Shashikanth Khandelwal talks on "Starting up after College" at Conquest 2009

About the Speaker:

Shashikant is a Founding Member and Chief Architect at TheFind Inc, a startup in shopping search with more than 15 million visitors per month. At TheFind, Shashikant has been involved in venture funding, product innovation (5 patents pending), and building a scalable search engine. He recruited a team to solve hard problems in information extraction using machine learning, and has played a crucial role in traffic growth and revenue optimization.

Shashikant also co-founded BITSEmbryo along with his 1997 batch BITSian classmates, and led the team from idea inception to building an Embryo Club on campus to run this project. In 2 years, Embryo has conducted 80 lectures via video-conferencing, some of them simultaneously across Pilani, Goa and Dubai campuses with an attendance of over 500 students.

Prior to TheFind, Shashikant worked at INSEAD France for a year. Shashikant has a BE(Hons) Computers Science from BITS Pilani and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is an active member of BITSAA.

Description of The Talk:

Shasikanth, speaking from the United States, in a online lecture setup by the embryo group of BITS Pilani, started off by speaking about dreams. “Dream and dream big” he said, while illustrating how he started his first big venture. He smoothly shifted to talking about the importance of knowledge, “Knowledge is Power.”, he quoted the slogan of BITS Pilani. He also informed the audience that knowledge could also be dangerous sometimes, as knowing how hard it is to do something , could dissuade one from even trying- “Ignorance is bliss”.

He revealed to the audience that the best way to learn entrepreneurship is to “Just do it.”Experience counts and entrepreneurs need to be bold enough to “Just do it.”

He then spoke about the need for mentors in our lives. The mentors could be anybody, our teachers, our friends, our seniors or just anybody who does something we want to do.

“You can be sure that there are many others who are as smart as you. However, if you work for one hour more everyday, it equals thirthy hours in a month and that is a lot of time. Hard work is the only thing which can make you stand out.” He quoted his mentor, Chandra Bhople.

He ended the talk by stressing on the importance of friends. He revealed that most of the people he is working with have been his friends for years. “A group of people will know a lot more people and have a lot more experience than one person could ever hope to have”, he said.