and completed his Electrical Engineering.

In 1994, he completed his Ph.D. and joined Qualcomm, where he worked for two years. When his brother suggested the plan to start a company, he quit his job at Qualcomm and rushed back to India. The two brothers along with Tony Thomas founded Vembu Software.

All the business was bootstrapped, with the investment made only by family and friends. To this day, when the Zoho had become a multi-million dollar company, they still work without any external funding, rejecting the continuous offers they keep on receiving.

“On those fundamental principles, we are not budging,” says Raju Vegesna, 37, Zoho’s chief evangelist. “We keep getting calls from venture capitalists but Sridhar (CEO) has even blogged asking them not to bug us.”

The business started well and they sold their products to a lot of companies in Silicon Valley and in Japan too. By the end of the year 2000, they’d grown to 115 engineers in India, 7 employees in US, with a business of $10 Million USD.

The setback and the comeback

In the year 2001, during the Dot Com Bubble burst, the networking faced a huge setback. The company customers list reduced from 150 customers down to just three customers. This resulted into a lot of resources and engineers being idle.

What seemed like a setback was blessing in disguise. They took two mandatory decisions.

They took the management networking software which they sold as Order Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and converted it into an Enterprise model. This gave birth to ManageEngine.

On the other hand they had an on demand effort. They invested some man power and resources into that and this gave rise to Zoho!

The company changed its name to AdventNet in 2005, and later changed it to Zoho Corporation in 2009. The business started growing over the internet for the rented software rather than selling the licensed copy for expensive software. They started Zoho.com, offering internet based software for work. They also started three more divisions, Zoho.com, WebNMS and Manage Engine. The graph of company’s growth headed upwards rapidly. Sridhar and team so loved the name Zoho that the domain name was purchased for $5000 from a us based startup that was in liquidation process.

By the end of the year 2012, the total revenue of the Zoho Corporation was near to $120 million USD and that of 2006 was $500 million USD, with 18 million users worldwide!

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Company culture and competition

Zoho has its own way of recruiting. They had set up their own Zoho University where they hire college dropouts and underprivileged students from low income backgrounds and train them to code and develop software products in India.

“I hardly spoke any English at the time, but I was really good at math… maybe that’s why they hired me,” says Babu, who was one of six young people recruited into what would become the first batch of trainees at Zoho University. He is now 28 and is product manager at Chennai based Zoho corporation private limited. Unlike other big shots in software industry, Vembu believes in smartness of individuals and hence recruits in a very innovative fashion. On one hand, where all the toppers are the point of attractions for regular recruiters, Vembu, who is an alumni of an elite institute, invests in training dropouts.

Today Zoho has more than 30 products that compete with big companies like Google & Salesforce. Vembu believe that he makes his prime minister and country proud in their Make In India campaign. ‘I am a great fan of Modi,’ says Vembu.

Although their customer base is spread worldwide, their major man power source is in India, that too, otherwise neglected youth. Thus, the true objective of make in India is fulfilled by Vembu and company.

Yogesh Pandey

Yogesh Pandey is the author of the novel, The Pragmatic (2016). He is currently pursuing his masters from Fergusson College, Pune.

He also runs a YouTube channel named Hard Reads, which is all about books and reading. He is an avid reader and is doing research in the field of Astrophysics.

Sonam Wangchuk- The stupid child from India who won the Rolex award!

Story, Tech Story / By Yogesh Pandey

Wangchuk from Ladakh, India is among the five Rolex award recipients of 2016, chosen from 144 participating countries. Ironically, at the age of nine, when he first moved to Srinagar, Sonam Wangchuk was thought to be a stupid child!

The reason was he didn’t look like his peers and would not respond to their addressing as he would not understand their language. This was the darkest period of his life. Unable to bear the treatment, he escaped to Delhi. After pleading his case to the principal, he got admission in the Vishesh Kendriya Vidyalaya (Special Central School).

He then went to National Institute of Technology, a premier Engineering Institute in India (known as REC at that time), to pursue an Engineering degree. He financed his own education by teaching students of tenth grade during his summer vacation. This experience was enlightening for him and it was here that he decided to enhance the education system rather than adding one more engineer to the crowd.

With this in his mind he founded SECMOL, the Students Educational and Cultural Movement Of Ladakh. SECMOL later launched Operation New Hope in collaboration with government education department and village population, which led the rise of 10^th grade exam results from 5% to 75%! One more peculiarity of SECMOL is that it is powered by solar energy alone. And even in the numbing temperature of -30 degree Celsius, it is capable of keeping the students warm.

This was just the beginning of Sonam’s innovations.

Sonam Wangchuk- The real Fung Suk Wangdu

In January 2014, Scrutinizing the situation faced by farmers in the critical planting months of April and May, he launched a project called Ice Stupa (artificial glacier), to find a solution against water crisis.

Before Sonam, many change-makers tried to build artificial glaciers. The solution was indeed feasible but had its own limitations.

‘I saw the problems these people were facing. The artificial glaciers were built at a very high altitude and villagers or workers were reluctant to climb so high. I wondered why we couldn’t construct glaciers right there in the village. The temperature is low enough to keep the water frozen – we just needed a smart way to make these glaciers,’ says Wangchuk.

Within two months, Sonam Wangchuk and his team successfully built a two story prototype of ice stupa that could store around 150,000 liters of winter stream water which nobody wanted at time. The ice stupa was located at the height of 10,400 feet above the sea level, the lowest possible altitude and the warmest possible location. It was the most challenging location and if it could be build there, it could be built anywhere.

Another problem surfaced up when the complete project almost failed due to the low quality and spurious pipes supplied by unethical traders resulting in loss of 2.5 million Indian rupees and many days of hard work and labor put in by villagers and the team.

But Sonam Wangchuk, who is also said to be the inspiration behind the Rancho’s character in the superhit Bollywood movie 3 idiots (2009), is the last person who will quit his work after getting disheartened by a setback.

“We were cheated and disappointed and were staring at a failed project when thankfully Mr. Ajit Jain of Jain Irrigation stepped in to supply the correct pipes immediately and Commander B. Manikantham of the Indian Air Force volunteered to airlift the pipes to Phayang. That is how we were able to salvage the project,” says an optimistic Wangchuk.

In addition to a solution to the ultimate water crisis, Ice Stupas also reduces the threats caused by glacier lake outbursts floods or GLOF. The Himalayan states of India- Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir are surrounded by about 300 potentially dangerous lakes formed by glacier melt. His efforts were appreciated worldwide and he received the honorable Rolex award in 2016.

With this endeavor, Wangchuk and his team intend to build up to 20 ice stupas, each 30 meters in height and capable of supplying millions of liters of water.

“The Rolex Award funds will support the project and promote ice stupas as a climate-change adaptation and desert-greening technique,” Mr Wangchuk said in a statement released by Rolex.

Yogesh Pandey

Yogesh Pandey is the author of the novel, The Pragmatic (2016). He is currently pursuing his masters from Fergusson College, Pune.

He also runs a YouTube channel named Hard Reads, which is all about books and reading. He is an avid reader and is doing research in the field of Astrophysics.

Pallav Nadhani-How this teenager’s extra pocket money effort is now a multi-million dollar company?

start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Yogesh Pandey

What started as an attempt to suffice the monetary requirements of a teenager, is now a multi-million dollar company whose customer list includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft and the federal government of United States. When Nadhanis moved to Kolkata, Pallav Nadhani was admitted in the La Martiniere for Boys School.

‘Here I got the aspiration that I want to be like them. And for me to be like them, I really need to work hard. I need to be on top of the game in whatever I am working on,’ he says.

It wasn’t feasible for him to be like them with a measly pocket money of Rs. 1,000. He was reluctant to ask his father for extra pocket money. Thus emerged the necessity of finding a way to make some fortune of his own.

His first endeavor was in the field of writing. He came across Wrox Press’ website ASPtoday.com, which paid a generous amount for innovative articles. Pallav Nadhani made an impressive amount of $2,000 by writing two articles. The third article he wrote turned out to be a life changing milestone in his journey.

Nadhanis owned a computer, which was a luxury in those days(2001-02). His father owned a web design company where Pallav initially worked. His share of work included preparing charts on Microsoft Excel. He found those charts extremely dull and boring. Along with this, he was also working with Macromedia Flash player (Adobe Flash now) for making designs for senior Nadhani’s company. He began exploring ways in which he could combine both to create better charts. He wrote an article on this idea for ASPtoday and made $1,500 from the article, which was the primal investment for his entrepreneurial journey.Image Credit: http://www.fusioncharts.com

Still in his school, Pallav, who calls himself an accidental entrepreneur, started his company Infosoft Global, based on the very idea of making interactive charts for business world. For the first three years, he did the work of designing, marketing, making and receiving calls, all by himself.

The company started growing and things were never the same again. The growth was so stupendous that in the year 2005, senior Nadhani, who according to Pallav is a sucker for growth and adventure, shut down his company and joined his son’s venture. Currently, he holds the position of CFO in the company. They also hired 20 employees and acquired office space in Bangur, Kolkata.

But Pallav Nadhani isn’t someone whose thirst is quenched easily. Expanding his company’s profile, he moved to Bangalore in the year 2010. In Bangalore he set up a company which excelled not only in the quality of the product it delivered, but also in the management and organizational aspect. The next year FusionCharts earned a revenue of 4.5 million USD.

Unlike his father, whose business ventures ranged from selling bicycles to writing books and running a computer training center, Pallav believes in a focused approach. Even after being a millionaire, he is still stuck with the idea he believed in when he was just a teenager.

‘I wish I could be like him (senior Nadhani). Being multi-faceted helps you have a very nice perspective of life. But if you have to really excel at something, you need focus,’ he said in an interview with Forbes magazine. In the same interview he talks about his plan for the next ten years, ‘I know that for the next 10 years, I want to do just one thing. Build software products and build the software product industry in India.’

Today, FusionChart’s client list includes 50,000 clients spread over 118 countries. In 2010, US president Barack Obama selected FusionCharts to design digital dashboard for the federal administration, the Federal IT Dashboard. It became the first Indian start-up to gain the attention of the Obama administration.

Yogesh Pandey

Yogesh Pandey is the author of the novel, The Pragmatic (2016). He is currently pursuing his masters from Fergusson College, Pune.

He also runs a YouTube channel named Hard Reads, which is all about books and reading. He is an avid reader and is doing research in the field of Astrophysics.

Oracle Founder: A Collage Dropout Who Now Owns An Island

Story, Tech Story / By Yogesh Pandey

Larry’s wife divorced him saying that he lacked ambition and was irresponsible. Three decades later, the same unambitious guy was amongst top ten richest men on the planet with a net worth of $48.6 Billion USD

‘Virtually everyone important in my life, my family, my teachers, (cis) my girlfriend wanted me to be a doctor. Over time, their dreams became my dreams. They convinced me I should be a doctor,’ said Larry Ellison, a billionaire, a philanthropist and a tech genius, in his USC commencement speech.

But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t do it. After a few unhappy years in the pre-medical school it became clear to him that he didn’t like the courses he was taking. His anatomy class appeared to him as a pointless form of psychological torture. He couldn’t study something that didn’t interest him. He even thought of himself as a person who lacked discipline or was selfish. But he was not able to make himself into a person he wasn’t.

Eventually, he stopped trying and at the age of 21, he dropped out of college. He drove from Chicago to California, a ride that was about to change the course of database managements systems forever.

“It (Berkeley) was the perfect place for an undisciplined, selfish, twenty-something to begin his search for himself, a righteous cause and a job that he loved”, Larry said. In Berkeley he wrote songs, became an environmentalist and worked as a river guide and a rock climbing instructor. Although he loved the jobs, they didn’t pay him much, so he started working as a computer programmer. He got a similar satisfaction from programming as he got from solving math problems or playing chess.

It was here that he made real progress in his journey of self-discovery and he had also found a cause. He had jobs that he loved and one amongst them paid his bills. He was happy with his life. His wife wasn’t. She thought of him as a college drop-out who spent too much time doing stupid things. She wanted him to be a full time programmer. As a compromise, he took a job at UC Berkeley and started taking classes. One of the several classes he took was of sailing. After the class was over he was in love with the ocean and wanted to buy a sail boat.

According to his wife, this was the single stupidest thing she had heard in her entire life. She accused him of being irresponsible and lacking ambition. She kicked him out and divorced him.

His family was already mad at him for leaving the medical school. Once again, he wasn’t able to stand up to others’ expectations. He wasn’t disappointed with himself though. He enjoyed the company of nature around him. He had a job that he loved and made money which was more than he needed. For the first time he was certain that he was going to survive in this world. A huge burden of fear had been lifted.

Throughout his twenties he continued experimenting and kept changing jobs till he realized that most fulfilling programing jobs were found in a cluster of companies situated in Silicon Valley. He worked with various software start-ups and also with well-established companies but he never found a job that pleased him as much as sailing. Therefore, he created one.

He founded a company, Software Development Laboratories (SDL), later named Oracle, with an intention to create a satisfying job for himself. The initial investment was of $2000 USD of which $1200 USD was of Larry’s. He estimated that the company will employ no more than 50 employees.

Today, Oracle has employed more than 150 thousand people. He intended to establish the world’s first relational database. Everyone said it was a crazy idea. It turned out to be the craziest. And as his beloved friend, Steve Jobs, who was also the official wedding photographer in his fourth wedding, once said, ‘People who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.’

With this idea he became one of the richest man on the planet with a net worth of $48.6 Billion USD. He also loves flying and has two military jets at his disposal and is amongst 129 Billionaires to sign The Giving Pledge. In 2012 he bought an island called Lanai in Hawaii.

Oracle turned out to be one of the most successful software companies ever. In the year 2016, the annual revenue of Oracle was $37.04 Billion USD.

Yogesh Pandey

Yogesh Pandey is the author of the novel, The Pragmatic (2016). He is currently pursuing his masters from Fergusson College, Pune.

He also runs a YouTube channel named Hard Reads, which is all about books and reading. He is an avid reader and is doing research in the field of Astrophysics.

Sonam Wangchuk- The real Fung Suk Wangdu

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