Ajeet Singh also completed his MBA from Kolkata, and moved on to work in Bengaluru for 6 years.
Born into a family of farmers in Uttar Pradesh, an engineer from IIT Kanpur developed two unicorns. In 2016, one of the companies he created saw one of the largest tech IPOs on the NASDAQ. Ajeet Singh went on to build two billion-dollar businesses: the cloud computing startup Nutanix, valued at over $6 billion, and the technology startup ThoughtSpot, valued at over $4 billion and producing business intelligence analytics.
In a podcast with Myntra and Cult.Fit founder Mukesh Bansal for the podcast "SparX by Mukesh Bansal," Singh described how he went about starting these multibillion-dollar companies.
"I come from a family of farmers, my grandparents were farmers in Western UP. My dad was a research scientist in the Department of Agriculture and he was a chemist, so I grew up all over UP," he said, adding that the visits to his father’s labs had a lasting impression on him. Singh was eventually the topper in Chemical Engineering at IIT-Kanpur.
Singh, a topper in Chemical Engineering in IIT-Kanpur worked in Bengaluru for six years after completing his MBA in Kolkata, and then he moved to the US. Singh didn't particularly envisage a career in business at first, even though he was the first engineer in his family. After his MBA, Ajeet Singh also pursued a career in management consulting, which he disliked.
Focusing on supply chain planning software, he joined i2 Technologies in Bengaluru, because he was dissatisfied with making PowerPoint presentations without any practical expertise.
After three years at i2, Singh joined Honeywell and then Oracle. "I went to the US with Honeywell and once the product was ready to be launched I didn’t want to stay in a very large organisation for very long. I wanted to be closer to technologies, and went to Oracle. And once I was in the Bay Area, I thought I really couldn’t be here and not work for startups. So then I joined a startup," said Singh.
Singh stressed how early-career professionals should focus on gaining as much knowledge as possible and establishing connections with knowledgeable people.
ThoughtSpot and Nutanix, two businesses heavily influenced by Singh, both have a sizable Bengaluru workforce. Singh emphasised the global reach of his projects, citing 400 R&D employees worldwide, including 300 in India spread throughout Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Thiruvananthapuram.
"We have a no-HQ culture. I hated the HQ term,” Ajeet Singh said because he wanted to avoid the misconception that essential work is centralised at headquarters. Drawing from his experiences, Singh maintains a discerning approach when selecting collaborators, including co-founders, investors, and team members.
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