Ravi Venkatesan
Business Leader, Author, and social entrepreneur in Bengaluru, India
Ravi Venkatesan is a business leader, social entrepreneur and author who has spent 30 years leading organizations and engineering large-scale transformations across multiple industries. These include building Microsoft’s India operations into the second largest globally, engineering the transformation of Cummins into India’s leading provider of engines and gensets, scripting the turnaround of Bank of Baroda India’s 2nd largest public sector bank and leading the board of Infosys through a challenging transition. Ravi serves on the Board of Hitachi Ltd and the Global Advisory Board of ServiceNow. He has led or served on the Boards of Infosys, Bank of Baroda, Cummins India, JCB, Thermax, AB Volvo, Strand Lifesciences.
After an illustrious corporate career, Ravi is now a social entrepreneur. He is a founder and Chairman of the Global Energy Alliance which aims to accelerate the energy transition in the global south. He is also the founder of the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) and Social Venture Partners a pan-India network of philanthropists. He is a Venture Partner at impact investor Capria Ventures and was UNICEF’s Special Representative for Young People and Innovation and a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. He was instrumental in creating Microsoft India’s Project Shiksha, the world’s largest computer literacy program and also helped establish the Cummins College of Engineering, India’s first engineering college for women, in Pune.
Ravi has a BTech from IIT Bombay, an MS from Purdue University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar. He is a recipient of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay’s Distinguished Alumnus Award and Purdue University's Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award.
Ravi is the author of two bestselling books, ‘What The Heck Do I Do With My Life: How To Flourish in Our Turbulent Times’ and ‘Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere’.
He has been voted as one of India's best management thinkers by Thinkers50 and Microsoft’s Alumni Hero 2020.