Thanks a lot for having me. Something which is near and dear to my heart is mentoring the students and preparing them for the next generation of leaders. The story which I wanted to share with you is coming from a small town in India which is called Rourkela and the journey from the small town in India to Silicon Valley has been quite a bit of it. It had the learning experiences from some of the seniors in my college and some of their family members. The excitement about learning new things on the computer and making a difference in the life of millions and billions of people for good, right. I still remember 30 years back, my father was reading a newspaper and he talked about Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, like 30 years back, who knew one day after 25 years, I would get a chance to work with Bill Gates and Satya Nadella at Microsoft as part of the Linkedin's acquisition a couple of years back. Therefore the journey from India to the Silicon Valley of California, it went through a journey of learning about the computers, doing my courses, talking to my mentors, going through all the process and fortunately, I landed up in California working for Google as a consultant, then leading their AdWords scheme, then moving to Yahoo, leading the display ad stream then Linkedin for seven years, worked on multiple critical projects with the co-founding team has been a good journey.

The responsibilities that I hold right now, I lead one of the engineering teams at Autonomic. I lead a talented set of engineers who are alums from Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Brown, and other top-notch Institutes. Therefore, some of the responsibilities and the decisions are how do I mentor and groom my team to be the next generation of leaders. The other decisions and responsibilities, which I have are how do I come up with the road map for my team and the company getting an alignment from the executive leadership team so that we also come up with 18 to 24 months of the road map and start to execute on it. Well, it's like imagine a strategic goal to tactical moves that enable you to move one step forward. The other aspect of the responsibilities is also hiring the best fit for the company and for my team moving apart from people who are technically very good but also having that right set of mindset which enables them with creative problem-solving skills. You can teach someone how to write a couple of lines in Java, but you cannot make them learn how to have a great mindset. It's a mix and balance of it. The responsibility that I have in a nutshell is leading a high-performing team at Autonomic, hiring, helping them to mentor and groom and enable them to reach their maximum potential so that they contribute to the company's objectives, missions, and goals in the best possible manner. Weekly hours, no fixed hours, no one tells you when to start work and when to end work and we all have heard about one story saying that power comes with a sense of responsibility. I even wake up in the morning early hours if there is a production problem. I also work late hours if there is a need for this. It's like whatever you got to do to get things moving and to protect our customers and our users that is something which is critical for all of us. Then my work travel which is widely distributed teams that I have in California, Detroit, Toronto, and also in China. I have a fair bit of travel, but due to the Covid19 situation going on, we all are working from home right now.

The challenges in this software industry, you talk about solving high scalable problems, user engagement, membership growth, artistic growth, and all. Every day is doomsday. Well, that has been not a day where you do not have a challenge and the challenges are different every single day that kind of keeps you on your toes every single day. Once it's an example that we had, if I can quote one example from Linkedin which is something which is near and dear to my heart, is we had a product called as the influencer product which was supposed to be long ago, we had a set-of the interviews scheduled from the top newspapers are the online media like TechCrunch, Business Insider, and Bloomberg but unfortunately, we discover a critical bug due to that we were not able to launch meaning as a highly visible thing, right with the media and with the CEOs executive team like all the eyes on you on the spot, that me as an engineering leader during that time, I had to take a decision to let my executive team and the management know about the actual problem, the risks it came up with, the impact that it would have on the users and if we go full-fledged well in this industry, even before launching a new product, we tend to follow on AB test. We do not ramp up to the entire world. We ramp up to a few set off the people and we learn from their data and then we ramp up or ramp down therefore, the decision was not to go full-fledged to 100% of our users but to ramp up to a specific 10% of the users so that the US conference with Business Insider and Bloomberg's went on but we as a team all hands on the tech we were working on it to solve it fortunately after the news happened towards the end of the day when people started to have more of attraction coming to our Linkedin site and to use the product and fortunately, the problem, the bug was resolved.