Meet our experts- our biggest resource for entrepreneurial know-how!
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
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Abhishek Rungta
Abhishek is an entrepreneur from Kolkata. He has been in business since 1997 and has turned around several successful ventures in the internet service domain. He has grown his ventures organically without any external capital. Besides this, he enjoys managing his ventures and this is the reason he never sold a company that he created. Abhishek has done his education from South Point High School. He went on to do his Bachelors in Commerce with Honours in Accountancy from St. Xaviers College, Kolkata. He then did his MS in Multimedia Technology from University of Bath, UK in 1999-2000. He has special interest in software engineering, marketing management and strategy planning. He is a proud recipient of Gold Award of Duke of Edinburgh’s Award from HRH Prince Edward during his visit to India in 1997.
Abhishek Rungta is currently the founder and CEO of Indusnet Technologies, a firm that specializes in all things Internet – design, development, market, training and SEO.
LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | Blog
Aditya Kapil
Aditya has a PhD from the University of York, UK, has done post doctoral research at The University of Chicago, US, and NCBS, India, and published seven papers in peer-reviewed journals. He expresses his creative energy by playing the guitar, with a style influenced by the blues.
Aditya Nataraj
Aditya is an operations professional with rich experience in marketing and client relationships, and proposal evaluation. He co-leads investments of the Ventureast Tenet Fund in the technology solutions space. His portfolio companies include Seclore, a document security solutions provider, Mobien, an enterprise mobility solutions provider; Lattice Bridge, a voice recognition technology solutions provider; and Vortex, a manufacturer of low cost rural ATMs.
Aditya works closely with portfolio companies, using his operational skills and network to add value post investment. He has helped portfolio companies in developing investment memorandums and other related activities for raising follow-on funding.He also guides companies in their marketing and pricing activities. In the case of one opportunity which eventually did not materialize, Aditya had built the entire cost model, and helped the promoters put the cost structure in place.
LinkedIn | Facebook
Ajeet Khurana
Educationist, Angel Investor, Mentor, Digital Marketer
Ajeet is a Member of the Board of Directors of Carve Niche Technologies, a technology enabled K-10 content provider. he is also Spearheading e-commerce education on About.com; part of The New York Times Company
He is an active member of Mumbai Angels: deal champion, screening committee member, investor. and also a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin. Ajeet has two decades of experience in the Education space, with many firsts to credit. He has Lead teams across functional areas to get businesses and projects off the ground, Designed teacher-training that elevates quality,without diluting individual teaching style. Ajeet has also harnessed technology for multi-locational education, without undermining the role of the teacher.
Ajeet is known for overcoming financial and operational challenges of running education business networks. Designing curriculum, generating and acquiring content. Striking the crucial balance between educational objectives and business objectives
He can wear the investor’s shoes as well as the entrepreneur’s hat.
Anand Lunia
Anand has over 15 years of experience as entrepreneur, venture investor and corporate executive. He is currently ED at Seedfund and has led investments in tech, internet, education and retail ventures. Anand is Co-founder of Brainvisa, leading e-learning company of India and is merited with the creation of its business plan, and has led the team in fund raising, ramping up and exit. He has also been the Exec. VP Operations of Hurix Technologies- a leading publishing KPO, responsible for an 800-strong creative team in operations, sales and marketing. He has an MBA from IIM and is a Bachelor of Engineering. He has worked at Asian Paints, ICICI Treasury, Lionbridge and has also served as Guest Faculty, Biz-plan mentor and Jury member at IITs, IIMs, SP Jain, NITIE etc. As an Angel, he has invested in Inkfruit (Investor- SAIF), Faasos and others. Anand is a Charter member of TiE along with being an active mentor and faculty.
Twitter | LinkedIn
Anirban Bhattacharya
Anirban is a Sales and Marketing professional with a proven track-record of over 16+ years of Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Consulting, Strategy and Relationship Management experience. In his earlier life, Anirban handled various sales and marketing roles with diverse organizations, cutting across industries and geographies, giving him valuable exposure to various facets of Leadership, Strategy,Sales, Marketing, Business & Customer Development, and Relationship Management. After getting a management degree from IIM Calcutta, Anirban earned his spurs in ITC, before working in various sales and marketing positions in American Express, ICICI Prudential, Metro Cash & Carry and PricewaterhouseCoopers..
As a co-founding partner in The Painted Sky, Anirban leverages his experience and learnings to conduct senior level training programmes, covering such topics as leadership, team effectiveness, negotiation, sales management and building relationships and customer loyalty and key account management.
Twitter | LinkedIn
Anu Sharma
A graduate of XLRI (Class of 1987), Anu has been the Global HR leader and member of the Executive Committee in multiple organizations- iGATE Global Solutions , Quintant Services, Aurigene Technologies (A DRL Company), indya.com portal Pvt. Ltd. (A STAR investee Company), Sony Entertainment Television (part of Sony Group of Companies). Her experience extends from leading organizational transformation efforts to setting up robust HR functions for global start ups like Aurigene and Quintant. She is the co founder and CEO of The HR Practice.
LinkedIn | Website
Ashim Bose
Ashim Bose helps firms create initiatives in business development, sales and strategic 
alliances, and sharpen and institutionalize their ability to execute with distinction. He has global management experience in consulting, business development and strategic alliances at Fortune 500 firms and an Indian conglomerate. Ashim has assisted in establishing cross-border businesses in information technology, and renewable energy, and he currently advises the board of an Indo-German joint venture. A NEN Goldman Sachs Mentor, Ashim assists entrepreneurs and startups in evaluating opportunities, clarifying their vision, defining strategies, and in executing their plans. Ashim is a National Talent Scholar, with a Bachelors degree in Engineering and has graduated from the Indian Institute of Management.
LinkedIn | Twitter
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Chandu Nair
A co-founder of Scope e-Knowledge Center, a pioneering knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) company, Chandu is a graduate in commerce from Madras University and a Postgraduate in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He has over 28 years of experience in industry consultancy, business information and media. While his domain areas of focus were business development and fund raising, his passion was enterprise building and transformation.
Chandu was part of the core leadership team that saw Scope transform itself from a boutique market research firm to an internet content portal to a KPO, as also scaling up from a 40 people to about 1000 professionals. In addition, Scope also changed from being India centric to having a global orientation and footprint. Scope has received angel, VC and strategic investor funding.
Apart from Scope, he was also involved in other entrepreneurial ventures, many of which were ho-hum or failed, and one B2B portal was sold to an internet major.
In India, he has been a member of various industry panels in CII, Indo American Chamber of Commerce (IACC), Institute of Management Consultants of India (IMCI) as also overseas professional bodies such as NFAIS, American Business Media (ABM), Licensing Executives Society (LES) and Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA).
He was also a visiting faculty in various business schools such as IIM-Bangalore, IIM-Kozhikode, IFMR- Open University (UK), Bharathiar University MBA department among others, something he does on and off nowadays.
He was previously correspondent for Business World magazine, India’s largest circulated business magazine, and Area Manager for Asian Paints (I) Ltd., India’s largest paint company. He recently (Aug 2011) exited from Scope e-Knowledge Center and is currently engaged in advising entrepreneurs of start-ups /early stage companies. He is also a member of the core team coordinating TiE-Chennai’s entrepreneur mentoring initiative as also a resource for incubators, NEN and college e-cells.
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Deepan Chakravarthy
Deepan is the man behind some of the successful Facebook games like Sudoku. Deepan is one of the founders of HashCube and has been running this startup since early 2008. HashCube was incubated at iAccelerator– IIM Ahmadabad’s incubation program. He and his friend Ram were very passionate about puzzles and did a website for solving Sudoku puzzles during their college days which then became the basis for their company. They started out one year after graduation.
LinkedIn | Website
Dhirendra R
Dhirendra is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Eduquity Career Technologies. His 
experience in the software industry spans more than a decade. He co-founded Ampersand Software in 1989, where he also managed the operations and business development for the company. In this capacity, he explored International markets and successfully created business opportunities for the company in Europe and Asia. In his role as CEO, Eduquity, he lends his efforts towards ingraining the organization’s vision and strategy in its people and making strategic decisions towards the achievement of the same.
LinkedIn | Blog
Dorai Thodla
Dorai is based California, USA and hails from Chennai, India. He is a Technopreneur ( built two companies in India and two in US), a Mentor and a Coach on Innovation. He wears several hats as CEO of iMorph Inc (a company he co-founded) and Innovation Catalyst. In addition to iMorph, he started the Startup Special Interest Group at TiE Chennai and has also participated in the Advisory Board at Chennai K-Community (representing TiE Chennai). Dorai is one of the Mentors at Nasscom Emerge at Chennai. He has started and is the Chief Mentor of Innovation Cell at KCG College.
LinkedIn | Website | Twitter
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Freeman Murray
Freeman Murray is a second generation technology entrepreneur who has been working with internet startups as a volunteer, employee, founder, investor and mentor for almost 20 years. He believes the Internet revolution belongs to the youth and has been in India the past 7 years exploring how to help young people here create technology enabled businesses.
He is currently running a program at the StartupVillage.in
called the StartupSchool which helps establsih
first time entrepreneurs in the habits they’ll need
to be successful as technology entrepreneurs.
LinkedIn | Blog | Twitter
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Gaurav Jain
Gaurav Jain and Pallavi Gupta were techies working in Bengaluru before they turned entrepreneurs. Mast Kalandar, the chain of restaurants they started in 2005, now has 18 outlets and they plan to expand this to 100 by 2012. Gaurav Jain , Founder CEO, has been a retail enthusiast all his life. He comes from a family with retail consumer background and has always been passionate about this sector. Gaurav has an MBA from IMT Ghaziabad and B.E. from MNREC Allahabad. Prior to Mast Kalandar, he worked for about 5 years in IT industry. He has had good stints with Planetasia (Microland) and then with Wipro Technologies. He has handled various sales & marketing roles for various geographies like the US, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia. His strengths have always been to create new opportunities and execute them. In one of the IT assignments, he got to work with Australian food chains, which made him to start his entrepreneurial journey in retail sector in India. Gaurav a keen eye for detail and likes to work on processes & systems, which make the operations efficient and scalable. His hobbies include reading, photography and traveling.
Twitter | Website
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Harish Bijoor
Harish Bijoor is a Brand domain specialist operating out of Bangalore. He runs aunique boutique consulting outfit branded Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a brand name that has a consulting presence across the markets of Hong Kong, Seattle, London , Dubai and the Indian sub-continent. He spent 18 months of his corporate career as the Chief Operating Officer, Zip Telecom Limited. He has spent eight years prior to his Telecom stint with Tata Coffee Limited in various designations moving through the Brand Management and Marketing Hierarchy. Harish spent the first eight years of his career with Hindustan Lever Limited moving through the Sales and Distribution stream during the first four years and the Brand Management stream in the next four. Harish is actively involved in the world of coffee in India. He is a member of many active coffee forums and delivers lectures on the subject in India and Internationally. He is a member of the Coffee Board of India under the auspices of the Union Ministry of Commerce. Harish is an active member of the Plantations sub-committee of the Planning Commission for the formulation of the XIth Five year Plan(2007-12). Harish has published a book titled, “Marketing Trends – Smart Insights into the world of Indian Business” – a serious book written in a style that is distinctly young and MTV-ish! He is currently involved in his second book on core-branding. Harish is a member on the Board of Directors of a clutch of companies and his passion lies in the arena of good Corporate Governance. Harish is a much sought after Public speaker in India and across the world with a total of 8961 Hours of Public speaking engagements to his credit to date. He has been teaching at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad for the past 8 years.
Website | LinkedIn | Twitter | Blog
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K. G. Murali
M.D. Focussed Corporate Services Pvt. Ltd.
K G Murali started his career in the Corporate World and worked for fifteen years with organisations such as Madura Coats, Tata Tea and last with Lakshmi Mills Group as their General Manager. He is a lawyer by qualification.
He has been an entrepreneur for the last fifteen years. He started a company which represents various Banks and Telecom Companies across South India for their Retail Operations in 18 locations with a Team strength of over 500 people.
Murali’s varied interests include
1. Excellence in Management
2. Managing with a heart
3. Management Training
He has been a Mentor for a few start ups.
His other passions include:
Being involved in running a Leprosy Home in Coimbatore for the last fifteen years.
His involvement in an NGO in Krishnagiri which helps provide nutritional food for 200 HIV affected/infected children every month for the last two years. He has a network of friends supporting him on this.
Being a part of a charity called “Gift a Future” which pays for primary school education of economically backward children in private schools
K. Srikrishna
K. Srikrishna is an entrepreneur, writer and father of two girls. In 1999, he founded his first company Impulsesoft. Prior to joining NEN, he was one of the founders of Zebu Communications, and an active angel investor. He’s also on the advisory boards of 3 companies. Over the past 15 years Srikrishna has served in a variety of marketing and management roles in technology firms in the US and India. He has a PhD and MS from University of California at Berkeley and a BTech from Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University. He writes a weekly column Book Beginnings for the Mint and with his daughter, authors a weekly business cartoon FlipSide for the Hindu BusinessLine.
LinkedIn | Twitter
Kauser Khan
MD at ‘Protocol’
She holds a Master Degree in Economics, Diploma in Fashion Designing from Mumbai, and holds a certificate as a trainer in etiquette and grooming from USA.
Mrs. Kauser Khan is a leading Certified Corporate Etiquette and Grooming consultant, and has presented her seminars to a diverse portfolio of business organizations and B schools across the country.
Her workshops with leading MNC’s in soft skil has received wide recognition.
Being an entrepreneur herself, she prepares individuals in believing in themselves and to have a never say die attitude.
The emphasis of her training is on self-assessment, thought provoking exercises and a better future direction through various visualization and training techniques.
She takes keen interest in research and development of workshops, keeping in mind various organizational behaviour and work habits of participants.
Her workshops on Global Professionals, Fine Dining and Business Etiquette have been appreciated and rated high by corporate professionals.
She writes business articles in reputed News papers like Deccan Herald, DNA, Deccan Chronicle, TOI and Outlook.
She has been nominated by “TATA NATIONAL ENTREPRENUERSHIP NETWORK HOTTEST STARTUP AWARDS FOR 2008″.
LinkedIn | Website
Kavita Iyer
Kavita belongs to that group of IIM grads who are sure their institute forces students to think like entrepreneurs because of the curriculum and the teaching method. “In every course, there is a large dose of entrepreneurship which prepares IIM grads to think like CEOs even as a management trainee,” she explains. Although she joined Wipro after graduating from IIM-A, she always thought that running one’s own enterprise was a bigger challenge. She saw her opportunity when she felt the internet had matured enough to be a pervasive medium to sustain a new initiative, what with the Web 2.0 revolution waiting to happen, particularly in India.
After detailed research, she started a community networking website, minglebox.com, with two of her former IIT classmates. The college and community website, launched in September 2006, was an instant hit among youngsters. Kavita now wants to create a large virtual campus of over 5,000 colleges across the country on the internet. She hopes to piggyback on the growth of net advertising and expects to break even next year.
Kiruba Shankar
Kiruba Shankar is a social media enthusiast and CEO of Business Blogging Pvt Ltd, a social media consultancy. He is a prominent blogger and also the founder Director of F5ive Technologies, a firm specializing in Web Development. Kiruba is also a co-founder of The Knowledge Foundation, a non-profit body that believes in the spirit of sharing knowledge. He is part of the team which organises events like Proto.in (Entrepreneruship event), BlogCamp, PodWorks, BarCampChennai, MobileMonday Chennai and OpenCoffeeClub Chennai. Kiruba currently teach New Media at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai Advertising Club, SRM University and the International Institute of Journalism, Berlin. He brings his expertise as an entrepreneur, a business author, and an acclaimed keynote speaker.
Blog | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn
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Madan Padaki
Co-Founder and Director of MeritTrac, Madan is an engineer from the National Institute of Engineering, University of Mysore and an MBA from SP Jain Institute of Management and Research. He has had stints with Wipro Corporation, Infosys Technologies and BFL Software (now EDS Mphasis). An active speaker at many forums, specifically on topics pertaining to Assessments, Talent Pools and Employability Enhancement, he is the author of several articles on HR and Employability which have been published in leading publications in India. He is also a well-recognized expert in the field of assessments and talent pools, and the media often quotes him in their reports. He serves on the Governing Council of DOEACC (Ministry of IT, Govt. of India) to evaluate IT education in India. He is an active member of NASSCOM, CII, TiE etc.
LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | Blog
Manoj Shah
Manoj Shah started his his health & fitness venture, Evolve, in 2007. He joined the venture back as the COO after he had successfully exited the venture where he was co-founder & CEO, through a merger with the Gold’s Gym. He has a strong background in strategy, business scaling and has an appetite for building diverse businesses post turning into a Chartered Accountant. In the past, he has been the Group CFO at Candy Group diversified into Alcobev, Hotels, Food, Fitness & Real Estate; Founder & CEO at Brisca Consulting and Business Head – Assurance Consulting & Software at Sama Audit Systmes & Softwares P. Ltd. He plays Tennis, likes hiking, driving, like technology and above all loves the chaos of change.
LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter
Mary C Gentile
Mary Gentile, PhD., consults on management education and values-driven leadership.She is also Senior Research Scholar at Babson College; Senior Advisor, The Aspen Institute Business & Society Program; and an independent consultant based in Arlington, MA. In her ten-year tenure at Harvard Business School, she has developed and taught the school’s first course on managing diversity, and helped design and taught its first required module on ethical decision-making. Currently she is director of the Giving Voice to Values curriculum and senior research scholar at Babson College. Her articles have appeared inHarvard Business Review, strategy+business, BizEd, CFO Magazine,and Risk Management, and she has written several books on ethics and diversity.
As an independent consultant (1995-present), Gentile works with corporate, non-profit and academic institutions on leadership development, social impact management, ethics, business education and diversity. Clients include: Columbia University Business School, INSEAD, Harvard Business School, Pfizer Corporation, The United Nations Global Compact Learning Forum, University of Texas-Austin Business School, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, UCLA Anderson School of Business Executive Education, Duke University Fuqua School of Management, Notre Dame Business School, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Harvard Divinity School, among others.
Mukund Mohan
Mukund Mohan, CEO of Jivity, is a leading social commerce company. He Founded and sold BuzzGain, a leader in Do It Yourself PR to Meltwater in January 2010. He has founded and successfully sold 3 Silicon Valley startups in the Internet & Enterprise software markets. Mukund has held executive and management roles in Hewlett Packard (Mercury), Inovis, Ariba and Cisco Systems. He studied at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Science and holds A Bachelor’s degree in engineering and computer science from The University Of Mysore, India. Mukund was named among the hottest angel investors in India by Venture Capital Circle in for 2011-12 and blogs at http://www.beaforceofgood.wordpress.com
LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter
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Niiraj R Shah
Social Media Expert,Referral Marketing Expert India,BNI Director of Business Affairs Australasia,Middle East & Africa, Niiraj is the India Master Franchisor of BNI, recently identified by the Wall Street Journal as a top 25 high performing franchise system in the United States. He self published a book – The Quest of the Phoenix – a powerful new way to grieve! Contributing author to #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller – Masters of Success. He started BNI India knowing only one person in India. A firewalker, Niiraj is a 3rd generation entrepreneur with business experience in commodities and plastics packaging. He attended Tony Robbins Mastery university, travelled to UK, USA, Canada, France, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, India, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, Bali,& Australia.
LinkedIn | Twitter | Website
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Pallab Bandyopadhyay
Dr Pallab Bandyopadhyay, Director-HR Citrix Systems, A doctoral fellow in HRD from XLRI, Jamshedpur, and Academy of HRD, Dr. Bandyopadhyay has also been trained at various human process and organization development interventions at NTL, USA as well as adult learning theories at Interactive consultants, Canada. Dr Pallab has more than twenty four years of professional experience in the areas of Institution, Organization and Human Resources Development. Before joining Citrix, he was the global HR Business Partner for Application and Business Process for Dell based out of Bangalore.
Dr Pallab was the past-President of NHRD Bangalore chapter and currently a member at the National HR and IR/ER committee of CII. He has been the member of the CII and NHRD team that developed the first HR competency model HR Compass in India. He has published several papers in leading HR journals and also the guest editor for NHRD Journal. He is also a visiting faculty in number of reputed business schools in India in the area of HRM/OB. He is an honorary member of the HR Academic Area Advisory Council of Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Bangalore , a research guide for PhD students under the Faculty of Management Symbiosis International, a deemed University and also a member of board of studies for IFIM, Bangalore, MS Ramaiah Institute of Management, Sona School of Management, Salem and BIMHRD, Pune. He is also an expert reviewer at Harvard Business School (HBR) Press and an advisory member of the board for “Sukrut” a unique psychotherapeutic clinic and professional development centre based at Bangalore. Dr Pallab is also a certified executive coach and spends considerable time in coaching both senior business leaders as well as young HR professionals across the country.
LinkedIn | Facebook
Pradeep Chopra
Pradeep has been part of the Internet Industry since 1999. He is a Co-founder and CEO of Digital Vidya, India’s premier Digital Marketing training company. He has personally trained & advised over 1500 professionals including CEOs across India, Singapore, Malaysia and Oman in helping them meet their business objectives using Digital Marketing.
Pradeep is an international speaker & an author on Digital Marketing & Entrepreneurship. He’s one of the most sought after speakers in Digital Marketing and his speaking assignments include Search Engine Strategies (USA), World Social Media Summit at Kuala Lumpur, Social Media Workshops in Singapore, Click Asia Summit, Global Youth Marketing Forum and NASSCOM India Leadership Forum in India. He writes on Entrepreneurship and Digital Marketing for Wall Street Journal, Inc & Entrepreneur Magazines.
Twitter | Website | LinkedIn
Praveer Gupta
Founder and CEO of Ripple IP services, A Mechanical Engineer from IIT Delhi ,Praveer brings nearly 10 years of extensive IP, Technology Strategy and Innovation experience. As a Lead of Office of Technology Strategy and Innovation at Sarnoff, he was responsible for providing strategic inputs on various cutting edge technology deals, and reported to the CEO on overall strategy. At GE Corporate R&D center at Bangalore, he received US Patent Agent equivalent training and certification, Six Sigma green belt training, and worked with several Patent Attorneys on preparation and prosecution activities across several GE technologies.
As Advanced Patent Agent, he trained and mentored several Patent Agents, and served as IP Consultant to GE Consumer and Industrial lab. At PatentMetrix, he was responsible for developing IP based investment report methodology, and patent applications of several cutting edge technologies.
LinkedIn | Website
Pravin Shekar
A start-up specialist: Relationships, Key Initiatives and Business. Honored with the “Market Research Emerging Leader” Award by the American Marketing Association.Launched krea, an India-centric panel research firm focusing on Healthcare and Youth.founded Dexterity Business Analysts, Dexterity KPO Services, “The Social Catalyst”, a social-marketing organization.
ESOMAR Global Council, Country Representative for ESOMAR, a global Research Association
Governing Council & Charter Member with TiE Chennai: Fostering Entrepreneurship worldwide.
He has presented technical papers at several International conferences (Berlin, London, Milan, Paris, Wales, Singapore:for ESOMAR, MRSS & BIG).and is a Charter member of the “Chennai Speakers” Toastmasters club.
His Interests include Entrepreneurship, Marketing Research, International Marketing, Social Work, Public Speaking, Travel,Photography and Golf.
LinkedIn | Website
PUNEET VATSAYAN
Puneet is a serial entrepreneur, international business executive, and mentor. Puneet has been an entrepreneur in both India and US; an investor in India, US and Europe.
Puneet is the Co-founder and Chairman of Hatch Incubators; Co-founder of the Angel Investors Consortium; and Board Member of Cosmos Hospitals. In addition, Puneet is actively involved as a member the CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) National Committee on IT / ITES and Ecommerce; the CII National Committee on MSME in Defense and Aerospace; as President of TiE. Punjab and Chandigarh; and, till recently as a member of Global Board of Trustees of TiE Global. As a serial entrepreneur he founded 3 ventures – all in the technology and IT domain in India and Silicon Valley. Prior to starting his entrepreneurial career in 2000 he worked with Centigram Communications (acquired by ADC Communications) in worldwide product management, international marketing; and services marketing groups. In addition, he has worked with Measurex Corporation (now Honeywell) and U.S. Borax / RTZ in International marketing and business development.
Puneet has an MBA in International Business from Thunderbird – The American Graduate School of International Management and a Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering.
LinkedIn | Website
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Radhika Meenakshi Shankar
Dr. Shankar is the founder of Wise Owl Consulting in Hyderabad. She is an academician and has nearly two decades of experience in teaching Entrepreneurship, Finance and Commerce in reputed colleges and universities. Her interest in Entrepreneurship Development was aroused while doing her doctoral study on change management of MSMEs. Since then, she has been teaching entrepreneurship and mentoring student startups.
Rajeev Surana
Rajeev Surana is an Engineer & Marketing management (XIM) graduate by qualification and a registered Patent Attorney with the Indian Patent Office. He has been involved with the R&D and Innovation sector in India for a decade now and specializes in commercialization of ideas by helping build business partnerships with different stakeholders. He is passionate about taking “technology & design ideas to the market” by working with Individual Innovators, Entrepreneurs, Incubators & Research Institutes on ‘idea protection to commercialization’. A regular contributor to Yourstory.in on IP & Innovation as also a board member of Licensing Executive Society, India chapter and Patent Agents Association India. He is currently involved in writing a book on “Protect your Idea” and loves to run on Mumbai roads & Marathons.
LinkedIn | Website
Raj Shankar
Raj Shankar, founder of ichiban Business Consultants Pvt Ltd holds a post g
raduate degree in International Business from the Symbiosis Institute of International Business, Pune. His ability to imbibe knowledge in every form and use it as a tool for creating unique solutions has enabled him to play crucial roles in leading consulting organizations such as Deloitte. This also lit his passion to use his expertise as a consultant to assist SMEs in their journey towards success and in turn resulted in the genesis of ichiban Pvt Ltd. And now as Principal Strategist at ichiban he leads his team by example as he sets high standards of conscientious consulting practices for both himself and his colleagues.
Website
Rajendra Bhat
Rajendra has over 18 years of experience in entrepreneurship. Having started h
is career with one of India’s top IT firms, he went on to launch his own enterprise in the area of Web development while the Internet was still a fledgling business opportunity. Having led his startup through the boom and bust of the Internet age, he has successfully transitioned to the role of entrepreneurship educator and mentor. Rajendra holds a post-graduate degree in Business Management from the University of Mumbai.
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Sameer Guglani
With already 5 start- ups in his bag, Sameer has a lot more to his name, He co-founded Madhouse Media in 2004, India’s first organized movie rentals company, which was acquired by Seventymm in 2007. Post acquisition he was Vice President – Corporate Strategy, Seventymm. In his pre-madhouse avatar he was a hacker for start-ups like Sonim Inc, Telephia and worked across India, US and Europe. At The Morpheus Sameer works with portfolio companies on things like – strategy / product / sales / marketing / boot strapping and whatever takes a start-up to shoot. Sameer is also an independent film maker with film festivals movies to his credit. He loves meeting people, travelling and reading.
LinkedIn | Twitter | Blog
Sanjay Anandaram
Sanjay Anandaram is a Venture Partner with Seed Fund.
He has spent over 2 decades as an IT industry executive, an entrepreneur, a VC, an advisor to early stage funds, start-up mentor and teacher. He’s a founding partner of JumpStartUp, an early stage VC fund set up to invest in technology and technology enabled businesses that leveraged India. He brings significant international experience involving new business creation and business development in India, US, Asia, Middle-East and Africa.
Prior to founding JumpStartUp, Sanjay founded Neta Inc., a venture capital backed Silicon Valley software startup that was acquired by Infoseek (Disney). In 1999, Sanjay returned to India and founded VentureKatalyst, India’s first online publication aimed at entrepreneurs. Before Neta, Sanjay spent many years with Wipro (NYSE:WIT) in their Global R&D and spear headed several new business development initiatives in India and the US.
He’s involved with TiE Bangalore (as Charter Member and co-chair of the TiE Entrepreneur Acceleration Programme), Nasscom (as part of the Product and Innovation group), with IIM Bangalore (as member of the NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning), with INSEAD, Singapore (as Adjunct Faculty teaching the Business Plan Workshop elective) and is on the Expert Panel of the Technology Development Board, Dept of Science and Technology, Govt of India. Sanjay is an Electrical Engineer from Jadavpur University, Kolkata with an MBA degree from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
Saumil Majumdar
Saumil Majumdar the founder director of Sport Village, he is personally engaged with over 100,000 children’s, 50,000 parents and over 200 schools in the sports context over the last decade. He is an alumnus of IIT Mumbai and Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He played a key role in linking partnership between sports consults and the world’s leading marketers and media networks. With his deep skill set, the company has built strong relationship with sponsors, media, the government, federations, sports associations and athletes, and has a strong presence across the country.
Website | YouTube
Shashank ND
Shashank ND is co-founder/CEO of Practo. Practo is an online practice management software, used by Dental, Medical and Wellness clinics to communicate with their patients, maintain patient records and manage the day to day operations of the clinic. Since it’s launch in July 2009, Practo has been used to schedule over a million healthcare appointments, manage thousands of XRay images and store millions of patient healthcare records. Practo is currently being used by 1500+ practices in over 40 cities in India. Shashank & his partner Abhinav founded the company while pursuing their final year BTech in Information Technology at NITK Surathkal. After graduating in June 2009, they signed up with startup accelerator – The Morpheus and began expanding operations. Currently Practo is a 15 member team, with offices in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi.
Late 2010 Practo raised their first institutional investment from a top tier VC firm.
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Prof. Soumya Chakaborty
Prof. Soumya Chakraborty completed his MBA from Satya Sai University. He worked in the corporate arena primarily in the area of Recruitments & Media before getting back to his first love of academics. He has been associated with reputed Engineering & Management Schools in Bangalore. His roles have been dual with him handling areas like Placements, Corporate Relations and Management Development Programs in addition to the courses he teaches. The papers handled include HRM, International HR, OB, Personal Growth & Effectiveness etc. He also handles sessions for the MDP programs being conducted for the various corporate clients.
Prof. Soumya has a strong interest in the area of Entrepreneurship and works closely with the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) to promote entrepreneurship in Welingkar campus. He is also pursuing his PhD. in the area of Learning & Development.
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Tim Mathews
Tim Mathews is the director at Research PE India and heads early stage and start-up funding. Tim received his B-tech in mechanical engineer from Indian Institute of Technology Madras and has pursued his MBA in Finance and Entrepreneurship from Washington University in US.
Prior to founding Providence, Tim was a part of Emerson Climate Technology in US taking care of competitor acquisition analysis and product strategy. Prior to Emerson, Tim was an Edison engineering graduate (EEDP) at GE Consumer Products and Satyam engineering services working on systems engineering, new product sourcing and product design for global markets.
Tim is currently actively involved in fund raising, corporate financial advisory, business modeling, and in training & mentoring of entrepreneurs.
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Vaibhav Tewari
Vaibhav Tewari is an accomplished professional with over 17 years of experience. Identifying early Industry trends and building robust businesses from ground-up have been the consistent features of Vaibhav’s experience. He has been at the forefront of many Industry defining businesses, including successful forays into Technology businesses, Supply Chain Management, Business Process Outsourcing, Tech Support and Consumer Finance etc. He has built successful companies like iSeva and o2s360 in the last decade. Currently he is building the exciting cloud business at Microland.
He has been a speaker at many forums/events like CII, TiE, Cloud Connect etc. and has published numerous papers and articles with many leading Publications over the years. Actively involved in Mentoring Entrepreneurs, he serves as a Board of Director, Advisor and Mentor for many fast growing companies across Internet, Retail Consumer and Technology verticals.
Vaibhav has been a judge and mentor at many Industry events like Power of Ideas (ET), TiE Entrepreneurship events, IITK fest and SLP etc. He is a regualar guest lecturer at leading Management schools in India.
He is a BTech from IIT Kanpur and MBA from IIM Calcutta.
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Vasanthi Srinivasan
Vasanthi Srinivasan is an Associate Professor in the area of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management at IIM Bangalore. She has a Post Graduate Diploma in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations from XLRI, Jamshedpur and a Fellow in Management from IIMB. Prior to Joining IIMB, she worked at Wipro Limited and The P&P Group, a Bangalore- based consulting organization. Her research interests are in the field of teaching business ethics, understanding organizational processes that build ethical behaviors and CSR in SME’s. She was a British Council Visiting Scholar at the International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility at the Nottingham University Business School in 2007 and developed a website www.teachcsr.com, which intends to promote teaching in Business Ethics and CSR among faculty of business schools in India.
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Vikas Rajput
Vikas Rajput is a practicing entrepreneur and an entrepreneurship educator. He founded 
“Parallel Living Research Centre” in 2004 to find alternate avenues to generate income other than a day job. Starting with a business in Content Development he has since then diversified into businesses like Business Research, Website Design, Internet Marketing, Corporate Filmmaking, Photography, Rural Tourism and more.
A trained filmmaker, he has also Directed “Jai Nagarja Sem Mukhem” a Full Length feature film in Garhwali Language.He is a guest faculty for Entrepreneurship at Delhi Business School, Badarpur and Jaipuria Institute of Management, Noida besides being a guest speaker at various Management Institutions across Delhi NCR.
He is also an NEN – GS Faculty Scholar.
Vellayan Lakshmanan
CEO Altius Technology. A Successful Enterprenur at Coimbatore, Vellayan is a an Engineering Professional with rich experience in Information Technology and Manufacturing. He successfully leads a team of over 150 professionals engaged in offering KPO services to companies in US & UK. He has also promoted couple of ventures in the Manufacturing space. He is actively involved in running manufacturing companies engaged in Polymer Processing & Engineering Services.
Apart from his ventures , Vellayan works with startups and is enagaged in mentoring a few ventures in Coimbatore.
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Vikas Verma
Founder, The Colour Factory
A management professional with in depth experience in consumer products, Retail and IT/Media industries in key areas of Sales/Marketing, Operations and Logistics. In 25 years, he has acquired critical experience of handling a start-up, setting the vision & agenda and conceptualizing a business strategy & executing against it. His team building and people management skills which he has been able to leverage successfully to plan and execute projects of high degrees of complexity, Innovating new business ideas, actualizing plans and scaling up operations. He possesses Strong strategic planning skills and a high degree of process orientation, equipped with key drivers for success in diverse businesses, high degree of tolerance for and ability to manage ambiguity and chaos.
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Vinita Ananth
Vinita is the CEO and Founder of CEO Council of India which aspires to be the country’s largest and and most influential CEO community. The CEO Council of India is a unique and contemporary platform for CEO-only knowledge sharing and networking and is by “invite-only”
Vinita is also CEO and Founder of GitGrow, a software company that is on a quest to simplify web analytics; providing an all-in-one web optimization solution that improves conversions and engagement.
Previously Vinita was the CEO of Social Hues Software and Services (www.socialhues.com), a company that offers actionable insights to marketers helping them optimize their campaigns & customer engagement.
Previously Vinita Ananth was the Director of HP Software-as-a-Service responsible for Sales and Delivery in Asia Pacific and Japan.
Vinita has over 13 years of professional experience in software and services. Vinita’s extensive experience includes leadership positions in software sales, business planning, service management, application delivery and business development.
Vinita was instrumental in the growth and success of Mercury Interactive and HP entrepreneurial SaaS venture making it amongst the top 10 SaaS vendors and the largest SaaS IT Management company in the world.
Vinita has been a speaker at various conferences in Singapore, Australia, China, Japan, India and Hong Kong like Springboard’s SaaS Asia, CTO Forum, CIO Summit, IT Executive Summit and QAI Software Testing Conference.
Vinita holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering and an MBA from Santa Clara University.
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Vivek Agarwal
Vivek has done his MBA in 1995 from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, where he majored in Finance and Bu
siness Strategy. He is a visiting faculty to the International Management Institute, New Delhi.
Towards the end of 1998, he saw a huge opportunity to make a difference in the area of education by leveraging the newly emerging technologies to provide high quality education to the masses in India and eGurucool was thus born. eGurucool raised over US$11 million in venture capital financing and emerged as the pioneer in the field of eLearning in India, combining a unique learning methodology and a huge infrastructure of technology and content creation processes. The Investors included Newscorp and IFC, Washington. The business has now been acquired by India’s leading education company, NIIT.
Vivek is committed to exploring how technology can be used to make high quality education and training, available to the billions of people at a cost that they can afford and at a place they can reach.
He has had a keen interest and passion for education & training throughout his professional career, and is committed to making LIQVID a world class organization in the area of eLearning.
Vivek Bhargava
CEO, iProspectCommunicate2.
iProspectCommunicate2 has evolved into one of the largest Search and Social Media Specialist organization in India. It also helps Search Agencies in Europe and US to become more profitable and flexible by providing Search offshore services.Vivek has spent the last 10 years guiding the Digital Advertising Strategies of companies such as MTV, Merrill Lynch, ICICI Bank, Reliance in both Indian and Global Markets.Vivek has traveled to more than 40 countries on various Consulting and Project Assignments and lived In Dubai for two years.
Vivek is passionately committed to iProspectCommunicate2’s mission of being the Biggest Contextual Advertising Firm in the Emerging Markets and Leading Offshore Contextual Advertising.
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