LEADER OF IMPACT
► RAJIV SRIVATSA and his IIMB batchmate Ashish Goel disrupted India’s unorganised furniture retail market with UrbanLadder, a vertical e-commerce platform, in 2012, at a time when most players were chasing horizontal e-commerce a la Flipkart. Nearly eight years later, Srivatsa moved on to become a full-time venture capitalist at Antler India. Both his present and last role are a far cry from his maiden job as a software engineer in Infosys in 2000. A “cocooned” techie from Chennai, Srivatsa may have never become an entrepreneur if not for the two “best years” of his life at IIMB. “I was a very introverted and studious kid, and had never stayed outside Chennai. The moment I came to Bengaluru and interacted with people from different backgrounds and cultures, my exposure became larger,” says Srivatsa.
After earning his MBA in 2004, Srivatsa—a self-confessed coding geek—continued to work in the IT and tech industry, with stints at Cognizant and Yahoo India. Though he turned entrepreneur in 2012, the ‘build something’ bug had bitten him while on campus at IIMB. Srivatsa shares, “I used to code a lot back then. I built out IIMB’s intranet service (Spidi), which had over a thousand daily active users (DAUs) at that time. I saw the impact it created and the way I could technologise the entire campus and connect people. One of my inspirations was Mark Zuckerberg, who was also building Facebook from his college dorm around the same time.”
IIMB had a critical role to play in UrbanLadder’s journey. “Our first customers, first investors, initial word of mouth… pretty much all of it was through IIMB alumni networks. It was a very powerful network for sure,” Srivatsa reveals. Interestingly, just before starting up, Srivatsa was also “considering a job” at Flipkart, the poster child of India’s start-up economy. “I’d interviewed for a role there. The Bansals [Sachin and Binny] were a big inspiration then,” he says.
However, he laments the fact that there’s barely any encouragement for entrepreneurship in campuses. “Right after the degree, all the focus is on placements,” he says. He adds that IIMs (and most educational institutions in India) don’t prepare students to deal with failure. “Mental health and therapy must be brought into these top B-schools because the competition there is much more,” he opines. “Leadership training happens at IIMs, but happiness training doesn’t happen.”
Is the hallowed IIM degree losing its relevance in the modern day, when students have a plethora of offline and online options to choose from? “Well, if you get a top-tier MBA, it is still worth it. But behavioural skills get better in a real job,” says Srivatsa.