Anu Parthasarathy

I'm passionate about start-ups and love working with founders/entrepreneurs. My dream is to participate actively in building innovative world class organizations from India. I'm confident that more and more information age companies will be founded by entrepreneurs from India in the next decade. How interesting and different it would be to recruit new kinds of leaders for these new age companies! This is what keeps me excited on Mondays. I split my time between bay area and Bangalore leveraging what I learn about start-ups there to apply here.

Before this venture, I was working in the bay area with e4e, a fund investing in early stage start-ups with remote delivery business model. I was a founding member of e4e and had the opportunity to see first hand the challenges involved in hiring for early stage start-ups especially in India. Aztec, iSeva, Vinciti were the few companies I was closely associated with during my e4e stint. The excitement and energy of the bay area start-up ecosystem is infectious and got me started on my quest to get some part of it in India in my own way.

Prior to e4e, I founded and ran a recruiting firm, Nexus at Bangalore from '90 to'00. It was a pioneer in the technology recruiting space and even today people remember it for the quality of service and high standards that we stood for. At Nexus I had the privelege of working with start-ups in the 90's like Infosys, Wipro, Mastek, Aspect etc on one hand and the big MNC;s like SAP, Oracle, Lucent, Autodesk, Cadence etc. I helped the Indian companies hire in India and outside. For the MNC's it was more around identifying the key people who could set up their India operations. As they say Timing is everything. Nexus grew with the IT industry and I was fortunate to be around at that time. Plotting with Nandan Nilekani on the kind of people who would be right for Infosys, US team to working with SAP to set up their complete South East Asia operations, I got the pick. The network into the entire tech professional community out of India is even today my real social network.

My first job was with Wipro straight out of BITS, Pilani. I joined them when they were yet to spin off as a seperate legal entity. I was part of the North India team and have many firsts to my credit like selling the first PC to the Defence Officers Training Institute in Mussourie. I was also a key member of the team that set up the Peripherals Division which later on became Wipro Peripherals or