Network Capital

In this podcast you can expect to learn the following:

1.Art of following your curiosity

2.Core challenges plaguing the policy landscape

3.Shaping meaningful careers in public policy

Arunabha Ghosh is a public policy professional, adviser, author, columnist, and institution builder. As the founder-CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, since 2010, he has led CEEW to the top ranks as one of South Asia’s leading policy research institutions (six years in a row); and among the world’s 20 best climate think-tanks in 2016. He has been actively involved in the design of the International Solar Alliance since inception. He conceptualized and is founding board member of the Clean Energy Access Network (CLEAN). With experience in 45 countries, he previously worked at Princeton, Oxford, UNDP (New York), and WTO (Geneva). In 2018, the UN Secretary-General nominated him to the UN’s Committee for Development Policy. In 2018, the Government of India appointed him as a member of the Environment Pollution (Prevention & Control) Authority for the National Capital Region. His 2019 TED Talk on air quality (Mission 80-80-80) crossed 100,000 views within three weeks of release.

He is the co-author/editor of four books: The Palgrave Handbook of the International Political Economy of Energy (2016); Energizing India: Towards a Resilient and Equitable Energy System (SAGE, 2016); Human Development and Global Institutions (Routledge, 2016); and Climate Change: A Risk Assessment (FCO, 2015).

In this podcast you can expect to learn the following:

1. The philosophy of the Young India Fellowship and how it prepares students for careers of tomorrow
2. The art of applying for specialized Masters such as the one at Harvard Graduate School of Education
3. How to commit oneself to solving a complex problem long-term

Karan Bhola is a higher education, leadership development and institution building professional. He is currently the Director of Graduate (YIF) Outreach and Admissions at Ashoka University. He has previously worked on several initiatives in higher education, including a project to establish India's first university for the transportation sector, as well as projects in ed-tech. He was the founding President of the Ashoka University Alumni Association.

Karan is an alumnus of Harvard University (where he was a Fulbright Scholar), Ashoka University (where he was a Young India Fellow), and Loyola College (where he received an undergraduate degree in Economics).

Karan bears a lifelong commitment towards contributing to higher education transformation in India and is fascinated by the power of collaboration.

In this podcast, you will learn:

1. Principles of career pivoting: fire-fighting to law to investing

2. Actionable advice for cracking Harvard Business School MBA admissions

3. Art of reaching out and writing effectively

Chia Jeng Yang 谢征阳 is a Principal at Saison Capital, a Japanese-backed fintech-focused fund (early-late stage, debt, fund of funds) that invests globally and in any vertical, but especially in emerging markets: Southeast Asia, India, LATAM, etc.

Previously, he was the 5th employee (Investment Manager/Country Launcher) for Antler, an early-stage VC/pre-team accelerator, and helped built Daraz, an e-commerce company that was acquired by Alibaba, in Pakistan/Sri Lanka for Rocket Internet. He is a consumer angel investor, with portfolio companies in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt, London and the US, and founded Shaper Impact Capital, a global platform for impact dealflow and startup support, currently in 20 countries.

His educational background includes a law undergraduate from Cambridge, and a deferred Harvard MBA. His previous work and writing (including topics on consumer investing) has been featured by CNBC, e27, Yahoo!, TechinAsia, etc.

In this podcast, you can expect to learn:
1. What Stanford looks for in their MBA applicants and what distinguishes successful applications
2. Framework for formulating career goals
3. Art of decision making and the importance of saying no

Rohan is a student at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to Stanford, Rohan was on secondment to the Government of India, working at the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation. A chemical engineering graduate from BITS Pilani, Rohan worked with Accenture Strategy and volunteered with his university's startup network. He likes humor, running, and random trivia

In this podcast, you will learn:

1. Principles of investing that optimizes both market returns and social impact
2. Constructs of building meaningful partnerships
3. Core elements of innovative organizational cultures

Manoj’s three decade long career has included roles as an entrepreneur, an investor, as well as a corporate leader spanning multiple sectors and geographies.

Manoj is the Founder and Chairman of Social Alpha, a unique initiative to strengthen the Science and Technology start-up ecosystem in India with a focus on “lab to market” enablement. Since its inception in 2016, Social Alpha has evolved as an integrated incubation and investment platform for high impact start-ups that aim to solve the most critical social, economic and environmental challenges faced by humanity. It has incubated and nurtured more than 60 start-ups, making 30+ seed investments and 2 exits. Some very promising start-ups in the Social Alpha portfolio include Voxelgrids, a New Generation MRI machine; Bionic Yantra, a Medical Robotics company with innovative exoskeletons for Locomotor Rehabilitation; Help Us Green, a circular economy company; and Hasiru Dala, a solid waste management start-up. (more at https://www.socialalpha.org/our-portfolio/)

Manoj is also a Senior Advisor to Tata Trusts, leading Tata Trusts’ engagements with R&D Institutions globally, as well as all their initiatives to promote Innovation and Entrepreneurship in India. Besides this, Manoj manages the India Health Fund, an initiative seeded by Tata Trusts to fight the huge burden of public health challenges in TB, Malaria and other communicable diseases.

Prior to founding Social Alpha, Manoj co-founded Malgharia Advisors, a boutique investing and consulting vehicle focused on Enterprise Software and Fintech businesses. Manoj has also worked for over two decades in investment banking and financial technology firms, holding global leadership roles in the areas of Corporate Strategy, M&A, Product Management and R&D.

Manoj is a founding trustee of Tata Institute for Genetics and Society (TIGS) and serves on the advisory and governing boards of a number of companies, non-profits and research institutions.

Manoj is an alumnus of Harvard Business School and lives in Bangalore, India.

In this Network Capital podcast, you can expect to learn the following:

1. The pros and cons of a career plan, especially a deep-dive on whether you need an overarching plan to succeed
2. The principles of risk taking when it comes to career choices
3. The art of following curiosity with diligence and a sense of wonder

Siddharth Jhawar works at Disney. He was a management consultant at Bain and a former Director at the Government of India, He is an alumnus of IIT Delhi, a CFA charter holder and Harvard Business School. You should also check out his standup comedy and his Harbus article "You Are Not Eligible: International Recruiting at HBS" - https://harbus.org/2017/23106/

In this podcast, you will learn:

1. Principles of building a sustainable, financially viable social enterprise
2. Mental models for building a homegrown business to consumer fashion brand
3. Stories of personal transformation

Fashion entrepreneur Gayatri Jolly’s brainchild MasterG, is a design and skill development eco system based out of Delhi, UP and Haryana. She is a qualified Fashion Designer from Parsons, New York and a Business Graduate from Babson College, Boston. She worked for two years in the fashion industry in New York with companies such as Armani, Diane Von Furstenberg, Dennis Basso and has worked on costume design for Lady Gaga at Diane Von Furstenberg. She divides her time between designing and training of individuals who aspire but lack access to quality training and opportunities. MasterG enables women from low-income communities to question the baggage of societal norms and to empower themselves financially through the vocation of fashion design. Through its emphasis on safe and labor laws-compliant factory space and wages, and an empathetic and equitable gender dynamic, MasterG aims to humanize the garment manufacturing supply chain and uphold dignity in the industry through a three-pronged approach – MasterG Training Centers, the MasterG Contract Manufacturing, and the in-house womenswear brand, HEIMAT.

Through this podcast, you can learn the following:

1. Mental models for addressing the climate change challenge
2. Insights on building meaningful careers in public policy
3. Connecting the career dots, especially if you are interested in pursuing multiple things

Shloka Nath currently leads the Sustainability and Special Projects portfolio at the Tata Trusts, one of India’s leading philanthropic foundations. In this role she is focused on the organization’s work on climate, energy and environment, implementing and funding sustainable and scalable solutions that help both people and nature thrive through India. She is also the Executive Director of the India Climate Collaborative, an India-led platform founded in 2018 by a group of philanthropies interested in continuing to accelerate India’s development, while also exceeding its climate goals. Prior to this, Shloka co-founded and was the Managing Partner of Sankhya Women Impact Funds, a gender lens fund with a focus on sustainability. Shloka is also an active angel investor in social enterprises and has mentored organizations across sectors. She has spent over a decade in journalism with the BBC in London, as a news anchor with New Delhi Television (NDTV) and Principal Correspondent with Forbes in Mumbai, with a special emphasis on financial inclusion, sustainability and public policy. In 2010, Shloka was nominated for India's highest awards in journalism for her reportage on microfinance in India.
In 2014, Shloka served as Campaign Manager for Meera Sanyal, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Candidate for Mumbai (South), for India's General Elections. She was also formerly a speechwriter at the House of Lords (UK) and founded the Research and Studies Programme for Gateway House, a foreign policy think tank in Mumbai. Shloka has a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a BSc in Government from The London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also the author of the book, "Hidden India: Journey to Where the Wild Things Are" (April 2018), a compendium of photographs and writing about Indian wildlife and landscapes.

In this podcast, we will learn about Pranav's path to Harvard Business School and explore why he decided to repivot his career after consulting, private equity and an MBA.

Pranav is the Domain Architect and Vice President of the Large Scale Education Programmes at Educational Initiatives. He was a member of the development team of the Mindspark product, which is a technology-based, personalized and adaptive learning tool for Mathematics and Language. He led the operations of the Mindspark Centres in urban slums of Delhi and Mindspark’s subsequent deployment in government schools of Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.

At EI, Pranav has also overseen various large scale student assessments done in Bihar, Haryana and Tamil Nadu and was invited by the Ministry of Human Resource Development to be part of the RMSA’s Joint Review Mission. Pranav has spoken extensively on various panels in India and the USA on various subjects such as student assessments, educational technology, and the critical need for a ‘Science of Learning’ as a pre-requisite to ensure students learn with understanding.

Prior to EI, Pranav studied Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and and finished an MBA at the Harvard Business School, after working at Boston Consulting Group and GTI Private Equity in USA and India.

Learn how Dr. Albert Lin collaborated with his mentor Dr. Ramesh to transform a personal tragedy into a viable solution for more than 40 million amputees. INK talks played a major role. Listen on

Today, the majority of the world’s 40 million amputees live without access to a prosthesis. Albert Lin, a materials scientist and researcher with the Qualcomm Institute (QI) at UC San Diego, has created a project to change that.

With the help of students and multidisciplinary experts at QI, Lin launched “Project Lim[b]itless,” an initiative that leverages cellphone and 3D printing technology to significantly reduce the cost and time it takes to produce the custom sockets of a prosthetic limb. The team’s ultimate goal is to make prostheses more accessible, particularly for people in rural communities and developing countries.

For Lin, helping amputees regain their mobility and re-master the physicality of life is very personal. In 2016, he lost his right leg below the knee to a vehicle accident. With the help of state-of-the-art prosthetic shaping, Lin has been able to maintain an incredibly active lifestyle and pursue dream projects across the globe.

Speaker Profile


Dr. Ramesh R. Rao. Dr. Rao has been a faculty member at UC San Diego since 1984, and Director of the Qualcomm Institute, UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), since 2001. He holds the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technologies in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD, and is a member of the school’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department.

Prior to QI (Calit2), Professor Rao served as the Director of UCSD’s Center for Wireless Communications (CWC). Dr. Rao is involved on a day-to-day basis with a wide variety of research initiatives at QI. He leads several major interdisciplinary and collaborative projects and has been a PI on dozens of federal-, state-, foundation- and industry-funded grants. Dr. Rao is an IEEE Fellow and Senior Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology. He was named a Member of the Board of the Academy of Neurosciences for Architecture, a Member of the Rady Children’s Hospital and Health Center Board IT Task Force and serves on the Board of Directors of CONNECT. Dr. Rao has been a long time member of the San Diego Indian American Society and currently serves as the Vice President for the Board of Governors.

Dr. Rao earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1984, after receiving his M.S. from the same institution in 1982. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in 1980 from the University of Madras (the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli). Dr. Rao received the distinguished alumnus award from the National Institute of Technology in 2010, the ECE Distinguished alumni award from the University of Maryland in 2012, the Professional Gordon Engineering Leadership Award from UCSD’s Gordon Engineering Leadership Center in 2010. He also received the 2011 Casa Familiar Abrazo Award for engagement with underprivileged area of San Diego.

Albert Yu-Min Lin


Dr. Lin is an award winning scientist, technologist, explorer, and adventurer with a knack for storytelling both on stage and the big screen. As a problem solver, he has reinvented how we explore and has made headlines around the world for his expansive work combining technology with exploration. His projects range from an effort to search for the tomb of Genghis Khan in Mongolia (using satellites, crowdsourcing, drones, and ground penetrating radar) to expeditions remapping major sites in China and Guatemala (using satellites and Lidar) to his most recent efforts to redefine human bionic capabilities with bio-monitors and 'flow' experiments.