MENTORS
LATHIKA PAI
Lathika Pai is the founder of SonderConnect. Her prior work experience includes large technology companies in the US and UK like Nortel, American Management Systems (CGI) and a $300 million fundd startup Relera which was in the cloud and managed services space. As a serial entrepreneur, Lathika successfully raised capital for her ventures both through equity and debt funding, as well as provided profitable exits to her investors. Her first entrepreneurial company Virtual Source was merged with Talisma's Technical Support arm to form B2K Corp which grew to 600 employees, and was then sold to Allsec Technologies. She has been on the Board's of International technology companies and helped them with their strategy for Asia. She is currently the Country Head at Microsoft for Startups, which supports startups in India and South East Asia. Microsoft for Startups engages with growth stage and typically Series A funded B2B startups.
TAMMY REDPATH
Tammy Redpath is senior Vice President and President of Target in India, an extension of the Minneapolis retailer's headquarters, located in Bangalore, India. In this role, Tammy leads all Bangalore-based operations in fields ranging from technology, E-commerce, and marketing to Human Resources, finance, data science and supply chain. Tammy joined Target in 1990. She began her career in stores and later held leadership roles in the marketing organisation. Before becoming the president of Target in India, Tammy was a senior Vice President of marketing, leading a global creative and operations team with discipline in strategy, digital and project management, production and experiential marketing. She was named president of Target in India in 2017 and has been instrumental in creating a strong cross-functional relationship between the Bangalore office and Target's Minneapolis Headquarters.
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BALA GIRISABALLA
Bala Girisaballa is the President of Techstars India. He received an MBA from Indian Insitiute of Management and an undergraduate degree from Osmania University. Bala is the founder and director of PurpleFront, a technology start-up helping small businesses leverage social media effectively to grow and retain customers. He was previously the MD of the Microsoft Accelerator India.
His skills include- entrepreneurship and start-up experience in bootstrapping businesses from ground up, business strategy, M&A assessment & fund raising, expertise in enterprise application including CRM, ERP, SaaS, Om-demand & business portals and Technical expertise in Web, RIA (Rich Internet Applications) & open source technology.
RICHA KAR
Zivame, an e-commerce company dedicated to the fashion needs of women, was established in 2011 by Richa Kar. Zivame is
India's leading online lingerie store selling more than 50 brands, 100 sizes and 5000 styles.
Prior to Zivame, Richa was a consultant at SAP. She remains active in Twitter and holds the reputation of one of the most influential women entrepreneurs in India.
Founder of Zivame.
RAJIV RAGHUNANDHAN
Rajiv is the founder of SeedX, an ecosystem for fund raising, advisory & business services for early stage ventures. He is also the Managing Partner at Arali Ventures, a deep tech, enterprise tech focused seed fund. His expertise is rooted in over 16 years of professional experience across Consulting, Operations & Technology fields. Rajiv also serves on the Board of Advisors across multiple early stage ventures. He has extensive experience in incubating & scaling new businesses, consultative selling, solution sales, large program management, business consulting and product design
Specialties: Angel investment, New business planning & implementation, Process Design, Product
Design, Operations Management, Large program management, Large deal pursuit management,
Talent development, Negotiation
Managing Partner, Arali Ventures & SeedX
DILIP KUMAR
Dilip is a young chartered accountant with 21 years of experience. He is a founder of a mid-sized CA firm in Bangalore. Personally, Dilip spends most of his time advising start-ups, scale-ups, subsidiaries of foreign companies, acting as a virtual CFO. He advises clients on setting-up businesses in India, corporate structuring, valuation, mergers and acquistion, post-merger integration, financial prudence and cost management, digital technology adoption for finance, liquidation under IBC. He is also a mentor and trains promoters on various platforms.
Chartered Accountant, P. Dilip Kumar & Associates
MEETA MALHOTRA
Meeta is a serial entrepreneur, who works at the intersection of branding, design and technology, and has founded 3 companies. Her career started with Infosys when they were just starting up. Meeta was one of two partners at Ray+Keshavan, a brand and design consultancy, before its acquisition by WPP-owned Brand Union in 2006, where she spent 14 years. Meeta co-founded KineticGlue, a social enterprise platform that was acquired by BMC Software in 2013. Meeta is also an active angel investor and advisor with Kstart, Kalaari Capital’s seed stage fund. She has also created 'The Practitioner' at meetamalhotra.com, a Q&A resource for brand, design and marketing practitioners.
Founder at The Hard Copy Previously Partner Ray+Keshavan Brand, Marketing, Design, Startups, Angel Investing
NANDITA LAKSHMANAN
As the Founder and Chairperson, Nandita provides the vision and direction for the PRactice. Her views on public relations, based on over 25 years of experience have helped shape the vision of the firm and influenced several of its best campaigns. Nandita is focused on establishing a culture of continuous leadership through mentoring and coaching,fostering entrepreneurship , and exploring collaborations which affiliates to prepare the firm for future growth. She leads with the belief that an idea is only as good as its execution, thereby maintaining a close eye on implementation and the last mile. Nandita has severed on various prestigious juries to determine excellence in PR, including the 57th Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival for the PR category; the Sabre awards India, among others. She is an alumnus of the Fortune is State Department Global Membership Program, where she won the Exxon Mobil-Vital Voices grant for an idea titled “Integrity Decoded”. In 2014, she won the Sabre Individual Award for her contribution to the PR industry in India. The award called The PRactice as “unquestionably one of the best PR firms, showcasing a grown up, ethical approach that has served the firm well in a fast changing marketplace”. She was recognised among India’s top 10 women in Public Relations by Reputation Today in 2016. Nandita, in her free time, dabbles in the kitchen gardening and exploring the rich legacy of Indian arts and crafts- handloom in particular
ARUNA SCHWARZ
Aruna founded Stelae Technologies 2002 to develop and commercialise software solutions in the Document Intelligence sector. Her experience is in utilising technology as an enabler to build customer driven solutions. Aruna possesses over 10 years experience in the IT and Telco sectors in UK, France, Spain, Africa and the Middle East with companies like Cable & Wireless, BT, 9 Telecom, Libertysurf and Rosebud Technologies. Her areas of expertise include strategy, marketing, product development and business development in IT and Telco sectors.
IRINA GHOSE
As Country Head- Modern Workplace, responsible for driving Cloud Adoption and Digital Transformation for Office365, Windows, Security and Devices. This includes leading a team of Solution & Technology Specialists to develop business scenarios for the Enterprise & Public Sector customers and drive business growth and cloud usage. Approximately 22 years of industry experience including 17 years in Microsoft and prior to that at Wipro & HCL. At Microsoft, managed various leadership roles in Sales, Business Management & Strategy. Partnerships & Inside Sales in the Enterprise Segment & Education Vertical. Involved in various cross industry Diversity Initiatives and a recipient of the “Inspirational Women’s Award” at Microsoft. Outside work, lead initiatives for social causes related to Girl Child Education & also actively engaged with the start-up ecosystem along with SonderConnect (a foundation for Women Entrepreneurs) and Microsoft Accelerator.
Specialties- strategic planning, conceptualising and envisioning new initiatives and execution excellence, team building and leadership, driving India centric innovation.
SAVITA SINGH
Savita possesses over 20 years of technology experience, across multiple industries and geographies and is an expert in solving complex business problems with technology led solutions and building/turning around teams in global or local settings. She has worked with Global In-house Centres (GIC) for 15+ years and is very familiar with the strategic advantages as well as the challenges of offshoring technology work. She is actively engaged with the startup ecosystem and mentors early stage startups on technology and leadership matters. In her current role, she leads the technology work to drive Customer Centricity across the Royal Dutch Shell(RDS) Group of companies for both B2B and B2C segments with the goal of thriving in the era of energy transition towards a greener and cleaner world. In her last role as Sr.Director, Technology with Target, she led the digitalisation or front-of-store experience for millions of Target guests that shop across the 1800+ stores in US. This entails modernising the legacy point-of-scale, payment and return systems into an enterprise checkout capability that seamlessly inter-operates and integrates both internally and externally. Key priorities include rapid modernisation of the portfolio into micro-service based tiered architecture and API-fication leveraging the product management principles while organising the teams into Scrum based Agile model and SAFe lean, in-sourced engineering teams with full-stack ownership and open source tools and frameworks with strong focus on automation to reduce cost ownership.
VAISHALI KASTURAE
Vaishali has 25 years of Banking and Financial services experience across Sales, Operations excellence , digitisation and automation. Currently is heading the ISV business for AWS in India, helping B2B start ups achieve scale and global impact ans is a part of the AWS India leadership team.
Till recently, she was the India Managing Director and country head for Experian. She has managed the India PnL and led focused growth in areas such as Credit Bureau, Decision Analytics and Software. Vaishali has also worked in the Corporate Bank-in operations and sales. She has experience in setting a third party BPO practice and has lead and managed the Banking & Capital markets practice across the globe with a 2500+ headcount. Vaishali is responsible for Operations, Sales and Margins. End to End ownership of people and revenues. She has set up a Captive / GIC as the first employee in India and scaled it to over 50% of the global head count for a Fund Administrator (PE owned firm) and also has experience in running the India Operations for the top Tier Investment Bank. Vaishali has managed Global process with functional ownership across the world.
ROMI MALHOTRA
Romi Malhotra is the CEO for Linkage India and works to bring best practices in Leadership development to India. Linkage Inc. USA, is one of the world’s leading leadership development companies and has strengthened leaders and helped organizations build cultures and teams that deliver superior results. Romi has close to 35 years leadership experience in industries ranging from Manufacturing, IT, Banking, Consulting, Outsourcing and now Leadership Development. He is a seasoned General manager and leader having successfully managed and grown multiple companies in India. He is best known as one of the pioneers and leaders of the Outsourcing industry in India. He provided leadership to 4 companies in India as the CEO/MD including DXC Technology, DELL, Scope International (Fully owned subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank) and GE Capital (KPO Business). He served as an independent Director on the board of Aegis Ltd. a leading Billion Dollar outsourcing company owned by the Essar Group in India and a few NGOs and start-ups.
His vast experience as a business leader gives him the ability to understand and coach senior leaders with a very practical bias.
SAMEER GARDE
Sameer is a seasoned global leader with over 27 years of experience. He currently spearheads sales, operations, growth initiatives and strategic alliances as President of Cisco India and SAARC. Prior to joining Cisco, his expertise in technology and understanding of marketing opportunities has enabled him to lead several top-performing organisations across India, Europe, USA and Asia. He also played an instrumental role, while serving as President and MD in consolidating and stabilising the consumer and enterprise business for Dell India. Sameer has also served as President, South Asia at Philips Healthcare and Country Head for Enterprise Business at Samsung India.
President India and SAARC at Cisco India.
RAVI KANNIGANTI
Ravi is working at Target at Director of Innovation and he manages Target Accelerator. He has more than 20 years of experience working for Retail and Supply Chain product companies such as Zebra Technologies, Tyco Retail Solutions Manhattan Associates, and Intel.
Evangelism and thought leadership on use of technology and process to solve business problems in retail and supply chain vertical is his core competency. He has experience aligning key internal talent with thriving eco-system by collaborating with partners, start-ups, universities, accelerators and incubators for innovation and faster development cycles. With strong project management background, he has experience translating strategy into practical steps for execution and rally key stakeholders around the future vision. Ravi has global experience and has worked with leading retailers and supply firm chains in the US, UK, Japan, China, Singapore, HK and India. Ravi graduated with MS in Engineering from Virginia Tech and MBA from Fischer College of Business, Ohio State University. He attended the "Retail Forum for Senior Leaders" at Harvard Business School Executive education.
VINAYAK HEGDE
Vinayak Hegde currently works as CTO-in-residence at Microsoft forStartups. With over 17 years of experience, Vinayak has built multiple products across different domains such as IoT, large scale networks and large scale data systems in a variety of individual contributor and senior technical leadership roles. Previously, he has worked with Akamai, Inmobi and Zoomcar.
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SHILPA SHARMA
Shilpa has spent over two decades in the textile, crafts and lifestyle retail space. In 2010, she co-founded Jaypore, an online retail portal for exquisite Indian handmade and high on design craft products. She is on the board at AIACA and was appointed on a Leadership Group working on Circular Design Challenges by MIT in January 2019. Her domain expertise finds her empanelled with strategic advisory firms and also actively engaged with the IIM Ahmedabad led CCBP program for young entrepreneurs and the Young India Fellowship(YIF) at Ashoka University, as a mentor.
Aside from her work with FMCG, Creative and Lifestyle Businesses as a consultant, mentor and advisor, she manages to carve out time to manage two other ventures. Breakway (an outcome of her passion for travel, it plans and executes bespoke Beyond the Brochure experiential journeys around India) and Mustard (a delectable blend of a shared love for fine food and exceptional experiences, it offers Bengali and French cuisine and has a presence in Goa and Mumbai).
SEJAL SHAH GULATI
Sejal Gulati conceived and developed the concept of Time Inc India where responsibilities included setting up the entity both strategically and operationally. Time Inc. India is a rapidly growing global in-house center that consistently strives towards high standards of performance, delivery and excellence. She is also an ILI (Indian Leadership Initiative) fellow and moderator at The Aspen Institute which helps foster the next generation of values based leaders in India.
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Business Development| Solution Sales| Strategic Marketing | Change Management | New Channel Development | Emerging Markets| Scaling Businesses| Incubating New Businesses | General Management
General Manager Global Commercial Services at American Express, President Harvard Business School Alumni Board
SEEMA KUMAR
Seema Kumar is a senior technology leader with a proven track record of making technology and products work for the business. Her career spans several roles including product consulting, product management, business development, strategic alliances and partner enablement. Seema is proficient at understanding ongoing market trends and drivers and has been instrumental in influencing offering roadmap and strategy to suit various local and global market demands. She has experience leading and growing technical talent across the organisation. Over the last 15 years she has had the opportunity to be associated with several key shifts in the technology space spanning enterprise integration, business process management, Enterprise Mobility, Cloud and more recently Commerce, Marketing technology and Security.
Country Leader, Cloud Technical Sales & Architecture at IBM
SANDY CARTER
Sandy Carter is a high performing executive with demonstrated expertise in General Management, Sales, Marketing , Strategy, and Ecosystem Development. Named one of the Top 10 Women in Technology, Sandy specialises in leadership, management, entrepreneurship, social media, digital marketing and strategy. Transcending disciplines, Sandy defines herself as multi-lingual in a technology driven businesses, with expertise in areas like Cloud, Internet of Things, Mobile and Social Media. Sandy is also an Adjunct Professor for Carnegie Mellon SV on marketing, innovation and leadership. She serves as an advisory board member with several organisations that strive toward diversity in the workplace and women's empowerment through entrepreneurial opportunities.
Specialities: Leadership, Management, Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Digital, Marketing, Strategy
Technology Expertise: Cloud, Internet of Things, Mobile, Social
Vice President at Amazon Web Services
SANKET ATAL
Sanket a leading executive in the field of Software Development with Enterprise Software with over 26+ years of experience in Informix, Oracle and CA Tech along with various E-Commerce (MakeMyTrip) companies, working in the US and India with geographically distributed teams. His areas of expertise lie in: business strategy, innovation, enterprise architecture, research & development, engineering, operations, program management, and process/governance.
Managing Director at Intuit
BHAVNA SURESH
Bhavna Suresh is an entrepreneur who attracts great talent and has experience building margin focused, scale up strategies for Asia-Pacific. She has successfully exited a multi-million-dollar PropTech venture in 2020, with an incredible tea.
She is committed to working with people across cultures, with a key focus on inclusion and women representation.
RAKESH MISHRA
Rakesh Mishra has more than 25 years of experience in managing brands, creating marketing strategies, developing new products and packaging, building advertising campaigns that span print, electronic, digital, outdoor channels etc., leading teams and providing strategic direction to businesses. He is still focused on learning and evolving with consumers in this rapidly changing interconnected world.
AMEEN HAQUE
Ameen Haque has had a two decade long career in advertising and a parallel journey as an actor which made him believe that STORY IS POWER and help leaders and organizations leverage the power of stories.
As a Story Coach, he trains leaders and entrepreneurs in storytelling, crafting narratives, telling their personal stories, story spotting and use story and story-based frameworks to help organizations navigate change, align culture & values and inspire action along desired goals.
Haque's Innovation work is focused on helping organizations make innovation happen by focussing on the biggest lever in their control- culture.
As a Diversity champion and practitioner, he runs an organization that practices what they preach and help organizations become inclusive in the truest sense of that word.
DIVYA BALAGOPAL
Divya Balagopal specialises in education law, arbitration, regulatory compliance, policy drafting and dispute settlement, with a strong focus on social entrepreneurship and innovation. In addition, she works intensively on women and child rights and safety issues and is a part of the drafting committee of the Karnataka State Child Protection Policy and a resource person for the Karnataka State Commission for Protection of Child Rights as well as a core member of FICCI ARISE, National Committee.
With advanced degrees from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and from India’s leading National Law School, Divya has wide international work experience having previously worked with Rindler Morgan a Boston Law Firm, and UNICEF, Geneva and in litigation at the Supreme Court of India and appearences before various courts, tribunals and forums in Karnataka.
NILKANTH HARIHARAN
With Software ever increasingly taking the center stage in the digital world -Nilkanth's current area of work and focus is Web 3.0 - a the third iteration of the internet that is promising a free and transparent flow of digital content and data with privacy and decentralization.
A successful intrapreneur and a one time entrepreneur -he has a passion to transform businesses. His 20+ years of experience spans across sales, channel management, marketing, finance, technology, advertising & communications. His passion for the digital and technology space has given him the opportunity to work closely with Enterprise customers, System Integrators and more recently with the Start-Up Ecosystem. Nilkanth is a netizen and a social media evangelist with a once all time high Klout Score of 74.
RADHA SHREENIWAS
Radha Shreeniwas is a Specialties in Human Resources Generalist, Personnel Management, Hiring and Talent Management, Organizational Effectiveness, Retail, Merchandising, Learning & Development, Competitive Analysis, Brand and Product Marketing, Strategy, Business Reporting.
She is currently the Vice President of People Team, APJ at ServiceNow
VEDANARAYANAN VEDANTHAM
Vedanarayanan Vedantham has helped build, grow multiple digital products & brands across Health-Tech, Ed-Tech and online travel. Possess a varied mix of global experiences spanning Digital Marketing, Brand Consulting, Product Management & Business Development.He consults with early-stage startups directly or through incubators on branding, digital marketing & help them evaluate product-market fitment - Multiple TiE Chapters, NEXEA Accelerator in SEA, Atal Innovation Mission with the Government of India amongst others.He is also a visiting faculty member at various top b-schools where he conducts programs on digital marketing, mobile marketing, influencer marketing, services marketing, product marketing.
SIBONEY S SAGAR
More than 21 years of professional experience in legal, regulatory, public policy, government affairs and compliance across complex and sophisticated commercial platforms including broadcasting, digital, telecom, energy and manufacturing.
Effective as a strategic counsel interfacing with senior management, government, regulators and advisors, Siboney is an efficient legal and regulatory analyst, astute collaborator and communicator with a proven ability to drive critical projects. She is resourceful and skilled at managing expert support and professional stakeholders to mitigate issues and meet project goals to client or business advantage.
She has served on several committees and has established affiliations with industry bodies including FICCI, ASSOCHAM, CII, IBF, USIBS, USISPF, NSDC etc. on themes covering IP, digital economy, broadcast & cable services, telecom policy, communications & tech, foreign investments, environmental policy, corporate skilling, sexual harassment etc. She is invited as a speaker to various industry and academic forums and continues to successfully advocate on matters relating to intellectual property, market liberalisation and competition in the telecommunications, media and digital area.