K Vaitheeswaran on why a startup is the second important thing in life. First is family
K Vaitheeswaran’s entrepreneurial journey lacks all the fanfare, glory and gyaan that make some of the most visible startup journeys of today, including Flipkart and Ola. It’s a story that underscores how lonely it’s to be a startup founder and how ugly the lows in the journey can get. On the midnight of December 31, […]
Avani Parekh of SnapChat service LoveDoctor on pre-teen sex counselling
The first time I heard of LoveDoctor, a SnapChat-based counselling service for teenagers, women and even pre-teen kids seeking sex advice, I was blown away. Not just because it’s rare to find a savvy SnapChat user in my peer group, but the whole idea of serving such a real world need, unaddressed largely, fascinated me. […]
Anand Deshpande of Persistent on employee vs founder mindset
Anand Deshpande, 55, and the founder of Pune-based Persistent Systems has been an outlier for nearly three decades. Since he founded Persistent in 1990, he has watched lucrative opportunities in low-end software services come and go across different cycles. Over years, he’s steered Persistent away from low-end outsourcing business towards high-end software product development work […]
Bhumika Goyal on what it’s like being a top open source contributor
Welcome to the Season 2 of the Outliers Podcast. We start the year with a conversation with Bhumika Goyal, a 22-year old computer science graduate with a passion for the Free and Open Source Software movement (FOSS), and is already among the top-ranked Linux Kernel contributors. In a year when a lot of talk is […]
Vijay Shekhar Sharma on the life of a founder
So who is Vijay Shekhar Sharma? Depending who you ask in India’s technology and startup ecosystem, the answers will range from “that crazy guy” to “overly obsessed entrepreneur”, “trying to fight too many battles at the same time”, “a desi entrepreneur”, “rags to riches story” and so on. If you ask us at FactorDaily, we’ll […]
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw on handling criticism and trolls
With over a million Twitter followers and hundreds of thousands on other social platforms, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw keeps a really visible and busy profile. This fan following also brings trolls and critics who can get really personal at times.
How Rohith Bhat built an app development powerhouse from small town India
“When Steve Jobs went on the stage in 2008 to announce the App Store, he showed the first 500 apps, and the five of them were built in this building, in Udupi,” Rohith Bhat, founder of Robosoft tells me as I sat down to record this episode of Outliers in Udupi, a small temple town […]
Santhanalakshmi Arvind on what it takes to be the family of a startup founder
Much before startup ideas find their way to colourful pitch decks, the founders, at least the ones with families, seek some kind of emotional, social approval. That approval is not make or break, but important. Who gives that approval? More often than not: the founder’s family: parents or/and spouses. They, of course, almost instantly give […]
Viral B. Shah on why engineers need empathy about users
The American civil aviation regulator’s next-generation collision avoidance system is built on a relatively new programing language called Julia. You can thank Viral, who along with Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Keno Fischer and Deepak Vinchhi, built the language the next time you have a safe flight in the U.S. airspace. Like every profession, […]
Vishwas Chitale on the dairy of the future
The first time I heard of Chitale Dairy was about eight years ago when an executive at one of the top Indian retailers asked me to check out how a dairy in Maharashtra’s Sangli village was using radio frequency tags to track cattle. Back then, most RFID deployments at retailers were bleeding and not delivering […]