IIT Mentors Presents:

"Deciding Between and Navigating a Tech vs Non-tech Career"

Thursday, December 3rd 2015, 6:30pm - 9:00pm

Prysm
180 Baytech Drive, Suite 200
San Jose, CA 95134

Space limit increased to 25 prospective mentees only! Previous events were sold out. Please note that you need to have studied in one of the IITs to attend this event.

See the Attendee List at the bottom of the page

Program Details

As we progress through our career, we are frequently conflicted on the direction we must take to grow. One such conflict for people from a technical background is whether to pursue a career close to technology or shift focus to business functions. The reasons for such conflict might stem from our notions of what path provides the greatest opportunity for growth and impact. The questions could be many:

Is there a right way to think about it?
Does it make sense to pursue an MBA after your degrees in engineering and PhD?
Does pursuing one path means losing the other?
How does one transition from a technology/product function to a business function in profession and vice-versa?

If these questions resonate with you, please join us to interact with and receive mentorship from our highly successful IIT alumni who have traveled the same path as you and have successfully navigated their professional career.

Program Summary

6:30 PM - 7:15 PM Registration, Dinner, and Networking

7:15 PM - 9:00 PM Discussion and Q & A with the mentors

9:00 PM Adjourn

Mentor

Dilip Venkatachari

Dilip Venkatachari leads McKinsey Digital Labs in Palo Alto.

Dilip is a technology industry veteran, and, over the course of his career, has co-founded & led multiple startup companies, and has held senior executive leadership roles at Google, PayPal and Yahoo.

Dilip is a proud graduate of IIT Madras! He also received an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a Masters in EE from Rice University.

Dilip actively mentors entrepreneurs and early stage companies. He is a member of IIT Madras's Entrepreneurship Forum in the Bay Area and was formerly the President of PanIIT USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilip_Venkatachari

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dilipvenkatachari

Tushar Kant

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Senior Director of Sales & Partner Development, Centurylink Cognilytics, San Jose,CA

Tushar has more than 16 years of industry experience across Silicon Valley & Wall Street at Intel Corp., Sun Microsystems/Oracle Corp., Bank of America Securities, GE Capital, NRG Energy, VMware and Centurylink Cognilytics. His expertise spans across diverse fields of Software Development (networking, mobile-communications, and semiconductors), Investment Banking, Private Equity, Venture Capital, Mergers & Acquisitions and Business Development (cloud-computing, virtualization and security). He has published on the topics in Artificial Intelligence, High-Performance Algorithms and Bankruptcy & Reorganization. He has spoken as guest speaker and in competitive events at MIT (USA), IIT Delhi and IIT Kanpur. His extra-carricular activities include national level debate in Macro-Economics, organizing concerts of international artists and being an active member of the PAN IIT Bay Area Chapter Fund Raising Team.

Tushar has a B. Tech. degree in Electrial Engineering from IIT, an MS in Computer Science (USA) and an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business. He is a Stern Scholar and Member of Beta Gamma Sigma.

Vishal Goenka

Vishal is a Senior Product Manager at Google

Vishal works on AdWords at Google. He joined Google in 2009 as a software engineer when his small advertising technology startup named Teracent, where Vishal was the chief architect, was acquired by Google. Vishal spent three years at Google in engineering roles and switched to Product Management in 2012. He also earned an MBA with honors during 2012-2014 from the Wharton's MBA for executives program in San Francisco.

Vishal earned his bachelors in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1996 with a gold medal for best all-round performance. He held various software engineering positions at Novell, Campus Pipeline, Teracent, and Google until 2012.