Software People Stories

In this episode, K Ramkumar, known as Ram or Kram - Director Product Mangement, Salesforce, in conversation with Gayatri shares 

• Starting his passion in software in the way of coding Fortran in his alma matter BITS Pilani. 
• Ram talks about starting in the software development working in small organisation in their ecommerce portals before moving into collaboration software
• Within the span of 25 years Ramkumar has travessed the depths of collaboration, communication and security using cloud and data analytics technologies
• Ramkumar describes his journey as continuing to expand in complex areas due to his deep problem solving skills
• Ram talks about taking a plunge in the product management after nearly spending a decade in engineering. He also shared some of his vulnerable moments when he moved from being a team leader of 20 individuals to an individual contributor.
• Product management certification in IIM and ISB has helped but his innate curiosity is what has catapulted to being a product leader today
• Ramkumar advises professionals to try different areas within software from business analysis, program management, scrum mastery, automation, data analytics and product management before assessing the area of specialisation
• Ramkumar shares of the his keen sense of understanding where the customers needs and marry that with technology potential and continuous experiment
• Ramkumar’s key advise to software professionals is to stay curious and continuous learn technologies with a beginners mindset

Ramkumar is an engineering graduate of BITS Pilani, with management education from IIM B, certification from ISB. Ramkumar is the Director of Product Management for Salesforce. He specializes in the field of security. 

Ramkumar started his career in India in Novell, Siemens before moving to the US to join startup boom in ecommerce. 

He leveraged his email/collaboration experience in Cisco and released several notable products for Cisco Systems. His products have won several awards. 

Ramkumar joined the product management in Cisco systems as an experiment. Ramkumar is a recipient of Presidents’ award for Salesforce along with several coveted awards.

Ramkumar can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramkumarkaleeswaran/

We continue our conversation with Sowmya Gopalan and Ramya Gopalan, the first software twins to be featured on this podcast.

In the first part they shared their origin story and also experiences of working in cutting edge technologies.

We paused with a question on how they pay it forward to nurture young professionals.

In this episode, Sowmya and Ramya continue to share

• How one might feel hesitant to approach colleagues or seniors, when starting on a career
• Nurturing the quality of giving space to others in their seniors, particularly to the junior members in the team
• Being open to solutions and valuing inputs from all; about sharing tasks to be done equally among the team members
• Their experience of being women in tech
• Being in a team with more women
• Now the ratios are more skewed
• Feeling more comfortable when there are more women colleagues
• Moving into teams where being the only woman in the team
• Though bonding well with colleagues irrespective of gender, having women colleagues being more supporting
• Having a lady mentor when starting one’s career being of great help
• Their thoughts on metaverse and spaces removed further from reality and need for better regulation and ethics
• Their thoughts on the importance of data in machine learning and how to address situations where there may not be sufficient data
• About using non verbal cues in video processing
• About extracting intelligence from any kind of audio signals
• Their career advice for persons starting in IT
• Their approach to balancing work and life.. Work life harmony!

Sowmya Gopalan has 12+ years experience in researching and developing computer vision technologies for consumer electronics. With a formal background in signal processing, I specialize in researching, prototyping and developing robust software solutions for image and video understanding. I tend to be most satisfied when I have the opportunity of seeing a product through its entire lifecycle - from concept, to PoC, to production software. I thrive in collaborative, kind and multi-disciplinary settings where interest and drive matter more than qualification. Outside work, you will find me trying out new recipes in the kitchen with Ramya, or reading a book in the historical fiction genre - I am curious about the world wars and modern history in general, so if you have a good book to recommend, feel free to drop in a line at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sowmya-gopalan-1840719/ 

Ramya Goplan is a software engineer who has worked on various consumer electronic products during her 12 year tenure in Amazon. Her interests and expertise include working on applications that are rooted in traditional signal processing and machine learning science. Having worked on the speech enhancement pipeline for the first gen and next gen Echo and Alexa products, she is slightly partial to speech and audio tech. She finds taking an idea from prototype to optimized embedded C/C++ implementation extremely enjoyable and satisfying. Outside work, Ramya loves to cook, sketch and listen to podcasts about health and wellness; Huberman Lab being her current favorite.

You can reach Ramya at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramya-gopalan-b3bb506/

First, our heartfelt thanks to all you listeners for the love you have shown and for permitting the Software People Stories to be part of your listening time over the last 200 weeks!

Your wishes and encouragement is what has kept us going and will continue to do so.

Thank you

This is a very special episode for the Software People Stories. This is the 200th episode.

So, for this occasion, we have 2 guests - Sowmya Gopalan and Ramya Goplan - twin sisters, now working at two of the IT giants, doing leading edge work. They have very interesting stories of their careers and perspectives.

This episode is also special, as we have all the three hosts present!

We will be publishing this conversation in 2 parts.

This is part 1 , where Sowmya and Ramya share

• How they got into IT and chose engineering for studies: 
• Sowmya:
• electronics and communication
• Masters in signal processing
• Internship in interdigital : cognitive radio applications
• Interest in images and videos
• Joining Amazon for a startup like project working on cutting edge technologies
• Computer vision features of Amazon Echo
• Then joining Apple, continuing to work on camera and photos app
• Ramya
• Being clear about not doing biology, and preferring match and computer science
• Telecom as specialization in undergraduate
• Getting in to same university and having the same advisor
• Interning in the same company
• Audio signal processing
• After 8 years, getting into health org, applying AI/ML etc
• Their experiences and thoughts on developing embedded solutions
• Using the customer satisfaction parameters as primary indicators of readiness of a release
• About the dependency management and change control practices at Apple
• The thrill of knowing that the first code written getting into production
• How aware the developers are of customer issues and usage experience, being emphasized by the customer obsession culture at Amazon
• One disappointing experience when the market acceptance of a child safety feature was somewhat underwhelming
• Their experience of having 21 patents between the two of them and tips for others to think of developing patentable ideas
• If they have tried pair programming between the two of them
• How they bounce off ideas and support each other
• Their mantra: start simple, keep improving, keep fundamentals strong, how textbooks and theory always help
• If they had any thoughts of creating something together
• Whether they lean in on each other and how they support each other
• And, the difference having or not having such support makes on an individual
• Having a safe space when the other person is non-judgemental and trustworthy

We conclude this episode with the question of how they nurture or develop younger professionals.

The answer to that question and a lot more insights, some technical and many on the softer aspects such as work life harmony will be in part 2 of this conversation. Do not miss the next episode, coming up in a week.

Sowmya Gopalan has 12+ years experience in researching and developing computer vision technologies for consumer electronics. With a formal background in signal processing, I specialize in researching, prototyping and developing robust software solutions for image and video understanding. I tend to be most satisfied when I have the opportunity of seeing a product through its entire lifecycle - from concept, to PoC, to production software. I thrive in collaborative, kind and multi-disciplinary settings where interest and drive matter more than qualification. Outside work, you will find me trying out new recipes in the kitchen with Ramya, or reading a book in the historical fiction genre - I am curious about the world wars and modern history in general, so if you have a good book to recommend, feel free to drop in a line at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sowmya-gopalan-1840719/

Ramya Goplan is a software engineer who has worked on various consumer electronic products during her 12 year tenure in Amazon. Her interests and expertise include working on applications that are rooted in traditional signal processing and machine learning science. Having worked on the speech enhancement pipeline for the first gen and next gen Echo and Alexa products, she is slightly partial to speech and audio tech. She finds taking an idea from prototype to optimized embedded C/C++ implementation extremely enjoyable and satisfying. Outside work, Ramya loves to cook, sketch and listen to podcasts about health and wellness; Huberman Lab being her current favorite.

You can reach Ramya at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramya-gopalan-b3bb506/

This is the second part of the conversation with Janakiraman Srinivasan, known as Jani.

In the first part, Jani spoke of his initial years in IT and the long career he had with Wipro. We ended that episode when it was a segue into his entrepreneurial roles.

In this episode,Jani continues to share more stories related to 

• The startup bug that led him to be a co-founder of Mindtree
• Getting an international experience, and the tech boom and startup culture in the silicon valley creating a strong impression 
• The emotional connect he had with Mr. Ashok Soota
• Changes in his experience between two startup contexts 19 years apart
• How these changes influenced some of the policies and strategies in the second startup
• The benefit of complementary strengths among the co-founders
• The experience of incubating startups within mindtree
• How he moved on to set up Nuvepro
• How he keeps himself updated on emerging and futuristic technologies
• And how he finds time for all this
• His emotionally stressful phases, when thinking of or making transitions across organizations
• The importance of people in the success of a company
• His career advice for people considering a career in IT and for those already in IT

Janakiraman Srinivasan is currently the Chairman of Nuvepro Technologies, a startup in Cloud Technologies and also President of Indo Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industries (IJCCI) - Karnataka. 

Prior to above, Janakiraman was the President & CTO of Mindtree Ltd, and was one of the Co-Founder and Board Member too. He served Mindtree from 1999 to 2014. 

Prior to Mindtree, Janakiraman served as the Chief Executive of Global R&D Unit of Wipro where he started his career as one among first five employees in 1980. 

Janakiraman was one of the Co-Founder of India Semiconductor Association (ISA) in 2002 and served for six years in its executive council, and later as its Chairman and Advisor too. 

Janakiraman did his BE at Regional Engineering College - Trichi (1973-78) and MTech from IIT-Chennai (1978-80). He is a Distinguished Alumni of REC for his Entrepreneurial Excellence. 

Janakiraman has served the board of Yokogawa India Ltd till March 2019 for four years. Currently a Board Member in startups Nuvepro Technologies, Innohub Technologies, Sanohub Technologies and Netra Accelerator Foundation. He is actively involved in promoting startups and entrepreneurial environment in Karnataka.

Jani may be contacted at janiuma @ gmail.com

In this episode, Janakiraman Srinivasan, known as Jani - an IT industry veteran, in conversation with Shiv shares 

• His childhood days in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu
• His Bachelors from REC Trichy and Masters from IIT Madras and getting into Wipro as a campus recruitee as Employee # 3 
• His father’s role in getting him good education
• The experience of being among the first employees in a newly launched company in a truly entrepreneurial environment
• Setting up an R&D team and activity in Bangalore and then setting up a factory in Mysore
• How they needed to dismantle the door, to get the first computer out
• The significance of bonds with colleagues
• The early culture at Wipro that stressed on many core values
• His experience in transitioning across various roles - from technical to business responsibilities
• Setting up a system integration or engineering group
• Wanting to move base to Chennai for personal reasons, taking up a role of a field specialist for the southern region
• Taking up the role of a regional field engineering manager, as the person playing that role moved on
• The transition to an individual contributor to leading a 50 member team and manage the business operations
• Becoming the product manager for the micro systems [PCs], that was a volume, low margin business that still needed superlative customer support experience
• Around 1991, being ‘elected’ to become the R&D head, when the then head took up a role to set up Wipro Systems 
• Launching the Product Engineering Services business to take the R&D expertise to customers
• Around 94-95, when quality standards were becoming more popular and mandatory, becoming CEO of Global R&D 
• Growing the R&D team from about 350 to 2200 persons

In part 2, we hear Jani’s story with mindtree and beyond.

Janakiraman Srinivasan is currently the Chairman of Nuvepro Technologies, a startup in Cloud Technologies and also President of Indo Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industries (IJCCI) - Karnataka. 

Prior to above, Janakiraman was the President & CTO of Mindtree Ltd, and was one of the Co-Founder and Board Member too. He served Mindtree from 1999 to 2014. 

Prior to Mindtree, Janakiraman served as the Chief Executive of Global R&D Unit of Wipro where he started his career as one among first five employees in 1980. 

Janakiraman was one of the Co-Founder of India Semiconductor Association (ISA) in 2002 and served for six years in its executive council, and later as its Chairman and Advisor too. 

Janakiraman did his BE at Regional Engineering College - Trichi (1973-78) and MTech from IIT-Chennai (1978-80). He is a Distinguished Alumni of REC for his Entrepreneurial Excellence. 

Janakiraman has served the board of Yokogawa India Ltd till March 2019 for four years. Currently a Board Member in startups Nuvepro Technologies, Innohub Technologies, Sanohub Technologies and Netra Accelerator Foundation. He is actively involved in promoting startups and entrepreneurial environment in Karnataka.

Jani may be contacted at janiuma @ gmail.com

In this episode, Victor Jayakaran- shares his story and experiences related to:

• His graduation from the Madras Institute of Technology and post graduation from the Indian Institute of Science
• Getting a campus placement at ITI and applying for a job with ISRO
• On his guide NJ Rao’s suggestion, choosing to join a small and growing company, Wipro
• Joining Wipro in August 1979 and starting work at an IISc lab
• Being part of the team that decided what systems to go for
• Working on technology transfer, with a view to make it as ready to use as possible for their customers
• Moving on to a hardware specific role, doing everything from system design, testing, purchasing the BOM
• Interfacing with the Govt. of Karnataka for setting up the Mysore factory
• Moving to Mysore as part of the team that set up the facility
• Returning to bangalore in 1983 - 88 MG Road
• Being into hardware, subsystems design etc
• When Wipro Systems Limited was set up, moving a part of that team
• Getting back to Wipro Infotech
• Hardware, software [OS port], to VLSI technologies
• Exploring opportunities in VLSI design
• Recalling that he had the best bosses in all his roles
• GL, purchasing, sales processing etc apps as part of delivering computers that can be readily used
• On taking up and playing different roles across organizational functions
• Experience of working with other organizations that operate at different paces
• Working in an open culture, where everyone’s ideas and experience are welcome
• Working 18 hour days - in a charged up atmosphere, as part of a very small team
• Getting opportunities to meet customers, when they had issues!
• Making problems into an advantage
• Techie customers like to buy from techies, rather than sales roles
• His experience of working with Japanese customers, who were very detail oriented
• Growing to be a leader of others who were peers till the previous day
• Learning to be objective in assessments and sharing reinforcing feedback
• On the emphasis on processes in Wipro, that helped doing things systematically and consistently
• The friendship bonds that kept him in the organization over time
• The courage a leader needs to bring in the right people as well as be ready to let go of people who don't fit
• About the experience of a spin-in, that could not meet the initial set business goals
• One important ingredient for startup success: fire in the belly
• How technologically deep should a leader be? The team should be confident of your vision
• Genuineness of the leader is critical to build a successful team
• His experience and views on work-life balance, particularly after getting married
• Getting an advice from one of his bosses about working Smart v/s working hard
• His career tips for entry level and mid career IT professionals
• Enjoy the work
• build camaraderie

Victor Jayakaran, did his B.Sc (Physics), at A.M. Jain College, Madras. He then did his graduation in Electronics From the Madras Institute of Technology. He then did his M.E. from  the School of Automation,  at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 1979.  He then started with Wipro as their first employee, to be part of Wipro’s Information Technology Business. He was with Wipro for more than 20 years, from 1979 starting off as their first employee (R&D Engineer),  till 2000, when he was the Vice President of Engg at EnThink, Wipro’s startup venture.   He then left them in May 2000, to join SCM India as President of its India operations, which was one of the  two core development centers, worldwide,  in the domain of Digital Media and   Smart Card readers and terminals. Then in 2006 he stepped out of SCM to create SCOLIS Technologies which later was acquired by the Identiv Group and merged with his former company SCM. He   headed  the new  Identiv Tech Center in India, located in Chennai till 2016, when he retired from hands-on operations.

Victor is married to Sunithy,  and they have two grown up children, both of whom are married and are blessed with four grand children.   Victor and Sunithy  as  part of the  team of trustees, started and are  running  Amazing Love Home, a home for the elderly  near Chennai, since 2009.

Victor may be contacted at: [email protected]

In this episode, Sai Krishna, a serial entrepreneur, who calls himself a metaverse plumber, loves creating interesting applications based on emerging and maturing technologies. In this conversation, he shares

• How a decentralized squad model, working with local partners and having an engineering focus for differentiation would help scale and localize, as needed
• How to build an organization to realize the vision of the founders
• Cadence of 2 weeks or 12 weeks, multi-skilled squads
• Willingness to learn and time to feedback
• A founder’s feelings related to exit decisions
• Founder’s formula: have fun, optimize for joy
• A founder’s job is to make everyone in the team to reflect back and feel the impact of their work
• Metaverse: hype or old wine or something substantial?
• Why 3D printing technology underdelivered on its promise
• How finances (and capital)  are critical to help new technologies become practical and increase wide adoption
• How commoditized solutions can trigger a race to the bottom affecting the survivability of a company
• Impact of new technologies on the carbon footprint
• Oblivious, brash and corrective : the three stages of companies operating to exploit new and emerging technologies
• Tips for anyone looking to get deeper into the metaverse ecosystem
• Step1: understand what variables you want to optimize for
• Financial gains, Wealth: building a company is probably the hardest
• Joy of learning being part of an emerging space
• Solving a problem that itches you
• Find a reason to resonate with the cause
• The market also needs to be ready
• Would you see it as a decades long journey, 15 hour days.. Yes, not just as an option to make quick money
• Cobbling a team of like minded lunatics..
• If he chose to be in AI because AI is in his name!

Sai has spent more than 9 years in building deep tech startups. He was an early believer and pioneer in the Metaverse, and built & backed startups in the domain. Notably:

- His Virtual & Augmented Reality venture, Scapic was acquired by Walmart/Flipkart

- He backed a venture studio for the Metaverse, Cope. Studio, which was acquired by Polygon/Matic

- His marketplace for Metaverse assets, Reality Tools, was acquired by MotionPage

Sai currently leads Flipkart Labs, where he focuses on new deep tech initiatives such as Camera (Augmented Reality) & Firedrops (NFTs & Web3) in the Walmart Group. He is currently an advisor at Polygon & Polygon Studios. He is alum of Stanford University Graduate School of Business, recipient of the Indian National Startup Awards and a fellowship recipient from Ondeck. 

He's been awarded by organizations such as Facebook, the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards, Wharton and IIM. Sai has delivered 80+ keynotes at international conferences, IIT-Bombay, NSRCEL & more. 

When it's not about work, Sai is quintessentially south Indian, with an affinity to dosas and filter coffee. You can reach out to Sai at [email protected] on anything around building moonshots.

In this episode, Sai Krishna, a serial entrepreneur, who calls himself a metaverse plumber, loves creating interesting applications based on emerging and maturing technologies. In this conversation, he shares

• His adventures and misadventures in IT
• Hailing from a south Indian family that emphasized education
• Moving to Bangalore to continue his education in RV College
• His attraction to build products, more with an intention of having fun in doing it
• His first product in the education space
• Understanding the need to think like an entrepreneurship and getting sponsored for an entrepreneurship program at Stanford
• Starting his company Scapic - with AR/VR as core technologies and being acquired by Flipkart
• His approach to identifying problems to solve
• Shiny toy syndrome: to pick something that looks cool; these may not be a venture worthy idea
• Choosing a problem that matches your expertise: your and your team’s complementary skills; this helps accelerating to market
• Select entrepreneurs: going after massive market opportunity
• Lousy team, great market, market wins
• Great team , lousy market, market wins
• Great team, great market - nonlinear outcomes
• How to think scale
• Visualizing the finish line: that is not a goal post; focus on the next milestone
• The importance of obsessing over the first cohort for a startup
• The value of creating a playbook after validation and further experimentation with the second and third cohorts
• Differences between B2B and B2C solutions
• How a decentralized squad model, working with local partners and having an engineering focus for differentiation would help scale and localize, as needed

Sai has spent more than 9 years in building deep tech startups. He was an early believer and pioneer in the Metaverse, and built & backed startups in the domain. Notably:

- His Virtual & Augmented Reality venture, Scapic was acquired by Walmart/Flipkart

- He backed a venture studio for the Metaverse, Cope.Studio, which was acquired by Polygon/Matic

- His marketplace for Metaverse assets, Reality Tools, was acquired by MotionPage

Sai currently leads Flipkart Labs, where he focuses on new deep tech initiatives such as Camera (Augmented Reality) & Firedrops (NFTs & Web3) in the Walmart Group. He is currently an advisor at Polygon & Polygon Studios. He is alum of Stanford University Graduate School of Business, recipient of the Indian National Startup Awards and a fellowship recipient from Ondeck. 

He's been awarded by organisations such as Facebook, the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards, Wharton and IIM. Sai has delivered 80+ keynotes at international conferences, IIT-Bombay, NSRCEL & more. 

When it's not about work, Sai is quintessentially south Indian, with an affinity to dosas and filter coffee.

You can reach out to Sai at [email protected] on anything around building moonshots.

In this episode, Usha from PM Power Consulting is in conversation with Chitra and shares her 3 plus decades of experience in software and technology around -

• Working at Raman institute for 10 years, her first exposure to computing
•  A research institute expects you to do your own learning, but of course
• Writing programs for 'astronomical' data analysis and structures of crystals in pascal & Fortran, 
• Finding logic was easy, testing with missing data and reconstructing it was challenging
• Becoming self-reliant, so finding solutions is now natural
• Building test harnesses from scratch,
• Joining i2 tech in supply chain planning
• Setup the first performance testing lab, getting things started
• Working with resource constraints while setting up the performance lab
• Learned how software products were sold, understanding product ROI
• Learning from Eliyahu Goldratt's book and seeing those principles applied in product development
• Customer experiences & product delivery
• A stint in Australia via Siemens in the telecom domain - testing & system integration
• The evolution towards collective responsiblity from specialized roles & functions
• Concept of quality and embracing culture around it, getting people aligned around quality goals
• Views on establishing test procedures, measuring effectiveness & ROI
• Customer experiences right under their noses
• Importance of building the right teams
• Important to follow your heart & passion

Usha is a Consultant with PM Power. She has worked for companies like Tech Mahindra, Siemens and Mindtree before founding LastMile Consulting Technology Solutions.

She has been a practitioner of Agile for 15+ years. She trains and helps large teams adopt agile methods

In this episode, Abhay Havaldar shares his story and experiences related to:

• Starting his IT career with a role in  testing software and going on to play other roles of marketing support and sales
• Product management and support with a dealing room package
• Always willing to experiment and joining a venture capital firm - Draper International
• Early stage investing, General Atlantic, India - and a boutique investment firm
• Why he got into IT
• How he positions an IT solution to a prospective client
• His experience of product management, explained in today’s terminology, as Software as a Service
• His experience with developing software solutions under a contract and the benefit of listening skills to add context to contracts
• The power users wield in product led growth models
• His starting out being a venture capitalist as a partner directly with the legendary Bill Draper
• His approach of investing in the plan first, than the market opportunity that is forecast
• The importance of evaluating all risks and being humble
• His thoughts on scaling startups and the Powerlocker model adopted by his form
• His views on reviews by investors in the context of fundraising and context of goals
• How he approaches theme based investing
• His approach to learning from others
• Being wrong is a great time to learn
• His experience and perspectives on the social sector
• The importance of being comfortable with storytelling, particularly for entrepreneurs

Experienced Board Member with a demonstrated history of working in the venture capital and private equity industry. Skilled in Corporate Finance, Venture Capital, Investment Banking, Strategy. Strong business development professional with a MSc (Sloan Fellow) focused in Business Administration and Management, General from London Business School.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhay-havaldar-a4a46523/