Welcome Ashok!

I am excited to share that Ashok Vasan has joined Pando this month, with the mandate to drive deeper value to more clients, faster and at scale. With Ashok, we are adding significant firepower (and a fair amount of grey hair) to our A-Class team.

Ashok is an enterprise technology veteran, who has spent the last two decades delivering dollar value to, and building deep goodwill with global F1000s across three continents. I have always believed that the ideal person to drive value to Pando’s clients should be in the sweet-spot between an ‘Entrepreneur’, ‘Supply-chain Expert’ and ‘Enterprise Tech-optimist’, with a sense of humor — I really thought that this unicorn didn’t exist, till I met Ashok.

We had heard of Ashok from his i2 colleagues, who referred to him with warmth and deep reverence; his profile resurfaced on my LinkedIn recently, when he posted this endearingly cheesy farewell note to his CA colleagues:

I was in Bombay at the time, and on my cab ride from the airport, wrote him an equally cheesy email with a heavy dose of the Queens, asking him if he would consider an opportunity with Pando. What followed, through a courtship of 2–3 months and multiple calls and meetings, was a deeply respectful acquaintance.

Ashok started his career as an assembly-line engineer, and grew to PM, at Detroit Diesel (now Daimler Trucks), after graduating from Wisconsin-Madison in ’91. During his MBA at Chicago Booth 5 years later, i2 (then already a fast growing upstart) came calling; Ashok spent the next decade taking i2’s Supply-Chain tools into new geographies, setting up in Japan, China, India and SEA, and driving P&L.

During his visit to Chennai, Ashok regaled Abhijeet and me with war stories from this period: of how he would fly from Singapore to Hong Kong, take a train to Lo Wu, and taxi to a ferry that would finally take him to Shenzen (Huawei HQ) for months on end, till he won i2’s largest and first account in the region; consistently, and despite the odds of language, culture, food and geopolitics Ashok delivered measurable value to some of the world’s largest businesses, building a startup’s (i2) leadership position across industries like Steel, Hi-tech, Semiconductor and Auto, during these years.

i2 was eventually acquired in 2007, and Ashok moved from Singapore to India, to run Dell’s Global Service Delivery arm as Executive Director. At Dell, he spent four years using his supply-chain chops to match demand and supply of ~12,000 agents across India and the Philippines, implementing Real-time Scheduling, Flexible Capacity Management and Network Optimization systems to drive large deployments. In 2011, Ashok caught the entrepreneurial bug, founding Oystor — a file sharing service for enterprises, that eventually got acquired. In 2014, he moved to CA Technologies as VP — Channel & Partnerships, designing and driving tripartite positive-sum-games across APAC, till CA’s acquisition by Broadcom, recently.

I have always believed that early employees ought to be afforded the same (if not better) privileges (access, respect, time) as early investors — after all, both invest effort, reputation and $$ in building the business. I approached my conversations with Ashok the same way — with complete candor, focus on the long-game, and a reality check on blind-spots.

In Ashok I found the deep wisdom of a technology veteran with the humility and get-shit-done-now attitude of an entrepreneur. His constant focus on what you need (not what he has) combined with his ability to really listen, make him a distinctly different sales guy — the kind from whom you’d want to buy, the kind we love at Pando. His unwavering focus on value, long-term thinking, and calm demeanor struck a chord with me. His twitter handle read “Cricket, CSK, Curd-Rice, Cloud-Computing” — here is a guy who actually loves what he does.

Ashok didn’t sell himself to me; Through out conversations, I was sold.

Just before making the decision about Pando, Ashok observed that he had helped orchestrate one large global transformation (from silos to networks within companies) in the way enterprises operated their supply-chains, while at i2. His job was not finished, he said, and he was excited to return to supply-chain technology (and his birthplace — Chennai) to help orchestrate a second transformation (from silos to networks across stakeholders and businesses), this time in the opposite direction — i2 moved east from Texas; Pando plans to move outward from Chennai.

Times have changed (we no longer travel or try for months on end to close one account — time to sale and time to value is everything) and Ashok has kept up with the times. “We should add more value to more clients as quickly as possible — this is an idea who’s time has come. We should grow this really fast,” he said, “and I can help. I want in.”

I didn’t have to sell Pando to Ashok; he bought in to our vision.

I believe that as we scale Pando from our current foundation of early adopters to global clients across our focus-verticals — FMCG, CPG, Consumer Electronics, Cement, Auto and Chemicals — and expand our network of, and value to transporter-partners, Ashok’s valuable DNA of scale-thinking, value-focus, and entrepreneurial grit, will drive us to the next strata of growth. Pando — the product, the people and its clients are fortunate to have him front-end this innings.

I welcome Ashok, his wife Crisy, and kids Kavya and Aditya to Chennai, and Pando!

At Pando, we are building the world’s first Networked Freight Management Platform, that is enabling large businesses to leverage freight networks to grow further and faster.

We’re hiring! If you want to work with folks like Ashok, write to us here. To check out our A-Class team and what we do, visit us at here.