Rockmetric and AI-driven analytics Software Development: Utkarsh Mishra
This blog is the second in E-Cell’s Startup Internships @ IITG series. It covers the summer internship journey of Utkarsh Mishra, pre-final (CSE) student and also the overall co-ordinator of the club at a Mumbai-Based startup Rockmetric!
Why/How did I apply?
This was back in April 2019, in the fourth semester that I had taken the responsibility of heading the E-Cell at my college, and naturally, soon started exploring obsessively about startups. You reach a point after listening to a few dozen podcasts and reading other articles where you realize that when it comes to understanding entrepreneurship, startups or businesses, everyone says the same thing just phrased differently, “Nothing can teach you unless you try”. Now, this is very counter-intuitive, because to “try” you need an idea and when you have one, it’s no more about trying.
Somehow, to me, working for a startup appeared to be the most helpful exposure to help me embark further on this journey of exploring the startup world. So I started to apply for internships to various startups with a lot of enthusiasm and hope. People usually made me believe that getting an internship after your second year is difficult, but from my experience, I would say deciding to start looking for internships is more difficult. Once you have done that, it’s relatively easy( especially when it comes to startups). I applied for around 4 to 5 startups at angel list. While applying I ensured the following
- They are based in my hometown, Mumbai because I did not want to stay away from home, and for learning how startups worked and not just be a developer there, being at the workplace was crucial
- The co-founder(s) had a good profile and sounded interesting
- More preference to product-based startups( quite rare in India)
I got an offer from Rockmetric that ticked all these. Mind you, this was in April when it would be considered too late and with the pathetic CV I had at that time, this was very lucky in fact.
The interview was a 30-minute long call, where I was asked more about what I did in college and why I was applying, what I knew about startups, etc. Of course, they needed some validation to show if I can code well. But they only took me for “I sounded very interested”.
Moral: If you really want to get an internship, just go for it. Startups will generally assess you more on your passion.
About Rockmetric
Rockmetric is a ‘cognitive data analyst platform’ that automates business monitoring with a simple Google-like ‘Natural Language Search’ interface. To understand a business monitoring software, consider this example: Your maths professor( probably MA 101) is very upset regarding the performance of your batch in the mid-semesters and comes to you for help. He hands over to you all possible statistics of the previous 10 years that describe attendance marks in various exams, question-papers, etc. He asks you to let him know 5 topics you think need revision lectures. Now, in deciding these topics you probably need to know which topic performed the least relatively. So, for example, scoring 40% in real-analysis might actually be good when compared to a 30% average in previous years while 60% in Linear Algebra might be worse compared to 70% average in previous years.
Rockmetric automates the job of an analyst. What Rockmetric will do for you is that it will take all of your data and help you visualize, analyze and monitor this efficiently. You can go the platform and ask queries in English ( like Google), say like, “What is the average score of students in a topic X?”, and it will find out the answer to this “intelligently” using the data you fed. Now if the statistics point out to low performance, you would probably consider this topic, hence MAKING A DATA-DRIVEN DECISION. You can also ask something like “What was the trend of marks VS attendance?”. To this, it will display a beautiful line-graph for this and so on.
Translate this to businesses. The data would be about revenue, profits, units sold, etc for very large companies and Rockmetric allows them to automate visualization and analyse this seamlessly and instantly and thus aid in making decisions. The natural language searchability, AI-based automated insights & a lot of to- be launched features are in the pursuit of making the data monitoring and analyzing process extremely seamless( as easy as Google search)
The workspace:
I started work by the end of May. The location was in the Bombay Stock Exchange Building in a co-working space there. The view from the 18th floor was splendid and always refreshing- interns usually got the window facing seats.
Culture:
It ticked everything you would expect about a startup
- No formalities what so ever
- Fast-paced
- Huge workloads (We worked from 10 am to 7 pm)
- End to end ownership of work
- A very energetic and young team
My project:
Enterprise users or the employees generally have rigorous schedules and making them use a separate web-platform for data-monitoring would be sub-optimal. So our founder wanted to build our solutions available on platforms commonly used by business teams like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Skype, etc.
My work was to integrate our platform into Microsoft Teams( a team-communication platform like Slack). The most challenging and exciting part was that I was the only one working on this. I had to research on the kind of integration this would be( we decided to build a bot), read through Microsoft docs to understand their bot-framework, learn user authentication flows, build a basic design for bot-interactions and then develop it.
For the last week, once I completed a basic version of the bot I worked on writing modules for data-pipeline automation, ie, the process of getting a companies’ data onto our platform. I learned a lot working on end to end stuff like this and now I am confident enough of building on any platform whatsoever! And when you know what value your work is adding to the company- the feeling is truly satisfying.
Working with the co-founder:
Undisputedly this was the best part about working there. Nimesh Mehta, the CEO, and founder of Rockmetric has had a great consulting-career before and had done his MBA from ISB, Hyderabad. Although he is not an engineer, his understanding of technology and innovation is really awesome. Listening to his ideas and vision about the product enthralled and excited me to no extent.
He was always very patient during my internship in answering my every query- from the vision of his startup to how I could run my E-Cell( yes really!). The tips he gave me regarding college-life are like cornerstones for me. He still answers anything and everything I ask him. He tried making sure that all interns get the kind of work that helps them in their careers further on in life.
So I guess when you are deciding where to apply, examining whether you see a role-model in the co-founder can be a really good metric.
Takeaway:
For someone deeply interested in starting up or learning about products or a passionate programmer who wants to build for the future, working at a startup can really be a great learning experience — just remember to keep that curiosity mode on!
The InternFair to be conducted during Udgam 2020[ 17,18 and 19 Jan] is a great opportunity for students at IITG to get an internship for the summer of 2020. The InternFair team has worked really hard to bring to campus some of India’s most exciting startups. Students' registrations will start by the last week of December. In the meantime, interested students can start working on their CVs.
Written and edited by Utkarsh Mishra, Overall Co-ordinator [ 2019–20]
