My professional experience of analyzing millions of data points from varied sources and churning actionable insights for stakeholders in the Oil & Gas, Heavy Engineering and E-Commerce industries, and the overarching opportunity the future holds in the field, has encouraged me to pursue a Tech focused MBA from Johnson Cornell. Post completion of the program, I see myself working as a Senior Manager Business Analytics with an organization such as Amazon, where I will be responsible for unearthing insights from data to help the business and product teams in driving process excellence and achieving enhanced customer satisfaction. Here, I will create strategic roadmap for analytics products to support the growth of different product and service categories offered by the firm. I will support multiple initiatives, and projects, provide configuration expertise, as well as guidance for enhancements, development, and maintenance of analytics solutions across different domains including and not limited to procurement, vendor management, finance, and customer sales.
The program at Cornell attracts me at multiple levels. Firstly, my combining core courses such as Critical and Strategic Thinking, Leading teams, Marketing Management with electives such as Business Analytics with Data Mining, Pricing and Revenue Analytics, I will learn the frameworks and best practices involved in managing and analyzing data. Secondly, via the different case studies as part the program I intend to learn what worked and what didn’t for organizations historically. Thirdly, I look forward to interaction with likeminded classmates and eminent faculty to understand how different industries leverage analytics to grow P&L. Lastly, by virtue of my experiences in running a technology enabled e-commerce startup, Pick My Cloth, and innovating on conventional processes and systems in a Multinational organization like Reliance has given me firsthand experience of rolling out technology for enterprise as well as retail consumers. Since I want to continue in the tech sector itself, I believe a one-year tech inspired MBA program is more suited to me to as it will allow me to stay focused on my goals, interact and learn from people who have varied experiences in the field of technology – software, hardware, embedded, consumer products, enterprise products etc. As someone who has been running a profitable venture for last 3 years, ROI is a key consideration metric. I believe that a one-year program will allow me to join the workforce sooner and hence a lower opportunity cost. I already have practical experience in the field and while I always a learning opportunity, an internship will add only some incremental value to my profile.
In the long term I would want to start my venture that applies analytics to improve growth of e-commerce companies. Cornell’s Startup Studio program excites me will be a good experimentation ground for me as I intend to work with other ex-entrepreneurs from different parts of the world and come up with disruptive ideas in the e-commerce industry specially around community-based selling, which is one of the most popular trends adopted in many geographies.
I started my venture, Pick My Cloth envisioning it to become the Amazon for handloom in India. For the first 12 months, as I developed MVP, onboarded the first bunch of sellers on the platform, and successfully completed the first 500 transactions, I was still full time employed with Reliance Industries and used to work on my startup at night and during weekends. With the salary, I could fund the salaries and marketing costs. However, I realized this was limiting me from going all out and aggressively pushing the business. Thus, I was at the crossroads where I had to make a tough choice of running Pick My Cloth as a side gig versus leaving the safety net of fixed salary and going all in with the startup. After a lot of deliberation and discussions with mentors, I decided to pursue the later as I believed that my idea had the potential to make the lives of thousands of skilled craftsman and artisans in the country better. In retrospect, I believe the risk I took paid off and as future leaders we should always be open to embrace uncertainty and take risks if you are convinced and have a clear direction of what you want to achieve.