The Journey Home…

I was 8 years old when I first used a computer. It might not seem like a big deal today where toddlers operate iPads like pros. It definitely was a big deal in 1984 , when my father got me an AT/XT. The orange monochrome monitor with its floppy drives and the blinking cursor waiting for me to tell it what to do had me hooked.

Over the next decade I played around with many assembled computers and took an obscure course – ‘Computer Science’ in high school as a mainstream subject. Coding palindromes and fibonacci series and seeing them getting printed on the the screen was amazing. Fortran, BASIC, COBOL, FoxPro, Archie, Lynx, Gopher and C became friends I spent most of my time with.

Following through my love for technology with an Engineering degree and a couple of startups later, I ended up in one of the most amazing companies ever – Sun Microsystems. It was my geek dream come true. I worked on the amazing code of Netscape products, participated in Java Community Processes for JSR-168/JAX-B and surprisingly became the JAVA Ambassador for the APAC region.

The high point in my career to date is sharing the stage with James Gosling in Beijing talking about the release of J2SE 5.0 – a major jump from 1.2 (oh, and going out to shoot pool with him later on !). That Ambassador experience made me realize that I enjoyed connecting with fellow techies, customers and anyone in particular to talk about technology and business intersects. Working with product companies to get them to adopt JAVA and also discuss with them on Go-To-Market activities showed me new doors of opportunity for my career.

So when SAP came knocking for setting up a Technology business led by the NetWeaver brand, I crossed over to becoming a technology business leader.

The  best career decision I ever made! PERIOD.

SAP and its ecosystem exposed me to customers of all sizes, industries, business-types and functional departments. Translating technology impact to almost every business problem was my high everyday at SAP for almost a decade. I learnt from the best-of-the-best on sales and marketing – and more importantly how to keep the customer at the center of everything.

I was privileged to lead iconic brands like NetWeaver, BusinessObjects, Sybase & HANA in India.

The urge to ‘create’ led me back in the path of my startup journey with BookMeABook, TransMetry & WizIQ. However, wrapping up a not-so-successful startup stint was morale-wrenching. That’s when Adobe happened to me – divine intervention indeed!

Adobe taught me the importance of nurturing creativity and curiosity to bring imaginations to life using technology. The emotions that drive human progress!

The blending of art-and-science is something that the next generation is already embracing. There is creativity & innovation all around us. We are truly going through a generational shift in almost everything. Everything is going digital.

Sitting at the center of this progress and transformation to codify everything is GitHub. I have been following GitHub as it always reminded me of Sun because of the community focus.

When the opportunity to setup & lead GitHub in India came by (thank you a16z and Nat), it felt like something I had been preparing for the last 21+ years.

Being a technologist, I’ve always been intrigued by the expanse of software development and its impact on our lives. India is a shining example of transformation by technology/software. Technology enabled businesses are transforming the economic landscape of not only the country but individuals as well. It is no surprise that India is GitHub’s 3rd largest userbase. With 270Million students across the academic K-through-College landscape along with more than 4Million IT practitioners, India presents a unique growth opportunity for GitHub.

I believe it is time for me to share my own learnings & experiences with the developer community, startups and help customers get code-ified for future. I feel privileged to be a part of this journey with GitHub and the impact it can have on developers and India.

Friends have been asking how I feel taking on this new challenge.

Well, it feels like…I’m Home !