Speakers
Lakshmi Narayanan
Vice Chairman, Cognizant
Lakshmi has been a technology industry leader for over 30 years. His experience spans organizational strategy, customer relationship management, corporate governance, risk management, and operations. As a founding member of Cognizant, Lakshmi has been responsible for the company’s high-touch customer relationship and delivery excellence model. Under his leadership, Cognizant became the youngest IT services company to reach the $1 billion revenue milestone. He was former Chairman of NASSCOM, the apex industry body for promoting software and services in India, and is currently a Board member of the U.S.-India Business Council (USIBC).
In December 2008, Anna University conferred upon him a Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) degree for his contributions as an industry-acclaimed strategist, institution-builder, leader, and visionary. He was named “Entrepreneur of the Year” by The Economic Times of India in 2005, was inducted into New Jersey High-Tech Hall of Fame in 2006, and honored by India’s Dataquest magazine as “Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2008. He holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in science and electronics and a M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Science.
Satya Prabhakar
CEO, Sulekha.com
Satya Prabhakar is the CEO of Sulekha.com, one of the most popular Indian Internet sites that pioneered the integration of classifieds and local search with social media in 50 cities. He leads a team of world class professionals in developing revenue-generating services that were acclaimed by users, media and industry.
Satya was featured in more than 500 news stories and was invited to speak in several conferences, industry gatherings and academic/corporate institutions, including Wharton, McCombs, ISB Hyderabad, IIM Calcutta, IIT Bombay, REC Trichy, and NIT Singapore. Satya has authored nearly 100 technical and general interest articles. Satya’s blogs/opinions/columns were published by Penguin, Mint/Wall Street Journal, Impact, Economist and Harvard Business Review. He has about 20 years of experience in US and India in management, business development, strategy/technical roles at TCS, Philips, Honeywell and AT&T.
Satya has won awards for technical/business leadership at AT&T and Honeywell. He was recognized by Confederation of Indian Industry with an entrepreneurship award. Satya is also a Charter Member of The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE).
Laura Parkin
Chief Executive officer, NEN
Laura is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the National Entrepreneurship Network, India’s largest, most vibrant entrepreneurial community. NEN is India’s leader in entrepreneurship education, creating and supporting the country’s next generation of high-growth entrepreneurs. In addition, NEN runs the annual Entrepreneurship Week India – the country’s largest campaign to build awareness and support for entrepreneurs.
Laura is a serial entrepreneur, having founded four companies, and a former venture capitalist. In the early 90's she helped in establishing a merchant bank at Moscow. Just prior to co-founding NEN, Laura was a Vice President at Ashoka, an organization that identifies and supports social entrepreneurs across the world.
Currently, she is on the Advisory Boards of Acumen Fund’s Water Portfolio; Proto.in, a non-profit supporting product-based startups in India; and the SIDBI Business Incubator at IIT-Kanpur. Laura holds a Bachelor degree from Harvard University.
Kiruba Shankar
CEO, Business Blogging Pvt Limited
Kiruba Shankar is the co-founder of F5ive Technologies and founder CEO of Business Blogging Pvt Ltd. Prior to this, he was Associate Director of Sulekha.com. Kiruba is one of the founders of The Knowledge Foundation, the group behind successful events like BlogCamp; India’s Biggest Unconference on Blogging, Proto.in; premiere event showcasing startups, WikiCamp; an unconference focusing on the power of wikis, PodWorks; India’s only event on audio and video blogging. He also regularly organizes MobileMondays and BarCamps.
Kiruba is currently authoring a book titled ‘UnConferences: Because The Audience is More Intelligent Than the Speaker’, a global community authored book project that he has initiated. Kiruba loves teaching and teaches at Anna University, Madras Ad Club, SRM University and Asian College of Journalism. He is a key member in Creative Commons India. He is a professional podcaster and hosts a show called ‘The Kiruba Show’ where he interviews CEOs of Indian IT companies. BusinessWorld Magazine ranks his blog www.Kiruba.com as one of India’s top blogs.
Indus Khaitan
General Partner, The Morpheus
Indus is a General Partner at The Morpheus, a seed stage venture accelerator. He started Tejit, Inc. a semantic web discovery engine which was later acquired. Prior to Morpheus, Indus was the CTO & Head of India operations of SezWho Inc. a US based social media infrastructure company specializing in distributed content discovery and user profiles. Indus has held senior management & technology positions at Symantec, Outride (acquired by Google), Mindware/NEC, and VeriFone.
Indus has a BE in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra and now lives in Bangalore. He blogs at http://khaitan.org/blog.
Dorai Thodla
Founder, iMorph Inc.
Dorai is the founder of iMorph, Inc. located in San Jose, CA.
Prior to founding iMorph Inc., Dorai served as V.P. Engineer at Coromandel Industries Inc. At present, Dorai is a member of TiE and ACM.
He completed his Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Telecommunication from Anna University. Dorai’s core expertise includes Database and Semantic Web technologies, Creating software products, Bootstrapping companies, Teaching and Mentoring.
Dorai is a serial entrepreneur and co-founded four companies – two in India and two in USA.In his personal time, Dorai enjoys Blogging, Teaching, Learning, Business Networking and Reading non-fiction and SciFi.
Shalin Jain
CEO & Founder, Tenmiles Corporation
Shalin Jain is the Chief Executive Officer and founder of Tenmiles Corporation (Sole Proprietorship). He is currently responsible for marketing and business development at Tachyon Technologies. Mr.Jain has been an entrepreneur since 2000 with core focus in product development for Desktop and Web. He has contributed immensely in the fields of Product Designing, Designing UI, Business Development and HR.
Mr. Jain has also worked as Designer/Programmer at Eg Innovations and as Web Designer at JKC Multimedia. Mr. Jain completed his post graduation from the prestigious Loyola Institute of Business Administration.
Suhas Gopinath
CEO & President, Globals
Mr. Suhas Gopinath, now aged 24, was recognized as the world’s youngest certified professional Web-developer through his project coolhindustan.com, at the age of 14. Mr. Gopinath setup Globals Inc. in the year 2000 at San Jose, California as the laws in India did not allow him to setup a company in the country as he was still minor. From then Globals has drastically grown as a Multi-national IT consulting company focusing on Web, e-Commerce and Mobile Solutions.
Mr. Gopinath at the age of 16 was recognized as the world’s youngest entrepreneur by CNBC and e-Business, Canada. He was also identified as the World’s Youngest CEO by global media including BBC, Washington Times, The Age and Limca Book of Records. He is designated as the resource person for Entrepreneurship at IIM Ahmadabad, and Advisory Board member at IIT Bombay Entrepreneurship Cell.
In the year 2005, he became the youngest recipient of the prestigious Rajyotsava Award conferred on him by the State Government of Karnataka. Along with his professional activities, he has also volunteered as the Brand ambassador of PeTA and also the Youth Ambassador for Indo-Pak Leadership Program organized by School of Leadership, Pakistan.
On December 2, 2007, The European Parliament and International Association for Human Values conferred “Young Achiever Award” to Mr. Suhas Gopinath at the EU Parliament, Brussels. Mr. Suhas Gopinath was recently announced as one of the “Young Global Leaders” for 2008-2009 by the prestigious World Economic Forum and he became the youngest member ever in the World Economic Forum’s history.
Raj Shankar
Founder, Raj’s Lab, ichiban Consultants, ichiban Academy
Raj Shankar is a management thinker, teacher, writer and entrepreneur. Over the last few years Raj has been spearheading many initiatives in the space of Entrepreneurship and Small Business that seek to address their unique challenges. As the founder of ichiban Business Consultants Pvt Ltd, Raj’s dream is to make available world-class advisory services to the Indian SME segment.
Raj is associated with Mumbai Business School, Park Global School of Business Excellence, Symbiosis Institute of International Business and various incubation units like VIT-TBI, PSG-STEP in the capacity of visiting faculty and resource person. He also heads the Centre for Entrepreneurial Excellence at ichiban Academy, wherein unique courses are conducted to provide essential hands-on knowledge to both aspiring and established entrepreneurs.
Raj has numerous publications to his credit in many national and international journals on Entrepreneurship, Governance and Small Business Management. He has authored a book titled “Entrepreneurship: A life of Commas, not Full Stops”. Raj’s newest initiative “Raj’s Lab” is conceptualized as an independent think-tank, the first of its kind knowledge creation centre in the area of ‘Entrepreneurship and Small Business Strategy’.
