BITS Reconnect, the first pre-APOGEE talk of the year, was held at 6:30 PM on the 15th of November. The talk featured two alumni from the batch of ‘79—Hari Menon and Ravi Menon. It was moderated by Dr. Madhurima Das, Assistant Professor of Sociology. Hari Menon is the founder & CEO of BigBasket, and Ravi Menon is the CEO of HSBC Asset Management, India. Both alums talked about the trajectory of their professional career thus far, interspersed with memories from their Pilani days. The talks were quite different from each other; while Hari Menon spoke about the beginnings of BigBasket, Ravi Menon’s story primarily revolved around climbing the corporate ladder.
The two men have known each other for quite some time—they were in St. Xavier’s Junior College in Mumbai together. They spoke about their initial days in the Institute, about frequenting Nagar Ji’s redi and Nutan, along with getting no sleep. Both of them were in the same clubs and departments—namely, Music Club and Stage Controls—and Mr. Ravi also recounted how most of his time in college was spent either working for Oasis or in the Music Club Room.
Speaking about their careers, Hari Menon talked about how he started off with a brief stint at ORG Systems, a large recruiter of BITSians at the time. After that, he worked at TVS Electronics, Wipro, and Planetasia.com. He talked about how life in the 80s and 90s was peaceful because companies had not adopted fast communication and relied on interoffice memos and facsimile. He first ventured into entrepreneurship when Planetasia.com approached him to build India’s first payment gateway, and his team envisioned an e-commerce website along with it. At that point, he quit his job and started Fabmart.com. He spoke about how at the peak of the dot com bubble, people had an unusually easy time securing deals. Later, he started a grocery store business that he sold to the Aditya Birla Group—forming the chain of retail stores now known as More. He followed that up by founding BigBasket in 2011, which is what he is currently working on.
Towards the end of the panel discussion, Dr. Das asked them about how the industry was working on addressing gender inequality. Ravi Menon said that while companies are addressing the issue by focusing on hiring women, he believes the poor gender ratios in Indian engineering colleges is something that can only change with a shift in societal norms and expectations.
This was followed by a Q&A round, where students asked questions about climate change, the AI revolution, and the state of the venture capital industry. Hari Menon advised budding entrepreneurs to ‘take a step back and slow down’, pointing out how startups fare better when the idea behind them comes naturally to the founders and they have some experience in the industry. When asked about Oasis from their time, Hari Menon recounted his memories of being the 1982 StuCCAn—reminiscing about how he reached out to his favorite bands for Prof Shows and generally ended up working through the night for the fest.
The talk ended with Dr. Das presenting the alums with a Clock Tower souvenir, followed by a horde of excited students followed them out of the NAB Audi to discuss their start-up ideas.