Our speakers

Sharad Sharma, Ex-CEO, Yahoo! India R&D

Sharad holds Electrical Engineering degree from Delhi College of Engineering. He has over 21 years of experience in the enterprise software and wireless infrastructure sectors. Prior to joining Yahoo!, he was involved in buyout activities focused on taking mid-sized software product companies private.

Previously, he was the India General Manager and VP of Product Operations with Symantec (formerly VERITAS Software) and was responsible for the turnaround of VERITAS operations in India. He was earlier a co-founder and CEO of Teltier Technologies, a New Jersey based wireless infrastructure start-up that became the leader in the Presence and Availability Management space and is now part of Cisco.

Sharad has managed product development teams at Lucent Technologies both in US and in India. He also setup AT&T’s and later Lucent’s R&D organization in India in mid-90s, at a time when offshore product development was just getting underway.

Sharad Talwar, CEO, IndiaCan Education

Sharad Talwar is a senior management professional with diverse experience of over 24 years with some of the most admired corporations in the country. His academic credentials include a management degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur, having graduated with top honours from these institutions.  

Sharad's career span includes stints at MNC's and leading Indian corporations. In his last role he was  Site Director, Operations with Convergys Inc ( a $ US 2.8 billion corporation ). Prior to that, he has held important positions at Dell, GE Capital, and HCL Hewlett Packard among others.

He has proven competencies in General Management, Marketing, Product Management, Sales, Operations, Business Strategy, running large start-up projects, turnarounds, Six Sigma and competency building. During his impactful tenures, Sharad has been involved in leadership roles across industries such as IT, IT enabled, market research and education.

Sharad now heads IndiaCan, a joint venture between Educomp, India's pioneering education company, and Pearson, the world's largest education services provider. This joint venture targets one of the country's biggest opportunities training young people. IndiaCan is a skilling and employability company which uses innovative technology solutions and VSAT delivery platform for scalability and consistent delivery of trained manpower, thereby mitigating paucity of good trainers in remote areas. IndiaCan's bottom-of-the-pyramid strategies in partnership with Government of India initiatives using technology, state of the art content and relevant international certifications - reach out to some of the most remote areas of the country in J&K, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, West Bengal, Orissa, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan et al'. As the head of IndiaCan, Sharad is responsible for rolling out from concept to execution, the JV's strategy to provide employability linked and skill based education to youth across the country.

Sharaf Sharaf, Fund Head, Amplify Growth

Sharat Potharaju, CEO, MobStac

Sharat is responsible for all business development, sales, and marketing efforts at MobStac.

Prior to founding the company, Sharat spent over 3 years doing investment banking at Merrill Lynch in New York, where he worked in both the Corporate Finance and Leveraged Finance groups. In this role, Sharat assisted clients in deriving customized solutions to the corporate finance issues they were facing. His work spanned a diverse set of industries, including but not limited to, financial services, healthcare, retail, technology, etc., and also included executing multi-billion dollar financing and merger and acquisition transactions.

Prior to that, Sharat spent a summer on a venture capital initiative at Duke University working with entrepreneurs crafting business plans. Sharat has a Masters in Engineering Management (MEM) from Duke University, and a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

Sharat is also very passionate about politics and public governance. From October, 2008 to May, 2009 Sharat was on a break working at Janaagraha as the Head of Marketing and Communications for the very popular Jaago Re One Billion Votes Campaign, India's largest grassroots movement for voter registration to date.

Sharath Loganathan, Co-Founder, Ninjacart

Shardul S. Shroff, Executive Chairman; National Practice Head - Insolvency & Bankruptcy, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co

Mr. Shardul S. Shroff is the Executive Chairman at the Firm. He has over 39 years of experience in General Corporate, Mergers & Acquisitions, Insolvency and Bankruptcy, Securities Law, Disinvestment & Capital Markets. Mr. Shroff heads the Insolvency & Bankruptcy practice at the Firm. He is a leading authority on matters related to Corporate Governance, Mergers & Acquisitions, Government Regulation and Bankruptcy & Insolvency Law. He has been instrumental in developing these practice domains in the Firm.

Widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of Corporate Law, Mr. Shroff has participated in the training and drafting of several important economic legislations and company law reforms in India. He has recently been appointed as a member of the Company Law Committee constituted by the Government to look into recommendations on various provisions of the Companies Act, 2013 and the Limited Liability Partnerships Act, 2008. He has also been a member of the Insolvency Law Committee constituted to review the implementation of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. Mr. Shroff was a member of the Committee constituted to review decriminalization of offences under the Companies Act and the Committee on crossborder insolvency, both headed by Injeti Srinivas, Secretary, Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India. Under Mr. Shroff’s leadership, the Firm has been recognised as ‘Best in Insolvency’ at the Asialaw’s Asia Pacific Dispute Resolution Awards 2018.

Mr. Shroff has been on a number of other high-powered committees appointed by the Government of India including the JJ Irani Committee for amending the Companies Act, the Expert Committee on maintenance of Cost Records and Cost Audit in 2014, the Eradi Committee involved in the insolvency provisions of the Companies Act, 1956, the second Naresh Chandra Committee appointed to look into aspects of SMEs and simplification of Company Law and the Valuation Committee.

Mr. Shroff has been consistently recognised as a leading lawyer by several international fora and publications, including the Who’s Who Legal, AsiaLaw, Chambers and Partners, Legal 500, Euromoney, International Financial Law Review (IFLR) etc. Chambers and Partners has recognised him as an ‘Eminent Practitioner’ for Banking & Finance and as a ‘Star Individual’ for Corporate/M&A. IFLR1000 2020, the guide to the World’s Leading Financial Law Firms, has adjudged Mr. Shroff as a ‘Market Leader’ in the areas of Mergers & Acquisitions, Banking, Restructuring & Insolvency, Capital Markets, Energy and Infrastructure, Project Finance and Project Development.

Sharif El-Badawi, CEO, Dubai Future District Fund

Sharmil Shah, Head Mobile, Loylty Rewardz Mgmt Pvt Ltd

With a wealth of experience in product development, management and innovation, Sharmil Shah heads our engineering team. He is responsible for all aspects of development, delivery, quality and support of Loylty's portals and software product portfolio. Prior to joining Loylty Rewardz, Sharmil had founded Tacto Software, where he led the development of a location-based mobile marketing platform called RedAnar, which was acquired by Loylty Rewardz in 2012. Sharmil has previously worked with Sapient Corporation, helping companies like Capital One, Sprint and Target with their IT strategy and implementation initiatives. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Virginia.

Sharon Andrew-Rajkumar, Vice President, Happiest Minds Technologies

Shashaank Shekhar Singhal, Co-founder & CEO, Dazo

Shashaank has over 6 years experience building Mobile and Web products. He is the co-founder & CEO of Dazo - a meal marketplace platform. Before Dazo he was heading Mobile products at redBus to make it the highest rated Indian travel app across all App stores and also won the Global Mobile innovation award. He previously founded a shopping recommendation portal and worked with McKinsey as an analyst in the Business Technology consulting.

Shashaank has completed his MBA from Indian School of Business, Hyderabad (Class of 2013) and hold Electronics Engineering Degree from Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh"