I learnt CEO skills in an Engineering College
Stories of Role Models
A CEO juggles many balls. Juggling many balls, without dropping any, is key. So also is knowing what balls to juggle.
I picked up these 2 skills when I was in college. This is my story.
I grew up in Saharanpur, in a joint business family. My joint family taught me early on, to adjust with everyone and to fend for myself.
I would see my father making decisions. Tough ones - dealing with money and people. It gave me the courage to take early risks.
A cousin in the family was doing engineering. That intrigued me. So, I also started preparing for engineering. I was a bright kid too (everyone is) so this also contributed to the decision.
I wanted to get into an IIT. I did not get in, in my first attempt.
I took a break year to prepare more and try once again. That year, on reaching the exam venue, I realised I had forgotten my aadhaar card. In the resulting confusion, I wrote the exam again, but did not get in.
Instead, I got into Thapar in Patiala. It was a reputed college. But more importantly, the IIT fiasco created a deep hunger in me, to prove myself. This would stand me in good stead.
I met Prof PS Rana - who would be my mentor, for the next 4 years - about 10 days into college.
When I expressed a desire to get actively involved in doing projects, he took me under his wings. He gave some ideas.
I could already code quite well - thanks to the break year - so I quickly implemented a prototype.
He saw it and packed me off to a competitive exhibition in Chandigarh.
Amongst the visitors there, the state education minister also saw our work. He praised it. My confidence soared. I jumped into doing projects with double the vigour.
College is low risk, low responsibility time. I knew it was the time to fail and make my mistakes as early as possible. I participated in all the hackathons I could.
Apart from studies, this involved doing a few other things too.
A capable motivated team is the key to a hackathon win. A desire to do many hackathons meant I also became good at quickly finding good team members and motivating everyone.
I learnt the hacks to get this going.
Create and post a google form with a catchy title.
Explain in excitement, what is in it, for someone to involve.
Reach out rapidly to the respondents, who you think, cut it.
Sell them the idea. Get started.
That is when I knew I could juggle many balls with ease. I also became good at helping my team crystalize what we wanted to achieve.
We won 5-6 hackathons in quick succession and then we started riding on our reputation.
Instead of flirting with many ideas, we now wanted to dive deeper into one or two.
AI was big in those days. We figured we can learn AI by building something with it. So, along with 2 friends, we created a chatbot that worked in 22 of the Indian languages.
Prof Rana saw it and encouraged us to reach to our college’s admission committee - knowing that close to admission time, the help desk got flooded with queries.
We were shaky about asking the college. We thought, if they had wanted it, they would already have gotten it done. Thanks to Prof Rana’s nudging we did reach out.
3 months later, we had a contract from Thapar to implement the chatbot. Having a customer who wanted something specific enough to hold you to a contract, changed the game.
I learnt two things.
One - if you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you do ask, the answer can sometimes be yes, even when you think, it is going to be no.
Two - any project is better off with clear outcomes and preferably a customer, who is asking for it.
On admission peak that year, the bot handled 40K queries in a day. The bot also crashed later in the day, prompting us to further learn how to harden the access and keep it safe from mischievous friends ;).
A health department employee saw the bot. Perchance, they were also looking for something similar to answer general questions for diabetes and hepatitis.
They asked if we would be interested in building one. We jumped at the chance and said yes. I think they liked both our enthusiasm and the fact that we forgot to ask for any money in return.
We put together Arogya Prahari and our chatbot now started interacting with patients at PGI Chandigarh in English, Hindi, Punjabi and Marathi.
By this time we were in the 3rd year in college and pressure for internships was starting. My project partners discontinued and I was left alone, thinking what to do next.
A conversation on mangoes with Prof Rana turned into a fruitful one for my future.
He said you guys have been trying to sell mangoes. It is now time to move up the value chain. ‘Try to sell the mango shake’, he said.
He was alluding to the fact that instead of giving the bot away, offer the service that it provides. It was a powerful lesson for me in both outcome clarity and being able to pivot rapidly to new outcomes.
I am indebted to Prof Rana, for the mentor he was. His wisdom helped pivot to Cruxe.
Cruxe made summaries. You could point it to a blog post and it would use AI magic to create the summary. Our customer was the professional content creator.
I knew I had to do more. There is a difference between a college project and a product.
I had to build a profile for Cruxe. Get customers to use it. So I also started my Instagram channel to talk about AI and bring attention to Cruxe.
I was already juggling 3 things, every day.
Working in my project team, on the product.
Doing studies.
Creating content for my Instagram channel. 45K followers on the channel gave me the credentials to engage with other content creators. I also understood my customer better because I was now a content creator myself.
Then 2 more things got added.
Engage with Cruxe prospects. Pitch to them.
Take up an internship - because everyone else around me was doing that too.
All this juggling - grew me. Inside I was a college student. Outside, I wore the CEO wrapper now.
The internship has since then, converted into a job.
Cruxe has grown to a team of 8. With it, I am sure, we are standing on the verge of something that has a life of its own.
I don’t know what the future holds for me. I do know that my college taught me some useful CEO skills too, though it was not supposed to.