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Arvind did his high-school from Delhi Public School, RK Puram, Delhi – from where he appeared for & scored 1st rank IIT Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) & Roorkee Engineering Entrance exams. He did his B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur. He immediately went for his Masters & PhD in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked as part of Computer Science & AI Lab’s RAW microprocessor group. The RAW group did groundbreaking work in multi-core parallel processor design, some of which were mirrored 15 years later in Intel processor designs. MIT’s exposure got Arvind interested in tech enabled solutions for emerging markets. He took a break from studies at MIT to return to India and join the recently setup Google India's Bangalore office as an intern in 2004, converting to full-time employee in early 2005. At Google, he worked on search algorithms (covering machine learning and recommendations) and ads. He helped transition Google’s then acquisitions, dMarc and Youtube, to google platforms and their early monetization prototypes. He left Google in April 2008 and co-founded Swasth India with 2 classmates. Swasth aimed at providing healthcare for the poor in India. The company was one of the first VC investments by Ratan Tata. Arvind was involved in defining the Swasth India & Swasth Foundation's vision, mission, governance structures, led the development of Swasth's core MIS, and led various projects in partnerships with non-profit partners and governments. Arvind’s family owns a traditional apparel business in India’s textile capital, Surat. Through his holiday visits to his family, he had begun to appreciate the role of SMEs in larger economic development. He moved out of Swasth in 2012 and returned to Surat to join the traditional family oriented textile brand & business, Triveni Sarees. He took the brand online – building a new team & processes. His initiatives brought about more efficiencies in the traditional core manufacturing management processes, aimed at better tracking & efficiency, and newer approaches in marketing & outreach. With Triveni's better defined vision & mission & improved processes, Triveni expanded into other areas & geographies. He founded Wishbook in 2016, a company digitizing traditional B2B apparel communication and transactions, from manufacturers to retailers. Wishbook raised INR 6.40 Cr of capital investment led by Info Edge (parent company of Naukri.com), grew to a team of 50+ employees, building a transactionally profitable B2B eCommerce model in addition to a set of software services. He is currently Vice President, Engineering at Drishti Technologies, Inc. Arvind is a very hands-on technologist, passionate about building and scaling tech enabled and deep tech solutions for pressing problems in emerging and developed markets."

My earliest sense of accomplishment was when I was 5. I was to color the sketch of a green vegetable, but was out of green water color. I intuitively guessed that I could try mixing blue & yellow, and it worked. This was my first self discovery - hypothesis, experiment, validation all baked in. There are some academic & professional moments, more around some unconventional accomplishments. During my college at IIT, I remember bicycling from the computer science center to hostel trying to understand through data structures - in this case AVL trees, and at some time - I could visualize the entire balancing process of AVL trees on node addition or deletion. It was so vivid & suddenly more intuitive. At MIT, I remember a specific multi-processor programming project. My approach was significantly more innovative, almost changing the initial design to work on - and yet 2 nights of work, and I could make it work. During my first venture, Swasth India, focussed on ensure affordable quality healthcare for the poor - I conducted many community meetings in slums & villages. One of the community meetings in an urban Delhi slum - I remember one of the women say to the others “Hum nahin to kya koi America se aayega hamari madad karne” (“If not us, will someone from the United States to help us?”). The pride on seeing the message of self problem-solving go through was immense. I had taken a traditional apparel brand (Triveni) in a bootstrapped manner, and would get interns from the top engineering, design & management institutions (IITs, NIFTs & IIMs respectively). One of the intern batches last day - the farewell message from the interns, the specialness they felt about the organization was heart-warming.

Hard to think where I would be 5 years from now. I do want to synthesize my learnings & experiences, building companies across spaces esp for emerging markets, how these ventures have influenced my notion of India, the many aspects of core data sciences & engineering I have seen. I would have likely written a lot more of these experiences & learnings & shared. And perhaps by then, I would stepped away from a more operational managerial role into a more deep thinking work, on the core technically hard problems.