How Vinay Solanki came back to india for his PGPX at IIM Ahmedabad and found his digital mojo — IoT

Digital Transformation | Founder IoT-NCR | IIM-A | Startup Mentor | TEDx | Patent Pending

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

Q1. Tell us about your formative years. In which city did you grow up, your family, school and college, your value system, etc.

Ans: I was born in Gwalior but I was brought up in Bombay, so I did my schooling in Bombay from a convent school and after that I went to pursue computer engineering Masters program which was also in Mumbai University. I come from a family of entrepreneurs; my father had been an entrepreneur for almost all his life. He used to work for Baba Atomic Research, he was a scientist there but then he took a plunge and started his own business, so that’s why I have learnt certain traits of running business and dealing with people from him. After doing my computer engineering I worked briefly as a lecturer in Bombay University, where I was teaching artificial intelligence, which was like 3 years back and then I worked for TCS for a very short while and then decided to go to US like many of us in Bombay who were planning to do so. I went to do my Masters in Computer science from state university of New York, post which I joined Goldman Sachs. So I was working in their New York, their headquarters. I worked there for approximately 8 years, where I was working as a vice president in the technology division, and then suddenly sometime in 2013, I realised that I am the only son in the family and my parents are getting old because I was the youngest out of my 3 older siblings, and I decided to move back to India to be closer to them. So that was one of the main reasons, and then as you said, I came back and joined PGPX in IIMA and that’s the time I chose my career to be in the digital transformational technology and I decided if I build my career in the next 10–20 years of my life, it will be in IoT and AI field and that’s why I pursued it deeply and went ahead to work with Airtel, leading their IoT business in India, then moved to work with a startup in San Jose for a short while, and then Lenovo for approximately a year and a half leading their IoT business for Asia Pacific before I decided to take a plunge and run my own company which I am running right now.

Q2. Was coming back to India an easy decision?

Ans: It was very tough and I had to ponder on it for almost 4 years I would say. I got married in 2010 and started thinking in 2011 when we started settling there in US, we took a call that if we have to go back we have to go early, if we stay here and have a kid and he or she starts growing up it will be difficult even more, and then while interacting with my parents I realised that they won’t be able to relocate with me there because of their network and other things which I didn’t want to disturb. So it was a very tough call, the quality of life, income, savings, and also the opportunities in terms of what kind of profile you get were much better, but I also realised one thing. While I was looking at what was happening in India as an emerging economy, I also saw a reverse brain drain happening where a lot of my colleagues not just from Goldman Sachs, but from my MS program, my friends from the other companies were pondering to go back, come back as an entrepreneur or maybe join their own corporate company and settle back here. Many of them are here now with me and doing very well.

I was prepared to take the salary cut, I was also ready to take a profile cut if needed. There were two reasons for it — because I wanted to move out from a technology profile to a techno-commercial profile which is what I am doing now, which is a good mix of both business fundamentals and technology expertise which I can apply to my domain. I could have pursued an MS in US as well but then my son was born by then so I thought if I stay back here I don’t think the inertia and force of pursuing MBA and getting a very lucrative job would ever let me go back to India in the future so that was one of the reasons and then I found PGPX to be also equally valued program to come back to India.

Q3. Tell us the most fondest of memories you captured in IIMA.

Ans: I was fortunate to study with you, one of the youngest in our batch, I was also fortunate to work with 84 people. I think it was a very exciting journey, the one year was very tough and time consuming on a personal and professional time as well. The batched and the terms go very fast paced but I think what I realise is that they give you all-round exposure to business fundamentals or running a business or being a part of the business leadership profile, PGPX gives you the right exposure. Of course there is a good stratification between the basic courses they all have to go through and the electives which are well designed, for people who wants to go deeper in certain area. Particularly for me, I took certain electives in digital technology domain by certain professors along with whom I also published a paper on IoT where I wanted to go deeper and understand how will digital transformation impact the businesses around us and frankly speaking, now I see the whole world is gripped with transforming themselves both digitally and professionally, all businesses whether big or small.

Q4. Did you stumble upon IoT as serendipity? What is IoT for the layman? How will it impact the common man?

Ans: To answer your first question, I stumbled upon IoT back in US as well because couple of my friends decided to launch a startup in smart home automation domain, something like Google Nest or like a connected doorbell or a smart thermostat or a Philips Hue Bulb. So I got very keen about what is really going to happen in the world in the next 20 years or two decades, and I was able to and fortunate to see that technology like IoT and AI along with other technologies like augmented reality would definitely pick up. The world cannot survive without adopting this and remain competitive, both businesses and governments. Even smart cities were picking up in the US and we would have heard about the same from our Prime Minister Modi when he launched the mission of 100 smart cities. So that’s how IoT came into my head.

Now, what is IoT for a layman? I am very fortunate and also very excited to share this because I keep writing blogs and am writing a book on the same topic. From a layman term, if you want to explain to your grandma, you can actually correlate analogously with the child. When a child starts growing up and an infant wants to communicate to the world around it, the only way they can do is by crying, and as parents what we do is when we see them crying we take some trial and error method. We start feeding them, probably then check the temperature, third step would be taking them to a doctor if their crying doesn’t stop. So the challenge we see is that the child is not able to tell you what’s going wrong with the child. Think about the same thing for a machine, because the child who now starts growing up and capturing information through their eyes, ears and nose, which acts as a sensor, start becoming intelligent over a period of time, and when they grow they are able to interact and share more information. The same applies to any machine or any device around us. If I put a sensor in a machine, where a machine can communicate back to me and tell me what is going wrong or derive some value out of it. Think about a temperature sensor in your home that can tell you the temperature in your room which can help you to adjust the air conditioner to keep it ambient. Or think about a connected car, that is launched by Maruti for example in India and Volkswagen in Europe, they want the customer to use the experience of driving the car which can talk back to them by telling them that its engine is going to go bad or its oil is running low or the tire pressure is not good. You may want to take a look at it and may want to take it to a repair shop. If you look at both of these examples, B2C, B2B, or even B2G, what we are doing with the smart cities in India, IoT as a layman, is very simple, it’s the power of enabling any device around you to talk back to you through sensors which then is processed by an AI engine to derive the value from it.

Q5. Since everything becomes automatic, will this impact employment as well? Will there be lesser number of mechanical jobs?

Ans: I think the whole industry is thinking about how many job losses will it result in because of automation around you. Its not just IoT, the automation of various industries happen because of amalgamation of multiple technologies together like robotics, humanoids or other things which can do the work that a human should technically do. I think over a shorter period of time, there will be an impact for sure, because certain processes might become more automated. You must heard of a technology called RPA which basically automates routine mundane task which are repetitive in nature and that has already resulted in certain jobs being impacted but over a longer period of time, two key things: one is, if the upscaling and rescaling of the same labor workforce can be done in the right way to employ them into newer areas, I think that would help drastically in the longer term, and second what I feel is that because of more efficiency, and enhancements in the operations of factories and other businesses, they will generate more revenue, save more cost and maybe employ more people in other roles and businesses. I think the bottom line can increase because of more efficient way of working or adopting a solution like I explained with the connected cars, ultimately that will be a win-win for everyone.

Q6. Do you always need a techy here in RPA or neural networks or do you also need people like business analysts who can think it from a commercial side here?

Ans: First of all, yes. There will be a role to be played by various institutes around us including both public and private to rescale, upscale and provide those kinds of platform for people to learn and grow. I run a company called IoT-NCR which is world’s third largest community with 8000+ members now and I have seen in my workshops, when we do workshops on AI, IoT, block chain, augmented reality, people come with background of non-tech as well. People from CA background, pure commerce, or other vocational fields like design thinkers, civil engineers, who are not programmers but they still have an application of IoT in what they design, the infrastructure they might be working on. So think of any area, typically for commerce background, taking the example of you; if you want to understand how an IoT impacts me or my businesses, so I will give a simple case study. For a financial lender who wants to lend a manufacturing unit today, they only have certain set of parameters to calculate the credit risk, their history, financial statement, their social footprint and other business documents but what I have also seen is that now these people who are purely from commerce and finance backgrounds, they want to understand IoT and see if I can deploy certain asset monitoring solution inside my lending company or my customer and that gives me more real time data or the productivity, I can do better risk calculation for them, I can do much real time estimation, whether they will be able to repay or make the EMI payment for the next month because that will give me their month-to-month inventory, month-to-month moment of days of inventory in other things and that can be possible by such digital solutions, so I think there is a good convergence happening in the world where technologies are impacting in almost every vertical and it is becoming more and more in need where people should know about the applications even if you are not able to program it.

Q7. Tell us about your startup. What exactly are you into now? How were the initial three months?

Ans: First of all you would have realised I am a risk-taker, I have taken big risks in the past as well and I love to take risk, and being an entrepreneur you have to know whether you can really manage those risks well. Unless you can’t do that, you should not take that plunge. My company is called the Thingy Fire Pvt. Ltd., it is based out of Gurgaon. I have a co-founder from ISB Hyderabad. He is a data scientist by profession and an alum of ISB, so he was running his company for almost a year now. It’s not something started in January, we both actually created a patent together around 2 years back. The patent is pending for publication in India and we have also filed in US and Australia. We basically created a product for retail industry and not just like the retail store industry, but any retail outlet, it can be a shopping mall, it can be building a commercial setup for implementing energy management solutions and use cases around energy aspects. So think about this; many of the retailers around the world, they have one big challenge — how do I optimize the cost of energy usage. Think of Big Bazar, on a weekend they have a good rush but on a weekday afternoon, it might be almost 80% empty but they still keep most of their lights on and air conditioners running at the same temperature, they need to consume the same diesel in the generators and consume the same power. Its very hard for them to optimize the consumption of energy based on the requirement. It could very simple like the heat map that can be done with an IoT solution and then some sensors that can capture temperature reading and automatically instruct the controller to adjust the temperature, and we did that and it worked very well for two retail players in India. We are right now working with a government organization and on a first place of deployment. It’s a tender so I can’t talk more about it but its one of the largest projects implemented by the government of India for food quality inspection across the country. That’s what we are working on right now.

Q8. If you look back and retrace your journey, what would be that one thing you would want to do differently?

Ans: I think one thing I should have done earlier is plunge into entrepreneurship a little bit earlier than what I did, but of course we all have our baggage of financial burden that comes along with going for such a program and also other things that you have to take care of so that I would definitely should have done a little earlier but I think one more thing that I realised is that I could have gone better or actually could have been done differently is by choosing the right path towards entrepreneurship. I think I spent too much time in corporate career but at the hindsight what I feel that career also gave me a lot of good exposure in terms of managing the business holistically. So one thing I definitely did on purpose is took different roles in different companies. I did not just stay as a sales person, in Lenovo I was in business development in sales, but before that I was in market strategies and in Airtel I was building the platform for connectivity management platform for IoT, so I tried to ensure I get an exposure holistically along with my personal efforts like IoT-NCR and another thing that I keep going on.

Q9. What will be your advice to youngsters?

Ans: Build a T-shaped career in today’s world. What I mean by that is T should have depth in certain area, for example me, I am very deep in solution designing and creating a solution architecture for any use case in IoT but I also have a wider bar of the T where you understand the other aspects to a certain level as well. A T-shaped career also helps you to stay competitive and relevant in your career because marketing is becoming very competitive specially in India, so many engineers coming out everyday so you need to build yourself and position as a differentiator, so not just focus on technology but also on personal branding.

Q10. What do you do for fun and fitness?

Ans: Today because of COVID I cannot walk but I normally used to go for morning and evening walk, but I am doing meditation and Suryanamaskar in my balcony in current situation, but the two things I am passionate about is cooking and dancing, so whenever I get time I just play music and dance on it, relax my body, and I also started home chef process now, where I cook certain things which I love and I also deliver it to the audience in my society because people cannot order from outside now. So I try to cook and help them as much as I can.