Entrepreneurs

Manoj Meena’s family hails from a village about 30 km from Jaipur. The family is into agriculture, with no business background. The pinnacle of career success for the Meena clan  was getting a government job. By that humble yardstick, Manoj’s dad became a huge success when he landed up a […]

Yatin grew up in the small town of Kurudwadi, Solapur. His dad used to run a watch repair shop over there. After doing his schooling at Kurudwadi, Yatin shifted for Junior College to Solapur. He surprised the family by flunking his grade 12 exams. His math score was 14/100. Dad […]

Vishal Purohit was a Bulls Eye student in 1997. He is a BE in Comp. Sc from DY Patil College, Pune. He is now Chief Executive Officer at Wooqer. He is also an Angel Investor. He was the founder of GarageAgain Ventures and CoreObjects prior to bootstrapping Wooqer. Wooqer is […]

Vinayak Joglekar was employed as an EDP (Electronic Data Processing) manager at Alfa Laval in the eighties, when he caught the entrepreneurial bug. Being a risk-averse manager from IIM Cal, he applied his first lean principle, by not quitting his job, but hiring an employee at Rs. 500 per month, […]

The entrepreneur talks are usually tagged My Story sessions at TiE. Vinay Nathan started off by professing that it is our Story – so we heard about how he and his 3 partners together have built this company. Vinay’s dad was a marketing manager at Cummins India Ltd. Vinay has […]

Vijay joined Xytel after his 7 year stint at Vigyan Ashram. Xytel had a JV with Powergas for making pilot plants. The company got taken over by a competitor in 2005, which is when Vijay decided to leave – and set up Texol with a few of his old colleagues. […]

Venkatesh is a finance guy. He spent the first 15 years of his life as a bean counter in a financial services compaby – from 1989 to 2004. From then on the journey has been from seagull to eagle. What I liked about his talk was that he would keep […]

Vasu is a first generation entrepreneur. He did his civil engg from COEP – as it was the easiest to get in. Joined corporate life immediately thereafter. When after 7 years of work, he had accumulated enough capital, he decided to buy an apartment. He found the building quality extremely […]

Vandana was born in London to Indian immigrant parents. She grew up being very interested in Marine Geography, but her very conventional dad have her 3 career choices: Doctor, Lawyer or Accountant. Vandana started off life as a radio jockey on a series of Asian radio stations, while she was […]

Mohit Gundecha and Suruchi Wagh studied at COEP. Mohit is a Marwadi from Ahmednagar, Suruchi a Maratha from Aurangabad. Suruchi is a year junior to Mohit and they first met when they worked together in Abhiyanta, the COEP college magazine. Mohit left COEP immediately after his bachelors to do his […]

Surinder’s family shifted post partition to India from what is now PoK. He was born in Delhi in 1947, where his father had shifted to, post partition. Surinder did his schooling in Srinagar and then went on to do his BSc in Botany at Science College, Jammu. Followed that up […]

Srikrishna Karkare, an IIT Bombay alumnus, spent his formative years at Thermax. He quit in 1988 to start a small trading concern for the chemical and allied industry. His wife Alka, who is also his batchmate from IIT Bombay, continued working with Praj, and was the family financial pillar in […]

Shridhar’s dad used to work with the Posts and Telegraphs department. Dad was a family educationist of sorts. Shridhar’s grandfather was not well educated. His dad was the eldest of 10 kids. He took responsibility for getting all of them educated. And then there were dad’s own three kids: Shridhar […]

Sharad Sanghi is a Bombay lad. Got his first internship to computers in his uncle’s company – Applied Electromagnetics, a Delhi based company, which worked on rugged computers. Btw, the uncle’s partner was the current CM of Maharashtra, Prithwiraj Ghorpade, his uncle’s classmate at Berkeley. Liked computers –  went on […]

Shachin Bhardwaj was your typical IT engineer, a bachelor who stayed back late to enjoy dinner on company account. The atypicality was in applying his IT skills to structure the offerings of all the delivery and take-away joints in Pune. What started off as an Excel sheet which was shared […]

Satish Magar grew up in a farmer’s family – in the city of Pune. Their village (now Magarpatta) was a very unique geographical island. Bounded on three sides by roads – and on the last by a railway line, the families have stayed together – and in harmony. Satish’s own […]

After his education at St Joseph’s, Khadki, Samuel Abraham went on to do his BSc in Chemistry at Nowrosjee Wadia College. Those days there was a one year PG course in petroleum which Sam enrolled for. Almost immediately after the completion of that course, Sam got a contract job with […]

There’s a group of intelligent(!) sardars who plan to give an IQ test to their sardar fellowmates. Henceforth a meeting is arranged & all the sardars in the community are invited. So first, they call Banta Singh and ask him what is 10+35?He thinks for quite sometime, and finally answers 55.All […]

Ranga Bodavala was born into an agricultural family in Guntur. Wanted to be an engineer, but his farmer-dad, who is also a trained cost accountant, made the young Ranga do his B.Com. An MBA from Andhra University followed, where Ranga got both his naukri and chokri. He met his better […]