Ashish, tell us about your background?
Early in my career, I worked as a Consultant at Infosys and Motorola across India and the US. The last 3 yrs at a start up in San Francisco. Though I have mostly been involved in High-level decision making, I am an Engineer at heart....always trying to find innovative solutions to problems. I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters in Information Systems. The MBA from Haas will be the "one ring that will rule them all". I am also an active volunteer at non-profit organizations located in the Bay Area.
What kind of exposure do you have to entrepreneurship, in your past? / What sparked your interest in it?
I worked as a product manager in a start up during the last 3 years. As a young man, I had always hoped to work for a start up in the Heart of Silicon Valley. So, joining ZoneLabs was a culmination of a dream. However, due to the dot-com bust, working for a start-up was not as glamorous as I had imagined. The company was located in a warehouse in a seedy San Francisco neighborhood with a homeless shelter across the street and crackheads lying by the entrance. But the company itself was doing pretty well. The company led by the CEO, a high school drop-out, the COO, another entrepreneur and an able team of 20 people - suddenly experienced a spurt of growth. When it was finally acquired for $300 million in 2004, the CEO walked out of the door with almost $30 million bucks.
The morale of the story was that it could have been me walking out of the door with the big moolah. Having come so close, I decided to throw more money at my quest to get rich by racking up a big debt to pay for my MBA.
Tell us about what you're doing for the bplan; how has it been going so far?
At the Mentorship & Events committee, we think of ourselves as the match.com of the BPlan competition. Our vision is to help you find the perfect team, an understanding mentor and resources to win the competition. We try to achieve this by a mix of events and workshops.
Usually there's a strong MBA turnout at the entrepreneurship events. This year, we have been trying to rope in more engineers from across Cal. While trying to do it, we realized that Berkeley has a very fragmented engineering department...we've had to bribe engineers using pizza and coke as bait.
We also regularly host "Best Practices" workshops with the Lester Center. Additionally, we have added new events like the Idea Workshop and the latest - an event labelled "Rags to Riches: Winning a Business Plan competition". This exciting new addition brings the winners of last year competition " Aurora BioFuels" and "CellASIC" to talk to aspiring BPlan winners on how to win a BPlan competition.
Another significant step we took this year was to invite Haas Undergrads to become part of the organizing committee. It has been a huge success so far thanks to active contributions from all our young "BPlan Executives" - Alison, Belinda, Ben, Oscar, Naaman, Suana and Wendy.
Finally, I would like to add that the success of any event depends on the people behind it. We have an awesome team of people in the BPlan committee and I am really excited to be a part of it.
Any personal goals you have, entrepreneurship-related?
Like many other aspiring entrepreneurs, I have tons of ideas...but as many already know, the key lies in execution. My goal in the next year is to rub shoulders with as many entrepreneurs as possible to reduce my inertia towards starting my own company.
