Abhishek Awadhiya
Class of 2007


 

Tell us a little about your family background/ history. How has it influenced you?
I hail from Bhilai, an industrial town in Chhattisgarh. I completed my schooling from Delhi Public School Bhilai. The town is known for a very conducive environment for good quality school education and excellent coaching infrastructure for preparation of IIT entrance exams. Given all this, unsurprisingly, I chose to prepare for IIT and finished my B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras.

Briefly describe your personal and professional achievements (including recent awards/ special projects).
Professional Achievements:
Professionally I am currently deeply involved in building the internet eco-system in India as a part of my role at Google. As a part of this, I’m working with large e-commerce companies to help them scale-up their businesses and also coaching/mentoring several B2C tech start-ups in helping them fine tune their business models to make them scalable and raise funding. This is especially exciting since am passionate about contributing towards the internet revolution in India.

Personally, life has been doubly busy ever since the arrival of our son Arihaan last year :)

Tell us about your profile prior to attending ISB and recap your professional life after ISB, including your career progression.
Prior to ISB, I was a telecom R&D engineer with Reliance Communications where I was a part of the team which developed India’s first indigenously designed CDMA base station. This was developed at 25% of the prevailing market price by re-writing the entire code in-house and re-designing the hardware.
Post ISB, I spent 6 years in McKinsey and then joined Google as Head of India Strategy and Sales Operations in 2013. I spent most of my time in McKinsey focussing on technology/telecom/internet businesses and was keen to transition to a full time operating role in this space. This was the key motivation behind transitioning to Google

How do you think your time at ISB has contributed to your career and personal growth?
I benefited a lot from the course content. Being an engineer I really was not exposed to the business focused courses earlier. The ISB curriculum really equipped me well to find sure footing as a business professional at my stints in McKinsey and currently at Google. Needless to say, the friends and batchmates from ISB are priceless professional network I have built which I cherish dearly.
On the personal front, I met my future wife in my class – Alankrita Datta so couldn’t have asked for more :)

What do you enjoy most about your current career position?
Being really close to the action in the internet/technology space

Briefly describe a typical day at work, in a way that illuminates the kind of challenges and opportunities your role involves.
A typical day at work involves working on areas which provide significant strategic growth opportunities for India. As an example, this might involve working on creating a strategic engagement with a large client where we can work with them as a business partner in helping them achieve key business objectives (e.g. 10X the transactions on their website over 12 months). Alternatively, it could be running a business review with a cross functional team including senior stakeholders brainstorming on critical product launches required for the market.

What is the next new thing in the industry or vertical you are working in? Are there any trends that you can identify?
Helping 10X the internet ecosystem in India is a part of my current role. India is going to be a mobile first economy. We are adding 5M new internet users every month and are expected to have 500M internet users by 2017-18. Most of the incremental users will have smartphones as the only means to access internet. This one trend will have the single biggest impact on the evolution of internet eco-system in India. This impacts the way business models will evolve and hence companies need to factor this in as they think about customer acquisition, customer engagement and scaling up their businesses. I am working closely with several companies in the internet space to help them adapt to this reality and factor this into their business strategy.

What was the main highlight or most memorable aspect of your programme at the ISB?
1 year at ISB helped me realize how much can be achieved every 24 hours provided one is aspirational enough and plans well for this.

If you could offer a word of advice to the current class at ISB, what would it be?
Identify your passion, leverage your strengths to work towards it and have a crisp/compelling story to communicate this to others.

How do you feel you can contribute to ISB?
I would definitely like to contribute more than the requests for reviewing resumes and helping prepare for interviews. I would be happy to provide students with the perspective of what the latest trends in the tech space in India are, what kind of opportunities it is opening up and how one should think about leveraging them.