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 […]
Why R A Mashelkar remains “dangerously optimistic”
R A Mashelkar, the chairman of Reliance Industries’ innovation council talks about innovation and other things.
Devi Shetty on why he’s obsessed with affordable healthcare
Dr Devi Shetty of Narayana Health is more a pioneer and a disrupter than an Outlier. Shetty, who is widely credited with disrupting India’s healthcare scene with affordable surgeries, is shaping the future of healthcare in the country, too. And while he’s doing all that, he is relentlessly exploring new technologies from 3D printing to […]