IC SPOTLIGHT FEATURE — NOVEMBER
IC Feature of the Month: Rishank Pandey
Rishank is a 2020 graduate in Chemical Engineering from BITS Pilani. With an unconventional approach towards problems and decisions, Rishank has an impressive list of achievements:
— Summer Research Internship at Columbia University (Summer 2017)
— Deep Learning Internship at deeplearning.ai (Summer 2018)
— TPM Internship at Hilti (Summer 2019)
— Co-Founder at Kaya(exited)
— CTO at Pepper Content(exited) — Founder, Workduck (YourStory Tech 30 startup)
— PM intern at OTO Capital (Summer 2020)
— APM @ Rakuten India. Currently a Product Consultant at Google alongside.
📹Tune into his video interview
Coming from a chemical engineering major, how did you find your interest in software development and tech?
Like any guy who gets into a non- IT background, when you enter college you hear people talking about placements, coding, competitive coding and all of that. So the interesting thing was that I had taken into chemical engineering because I had this interest in high energy renewable systems back when I was looking at college curriculums so my BITSAT score could have afforded me a circuital branch but I took this and worked out eventually.
Not a great way to make decisions but yeah the good thing was that when I entered college there were too many people around me and they were all either focused some way or the other in coding or competitive coding or something like that and back in 2016, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning had become buzzwords amongst developer circles at least, not so much in I would say the startup world or in general human consciousness the way it has gripped it now.
In my first year there were too many people around me who were who were doing coding some way or the other I did not really have that much of a tech background so it just made sense for me to go around and learn stuff a bit and I remember that when I started out with C(because that is what people were doing back then), I hated it. So there was this course called Introduction to CS50 by Harvard. It’s a popular course and three weeks in I couldn’tunderstand anything so a few friends suggested me to start off learning Ruby . I would recommend other people to start with a simpler language like a Python or a Ruby, whatever works for you. There was this book called Learn Ruby the Hard Way by Zed Shaw. There is another book by the same author called Learn Python the Hard Way , so I started off with that and that is when I realized that okay, programming is actually cool if you don’t really go much deeper into language structures from the start itself. I think that happens with anyone who gets into software development per se. Once you get into the habit of building stuff, once you are past that initial Valley of Death situation where you are basically just trying to learn the structures and language and stuff, you realize that this is kind of magical because you’re building those normal loop pyramids and everything and you suddenly see things coming alive on the screen.
So that is when the actual transition happened. This is basically my first year itself. Obviously, there have been a few friends who took a little while getting into software development per se but I’ve seen the majority of the people around me, even those who have an interest in core fields taking into computer programming because it simplifies stuff. It’s a tool to get stuff done faster. So yeah that was pretty much my thing. People around me were doing stuff I started learning it and then once I crossed that Valley of Death I was set on to using this either in my core applications or just focusing on it entirely.
So let’s go a bit ahead. You did a research internship at Columbia University and you also did a ML internship at deeplearning.ai which is one of the pioneers in deep learning. Can you tell us a bit more about how you got in and what were your experiences there?
So there was this senior of mine who had done an internship at Wolfram that I got to know after his first year and I was like okay so this is something that is possible. I did not know whether I would be able to do it or not, but yeah, once you see people around you doing cool stuff, you’re like I also want to do something. I thought about doing a research internship. I wasn’t exactly sure whether I had the right profile or not. I started interacting with a few college and school seniors of mine to get an understanding about the level at which people actually want to take you in, why they would actually pay you to do stuff when you’re just a first-year student. I think this is something that everyone in their first year or second year should actually do.
A lot of junior batches are doing it and there is much more consciousness about it now. Back when I was in my first year, there was little less consciousness about this particular thing that you could actually reach out to people and they’ll help you. In, the second semester I reached out to a school senior, and basically he was already at Columbia University and I wanted to know what he was working on, who he was working under, and then he introduced me to his professor under whom he was doing a project, which is Professor Peter Allen and I then reached out to him because I went through a few of his research papers and I found out a small thing that I had queries on. I hadn’t reached out to him initially just asking him for a research internship. Obviously, that’s one way of doing it but I just wanted to talk to him and understand what he was working on.
Once I had that conversation going on is when I actually just put the question that what if I could come and help you in this and by then we had obviously we had video calls and everything so he had pretty much warmed up to the idea that I could actually go on and contribute.
From what I’ve seen, there are basically three approaches to landing a research internship. One is applying to programs, but that is not really possible for someone who is in their first or second year, especially in India. So that is kind of, out of the question. The second approach is the cold emailing approach that people do. The cold approach like 300-400 professors or research labs or research groups and that’s okay if you can do it. I did not have the patience to do that.
The third approach is what I like to follow. When you’re reaching out to,let’s say, five people, you reach out to them not with the sole intention of just getting an internship. You ask questions and you figure out whether you can actually contribute there or not and not just care about what badge is coming on to your CV because if it is a good fit it will come on mutually, the way it happens in Bollywood movies for romantic couples. The same it happens in the work atmosphere. So yeah that that was pretty much how i got my first internship which was a confidence boost for me also because till then I didn’t know whether I could actually contribute or not. That is what led me to apply for deeplearning.ai’s internship program. Everyone learns Machine Learning through Andrew Ng. Then I heard that deeplearning.ai’s manufacturing division or I would say the commercial division Landing AI had raised about $175 million in their funding round and that was too huge, so they had launched their global internship program back then. I applied for it and then thankfully I had a profile till then that could allow me to at least sit for their exams. Their exams are pretty cool, it did not involve actual DSA questions. There were these proper questions on code snippets that you had to fill in. Like, let’s say like I remember this question on where you had the output.
You knew what was to be done and then you had to fill in the code snippet the way now they have structured their Coursera courses with python because back then deeplearning.ai’s courses were more on like Octave and MATLAB but at least their questions were in Python, so you basically just filled in their code snippets and I got like four rounds and then I got into that. So that was a wonderboy moment!
One good thing was that even when I was in my 2–1, I was an AI consultant at Trivago. The concept of being like an AI consultant or has gained ground recently. So what you do is you basically freelance for data science projects soi think that is something that people should actually look to do apart from just doing Kaggle projects. I was never a big Kaggle guy because I have always had this aversion to like competitive coding or platforms that are similar to it because somewhere the other there is a huge line of people who are doing that and I don’t prefer doing stuff which has a huge line in it. So I was never a big Kaggle guy but even if you’re on Kaggle, I have seen people doing stuff and then getting into research groups, open-source groups, or whatever. So that is something which is definitely recommended because not only does it help you put your point across that actually know this thing but you also get to learn a lot of ancillary stuff which you won’t get to learn when you’re doing just structured machine learning stuff. So yeah that is the basic story behind the first two internships — reaching out to people, talking to them, solving stuff, and just getting through.
So let’s push in a bit ahead to late 2018 when you were a part of Pepper which is in news recently for its funding. You were a part of it for almost a year. Can you walk us through why you decided to join a startup and be part of a founding team? What were your learnings from balancing academics and a startup in college?
To be very honest I haven’t been good at balancing academics and other stuff. My academics always took a big hit and that is definitely not recommended. It’s always better if you are able to manage different stuff. I won’t take names here but but there have been a lot of factors, it’s not just me but yeah the environment and everything. Before joining Pepper, there was another startup that I had co-founded called Kaya, and what we were trying to build there was an AI-based corporate virtual assistant so it was able to transcribe meetings, summarize it, and schedule the important action items into your calendar tools. We were one of the top 20 startups selected by the Government of India for the Silicon Startup Exchange Program, which was this two-week fully funded networking trip to the Silicon Valley and I was basically leading. We had been incubated. BITS has this Incubation Center and they give you like office space, internet, AC and everything and you pay a small rent for that but it’s worth it. So we got incubated with Kaya and the good thing was that is actually when I realized why things like co-working spaces or concepts like that actually work. It’s because we were incubated in one room and there were like two-three other startups.
I am not very extrovert so I didn’t really go on and mingle a lot but at least it was good to know that people were working on cool stuff . So we eventually had a small exit with Kaya, not a big one but yeah, so that happened and then Anirudh basically reached out to a friend of mine to reach out to me because they had just started out and they were trying to find out their product-market fit, trying to build out their platform in some manner and then we talked and figured that okay this is something cool so I could probably devote my time to this. I was basically free, I’d come back to that same freelancing stuff because it gives you money and then time to expand it, so that is basically how Pepper Content happened.
I mean I know in pop culture generally, start-up beginning stories are very dramatized and everything but it’s really very simple. So he just reached out, we had a talk, he pitched me the idea of what he was doing and what he envisioned to do, and some 10-15 minutes in, I was like, “Oh this sounds cool, how about we talk about this tomorrow I’ll probably come back with a few ideas of mine.” We kept talking and then we were like cool, let’s just do this. That was pretty much it. The good thing was that in Pepper, I actually learned a lot more than just the tech stuff and that is probably the time when I personally went through this transformation, evolution or whatever term you attach to it, from just a developer or a researcher to a product guy because that is when I had started reading on how you exactly get customers on-board, how it actually affects other stuff. So yeah and then Pepper was also an eye-opener on the startup ecosystem that is there in India.
It has developed a lot to be very honest and it is developing massively. Now is as good a time to do a startup because there is capital inflow, there are people coming in with startups in general in India are becoming big like Flipkart having a big exit, Snapdeal becoming big, PayTM or RazorPay becoming unicorns. So that capital influence been high, the focus has been very high. Yeah, that was how basically Pepper Content happened and if you have any questions specific to that I’d be happy to answer that word.
Any important takeaways that you had you know apart from that the startup ecosystem transitioned you into a PM person? Should students generally venture out starting out themselves in college?
So let me just break it down. There are a few facts which are very important if you want to see whether you actually want to venture out or not. The first is whether you have an unfair advantage or not. That is something that I had learned from Anirudh actually.
He had actually interned with YourStory before he came up with the idea of Pepper and his unfair advantage lied in the fact that he knew the content industry. He had worked as a freelance writer at a lot of other places so he knew the ins and outs of the content industry to an extent where he could see those gaps and that is his unfair advantage. He was not initially a product person or like a brilliant salesperson or something. He knew the ins and outs of the industry and he had the grit and the perseverance to do it so that was his unfair advantage and he figured that okay fine this is a good enough space let me begin here.
Other startup founders that I’ve met that started in or around college and became successful are something made of the same mould. They have some unfair advantages that they realize very early on so if you are looking to venture out in college, it is the unfair advantage portion that you need to figure out. Either you are a brilliant developer or you have this habit of coding on your laptop for 12 hours, that is an unfair advantage too because you can spend more time on your laptop in a year than other people, so you can basically build products that can help in that process. That is it that is one of the major things that I think any college student should think of before venturing out on their own.
Number two would be figuring out whether you are built for a startup or not. Everything goes through a hype cycle okay, so right now we are going through a startup found hype cycle where everyone thinks it’s cool to be a startup founder but trust me it’s not that cool, people only show the glamorous parts of it. There are a lot of stuff which is which is always pushed under the carpet for obvious reasons but yeah the the thing is that there are there are actually obvious patterns to see if you do want to venture out as early as possible or not. One is of course whether you hate your studies and by studies I mean the general system that you’re in, not just the core studies two is whether you have actually been excited about something and whether you have actually pursued something to an extent.
It could be anything, it could be something as simple as playing football. Like have you actually dedicated two hours for six months just to play football and get to some level. So that is a good enough indicator to see if you have been dedicated enough for anything in the past before because everyone has a different ,I would say, whatever like not in the philosophical sense, but in the normal sense also, everyone has a different development phase so you do go through that phase. It’s just that for some people it happens early on. So for Anirudh, writing it happened early on, for me coding happened very early on for a few of my friends for coding or playing sports happened very early on. So they just knew that they if they actually did something or they put their heart or mind to it, they could actually spend a lot of time doing it so and that is a good enough indicator that okay fine if you are going to do a startup, you could put my heart and mind to it and probably get it to some level. Some form of a confidence boost based on something that you’ve done previously. So yeah the unfair advantage in this part is good enough to let you know whether you should actually venture out on your own or not. The other alternative is you try to become part of other startups because that in itself is a big learning curve.
I remember a few juniors of mine and a few seniors as well, who actually went out of their way to become part of startups very early on just so they could have this big learning curve so yeah. You should definitely try to be a part of the startup as early as possible, maybe as part of a founding team or as employee number 10-20 or something like that, because in general, a startup is the best way to learn stuff.
We’re almost driving towards the most interesting part of the conversation now. You said you transitioned slowly towards Product. How did Google happen?
Okay very honestly Pepper was happening already, we had to raise that seed round, and then, of course, there was this I would say small ideological differences in how we wanted to progress further and I completely understand how or why that happens. The content industry in India is very fragmented and oh actually this is a good take!
If you’re aiming for industries that are very fragmented, do not try to build out of the box product solutions because that would never work. Distribution channels are always more important than product channels or products themselves. So content industry in India is very fragmented my co-founders had the vision that they wanted to build something like a marketplace, whether it’s a managed marketplace or something of that sort and that makes sense. I come from a more developer or a product point of view and I’ve always believed in the power of startups like a Dropbox or a RazorPay or Stripe or something like that and doing that at this stage would have been slightly premature. The market wasn’t ready. So I was looking to get away from Pepper Content, looking for the opportunity. So there was that transition period going on and once the transition period was in full flow, like it once it was decided that I will have to now pursue something else, I started looking for opportunities. I already had a few offers but then I came across Google’s APM opening and I reached out to a friend and I was like could you refer me to this. I didn’t really know whether they will take me or not, but yeah I applied for it and there was this question that Google always poses in their application. It’s basically like, do you want to put a cover letter, it’s not mandatory we don’t have a look at it or anything and would you like to share some thoughts or something. It’s like a big text box. So I remember that I had seen these memes around Google Maps so I thought might as well use that. So I basically dissected the problem with Google Maps and a solution it turns out that that actually helped later on but yeah that is how Google happened and to be honest that is how even Rakuten happened. I came across a Linkedin post and I was like oh okay. I’ve been a big Barcelona fan so I’ve always had the soft spot for Rakuten, since they are the official sponsor. So I reached out to them and again the same thing happened, like they they basically asked if you have anything in mind and I have had a few points in how the Rakuten does not post much. They had this space in between where they would not post much on Instagram regarding Barcelona or comment on the posts so I’d basically charted out a small marketing thing on what they should do. Obviously that had no bearing on the work that I’m doing right now but yeah it helped to warm up the interview process and put across how I generally think of problems. That is how what the things came into came into the general scenario.
First of all, congrats on getting the Tech30 shoutout by YourStory. Can you tell us about WorkDuck - what’s WorkDuck and why you started it?
You would have noticed by now that I have been into the habit of building products in various scenarios and so have been my co-founders. Ruddhi and Mihir were a part of Kaya as well and then they were also part of Pepper Content. Ruddhi was helping us build out the platform and Mihir had helped out a bit in between in getting writers on-board. Whenever you build a product, there is this time lag between when you build a product and when you want to ship it and this is this time lag where you’re trying to find bugs so either you’re trying to find it yourself by sharing it amongst team members.
If you have an app then you’re sharing your APK on WhatsApp, telling friends to just see and let you know what works and what doesn’t. It’s a very painful process and even when you ship it, at least for the first few times, you are always prepared to get these negative reviews coming in. So it was this process that that seemed to be a very big problem, and that was something that I was actually facing in the day-to-day work situation as well. So like in Rakuten then, we were building this product, I won’t name it but the QA process was a big failure. So that is the personal experience that baked into the problem statement itself and we figured out that in the problem statement, it’s really very simple, the quality assurance process, which is the process of finding bugs is a very broken process in the sense it’s very time consuming and manual and the only other alternative that that is widely adopted in the developer circles is to write scripts based on Selenium or Appium and those are very flaky, like they break across small app updates and they’re very hard to maintain and are time-consuming and everything.
So, we just set out to remove all of this by making this platform. We call it the modern collaborative no-code platform for AI-powered app testing so that is in essence what we are doing at WorkDuck because once we set out to build the product, we realized that there are these large distributed teams and everyone has started to follow the Agile Methodology now, so there is a lot of back and forth between a lot of stakeholders and that is where the collaborative portion kind of kicked in.
You’ll have to make it in a little collaborative manner so that is the work that happened and to be very honest the idea of doing another startup was always there even after Pepper Content and it just so happened that I had already been working at like two places and I had been noticing this problem and it just did not make sense that there was no solution for it that could be adopted so easily, so I just talked to Ruddhi who is now a product engineer and we just figured that yeah this is cool stuff. He can probably build this out. So that is how basically worked the gap and then Mihir came on board because I told him the problem and he’s not a developer at heart so he just knows stuff, but then he talked to a few of his friends and he was like, okay cool this is a big problem. That is the sense that is an essence of the work that happened and what we are basically building here.
So I think you love solving problems. I think that’s the one string of our entire conversation — anywhere you see a problem, you try to solve it.
I mean it’s both a good and a bad thing because then sometimes you’re also trying to find problems that are probably not present. One good thing that I’ll recommend people to read is and something that I actually got to know about much later on. It is this book of essays by Paul Graham called Hackers and Painters. So I got to read it in my third year and then I’ve always revisited that book like every now and then and that basically got me more into this culture but anyone out there listening to this or whatever, you should probably read that book in the sense that if you are someone who likes solving problems or ending problems, you should definitely continue that practice and not try to nip it or something and yeah I mean it reaps rewards.
What’s your one piece of advice that you would give to any student who is studying in college?
I’ll probably give him/her two pieces of advice. One would be to definitely learn to code, not just as a full-time thing. It just brings that sense of structured thinking that is much required in whatever field that you’re going. Even if you’re doing hardcore physics research, it’s good if you know how to code because then you’re able to do those particle research things.
Definitely learn to code or build stuff like there are ample amounts of no-code platforms there’s Bubble, there’s Appsmith. So use any of that and just learn how to build stuff and since it’s two-part advice — the second part is don’t focus too much on dating. It’s all right till the time you’re coding stuff. It’s fine, it’s all right those things can happen. Because I also went through a few so as a senior I would like to tell a junior that it’s all right, just focus on building stuff, the rest of the things follow. I've seen an ample amount of seniors now, things happen so it’s all right.
RAPID FIRE🔥
Number one skill that a PM should have?
Do not treat this as a program management job.
Your role is not just to align with the priorities of other people and do treat this as someplace where you want to bring in more features from your side itself. I would say people management skills, that is something that is not often talked about. I have seen that even in the interview processes that generally PMs follow right now and of course I see maybe there could be a change in the future whatever but it’s hard to judge someone’s people management skills in the interview process itself.
People have put certain processes in place but I don’t think it’s still full proof but don’t become a program management guy like don’t become a program manager, be a product manager and have those people skills to pull those things off and probably focus a bit more on that. Do not treat this as a consultancy job in tech.
Research internship versus Corporate internship💻
The first or second year me would pick a research internship while the third of the fourth year me would pick a corporate internship because let’s be honest, it pays a little more (:P) so there is that right and it’s easier to see whatever you are working on becoming something tangible because there is always an upside pressure to it.
I understand that it kind of puts down the quality in terms of people who are like purists and I completely understand that but yeah I mean corporate research pays well you can see your things being built so I kind of put myself into it.
Starting up v/s working at a startup🚀
I am more of a starting up guy because I would like to have that much independence with how I’m spending my time and what I’m building but in case somebody is in their second or third-year and would probably want guidance or something, it’s better to just work in one and figure out stuff. That is where my previous experiences had helped to be honest.
Also while we are on this, just one piece of advice and that is something that I’ve seen oft-quoted at a lot of places so I’m sure people would have seen it themselves too but try to have your own playbook of doing things so not have too many questions on yourself if you're doing something on your own when you think it may or may not work out. So that is important and that’s something that I remind myself every day as well.
Spaces or tabs ⌨
To be honest I’m a tabs guy. I mean I just don’t see the sense of why you would press space four times or eight times to get to a place where I can do it in like two times or four times. I don’t get it. So I’m a tabs guy, I can’t deal with spaces :)
Coffee or tea☕
Actually both. I never used to drink tea before. I drank tea for the first time in Mumbai only. A friend introduced me to that, I don’t know why, for some reason, I never drank it before but right now I’m a coffee guy because I tend to like stay awake for a long time but yeah the kind of conversations you can have over tea is different so there’s that. I mean it depends. For a professional relationship probably coffee but to actually sit around and talk to people it’ll be tea.
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