Our speakers

Sanjay Mishra, Professor, The University of Kansas

Sanjay Mishra is Professor in Marketing at the University of Kansas, School of Business. His undergraduate degree is from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, MS in Engineering from the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, and an MBA and a Ph. D in Marketing from Washington State University, Pullman.

His research interests are in Consumer Preference and Choice Modeling, Brand Extension and Alliances, Consumer Information Processing, Entrepreneurship and Fast Growth, Innovation, New Product Development Processes, and Psychometrics. He has worked on product development practices in India, South Korea and Finland. In the new product and the entrepreneurship area, he is interested in how investors (venture capitalists) make investment decisions and whether firms/entrepreneurs learn as much from failures as from successes. His work has been published in several journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Psychometrika, Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, Academy of Management Journal, Marketing Letters, Journal of Product Innovation and Management. Prof. Mishra has presented papers at conferences in Asia, Europe, Latin America, Australia, and North America and made invited presentations at leading universities in Mexico, South Korea and India and at National Association of Development Organizations (NADO) and National Business Incubators Association (NBIA) annual conferences in the USA. He has received research and curriculum development grants from the Marketing Science Institute, Hewlett Packard Corp, and the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Dr. Mishra was a member of the team that developed and organized the “Entrepreneurial Effect”, a weeklong seminar for economic development personnel in the US. For several years, he served on the Haskell Indian Nations University's National Advisory Board in Business. He was a member of the 1996 University of Kansas Fulbright Group visit program to Mexico.

Dr. Mishra teaches courses in Innovation and New Product Management, Marketing Strategy, and Entrepreneurship. He has worked with technology related entrepreneurial businesses and assists firms in their new product development decisions. He has received several teaching awards, including being voted as the “MBA Outstanding Professor.” Dr. Mishra was consulting editor for a report to the President for the White House commission for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Dr. Mishra has arranged and led students—MBA & Undergraduate--and faculty on study tours of India, presented a course on the “Discovery and Understanding of India”, and made several India related presentations. He was a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Scholar understanding innovation and entrepreneurship in India.

Sanjay Mishra, GM-IT, Saksham Group of Companies

Sanjay Mishra, Head IT, CIO, Larsen & Toubro

Sanjay Nadkarni, Founder, Babyoye.com

Sanjay Nadkarni is the Co-founder at babyoye.com and has spent the better part of his professional career helping large enterprises harness the power of telecommunication infrastructure. While demystifying the Internet, Data Centers and Wide Area Networks for others, his raison d’etre for the association has always been a heartfelt need to create harmonious applications for online communities.

Babyoye.com represents his vision for bringing world-class products and services to the online Indian parent. Babyoye has tied-up with over 80 brands and offers a range of over 4,000 products, including Pampers diapers, Chicco food, Johnson's skincare range and cyclemaker BSA's prams and strollers.

He started his career with Sify Limited as a Key Account Mananger and then moved to Bharti Airtel Ltd. where he worked for over 8 years before founding babyoye.com.

Sanjay Nath, Managing Partner, Blume Ventures

Sanjay is a Co-founder & Managing Partner at Blume Ventures ( www.blumeventures.com ), India’s leading homegrown early-stage VC. Founded in 2010 by Karthik Reddy and Sanjay Nath, Blume has invested in over 100 startups since its inception.

Blume’s portfolio includes notable exits such as Taxiforsure (acquired by Olacabs), Zipdial (acq by Twitter), Promptec Renewables (acq by Havells), Minjar (acq by Nutanix), and most recently Mettl (acq by Mercer). Its growing base of emerging portfolio stars include Grey Orange Robotics, Unacademy, Servify, Locus, Railyatri, Nowfloats, Tricog, Belong, Webengage, Carbon Clean Solutions, Stellapps amongst others. Sanjay serves as a board advisor on several Blume portfolio companies including Locus, Tricog, Little Black Book, Dataweave, Yulu Bike and others.

Prior to Blume, Sanjay was also an active angel investor through Mumbai Angels. His angel investments include Inmobi, LittleEye Labs (acquired by Facebook), Tonbo Imaging, Svasti Microfinance, 6Dbytes (Blendid), amongst others.

Sanjay’s experience spans the US and India, and ranges from management consulting (PwC and IBM Global Services), product marketing and operations (Sun Microsystems) and angel investing (thru Mumbai Angels). Most recently, prior to founding Blume, he co founded Loxodrome, a legal outsourcing company with dual-shore operations in San Francisco and Pune, India. Early in his career, Sanjay supported the growth of Kanbay (Nasdaq IPO in ’04), then acquired by Cap Gemini for $1.25BL in ‘06.
Sanjay has earned an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management and also holds an undergraduate major in Information Systems from BITS, Pilani.

Sanjay Nath, Co-founder & Managing Partner, Blume Venture Advisors Pvt. Ltd. | @BlumeVentures

Sanjay is a Co-founder & Managing Partner at Blume Ventures (www.blumeventures.com). Blume has emerged as one of India's leading early-stage funds, having invested in over 50 startups since its inception in late 2010.

Blume's portfolio includes Taxiforsure (acquired by Olacabs), Zipdial (acquired by Twitter), Qubecell (acquired by Boku), Grey Orange Pte Lte, Mettl, Webengage, Hotelogix, Exotel, Rolocule Games, and Carbon Clean Solutions, amongst others. Many of Blume’s portfolio companies have secured follow-on financing from top tier global VCs including Tiger Global, Accel, Matrix, Bessemer, Cisco Ventures, to name a few.

Prior to Blume, Sanjay was also an active angel investor through Mumbai Angels. His angel investments include Inmobi, Appsdaily (formerly Onward Mobility), Little Eye Labs (acquired by Facebook), Tonbo Imaging and Svasti amongst others.

Sanjay’s experience spans the US and India, and ranges from management consulting (PwC and IBM Global Services), product marketing and operations (Sun Microsystems) and angel investing (thru Mumbai Angels). Most recently, prior to founding Blume, he co founded Loxodrome, a legal outsourcing company with dual-shore operations in San Francisco and Pune, India. Early in his career, Sanjay supported the growth of Kanbay (Nasdaq IPO in ’04), then acquired by Cap Gemini for $1.25BL in ‘06.

Sanjay has earned an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management and also holds an undergraduate major in Information Systems from BITS, Pilani.

@sanjaynath

Sanjay Nayak, CEO & MD, Tejas Networks

Sanjay Nayak is the Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of Tejas Networks, a leading optical networking product company from India. Mr. Nayak is a technologist with over 20 years of industry experience in India as well as the USA. Prior to founding Tejas, he held senior management position in globally leading Electronic Design Automation companies such as Synopsys (where he was the Managing Director of Synopsys-India) and earlier at Cadence Design Systems.

Mr. Nayak holds a M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University, Raleigh and B.E in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra.

Sanjay Nekkanti, CEO, Dhruva Space

Sanjay Ojha, Senior Partner, Business Transformation Services, IBM Consulting, India & South Asia

Sanjay is leading IBM’s pivot to AI & Cloud in the new paradigm through his role as leader for Business Transformation Services in India. He drives client mindshare on transformation led by AI, Digital and functional consulting ie, customer, talent, finance and supply chain. He works across industries including Banks, Telcos, Retailers, Media, Industrial and Government sector.

Before IBM, Sanjay was a Managing Director at Accenture in New York office, where he led Applied Intelligence and Digital business for Financial Services in North America. He helped clients reimagine their business models by embracing Artificial Intelligence and Analytics. He joined the firm in 2009 to help launch its Analytics business, grown it to global scale over a decade, that included building a global data science team of 1000+ practitioners across five markets.

In his prior work life between 2000-2009, Sanjay was instrumental in setting up GE Capital’s Analytics Center of Excellence at Bangalore, a first of its kind in India, that serviced businesses worldwide. Subsequently, he joined the leadership team of Genpact that was spun off from GE, and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina to set up Analytics virtual captives  for the US Banks.

Sanjay is an analytics and data native who is well versed with machine learning, data science, data engineering and artificial intelligence technologies, and its application to solve industry problems.

Sanjay Purohit, Founder, Director & CEO, iProf Learning Solutions India Pvt. Ltd

Sanjay is an expert in business innovation and process transformation and has extensive experience of leading transformation projects across several industries and organizations. He has experience in technology, textiles and outsourcing services industries and has worked in USA, India and Singapore.

Prior to starting iProf, Sanjay was a managing director with New York based business restructuring firm LMCO. As part of his role at LMCO, he oversaw restructuring at prominent organizations such as Silicon Graphics and Great wide. He has led several organizations through transformation phases as a CEO. He was the CEO of USD 600M textile firm Dan River in the United States. Dan River's transformation under he has been featured in several business periodicals and is a University of North Carolina Business School case study. In addition to Dan River, Sanjay has also been the CEO of BPO organizations Colwell and Salmon, Cartel; and manufacturing firm Best and Baker.

Earlier in his career, Sanjay has worked with AT&T Wireless and Motorola when they had just entered the Indian market. He was also part of the founding team at outsourcing firm Epicenter Technologies. His first job was as an IAS officer.

Sanjay is an MBA (Gold Medalist) from IIM, Ahmedabad and holds a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT, Mumbai.