Meet a Milestone Maker featuring Meena Sankaran

Every week we’ll feature the Spring 2017 Milestone Makers cohort. The following interview is with Meena Sankaran, CEO and Founder, Ketos Inc.

Tell me your name and describe your business in ten words.

My name is Meena Sankaran, and I am the Founder and CEO of Ketos. Ketos helps enhance global health through proactive insights on water with a zero touch deployment of innovative hardware, software and data science.

How did your business come to be?

You know growing up in India, having sufficient water and clean drinking water has been super critical. Over 5 million people die of waterborne diseases all around the world every year. After 15 years of technology experience, I wanted to bring the convergence of water, science and IOT to really deliver something that has a broader impact.

What’s the dream for your business?

The dream for my business is to have millions of nodes deployed globally so that we can truly make a difference in terms of potentially preventing a disease outbreak, reducing the number of deaths, or even improving urban water distribution. Ultimately as a community, we can revolutionize water research with the new data we can generate because that data doesn’t exist today.

Where do you find inspiration when faced with challenges?

You know, as an entrepreneur, you’re hit with challenges every single day. Personally, I keep the big picture in mind and the potential of what we can impact. My core inspiration comes from a lot of the tools I have grown up with in terms of meditation and being my spiritual self. I try to derive inspiration in every person I meet and through reflection in nature.

What is the biggest learning from the journey so far?

There’s so many learnings in an entrepreneurial journey. I would say resilience and patience are two things that have grown by huge bounds for myself. And what I’ve learned is, everything is impermanent, so I don’t waste time trying to analyze disappointments or brood over things.

I’ve just grown to really accepting things and value time a lot more because time is the most crucial factor in everyone’s life. I am much more deliberate about how I spend time as an entrepreneur.

What does the term milestone signify to you?

I measure and drive my business purely on execution and you can’t consistently execute without giving your team and yourself key milestones to achieve. The term ‘milestone’ is a critical word that is known to my entire Ketos crew. Whether it’s small or big, every single milestone counts and we make sure that all those small successes are celebrated towards that big vision we want to achieve as a team.

What milestone are you committed to accomplishing by the end of the Milestone Maker’s Program?

We are committed to securing our seed fund. I definitely hope we are able to line up enough investor interest so that we can actually execute and truly drive the demand that we’ve been getting from our customers and get the traction we believe Ketos can achieve when we really hit the market.

The Milestone Makers program is designed to help early-to-mid-stage founders set, hit, and celebrate milestones critical to company growth over 12 weeks. Each of our 14 Milestone Makers selected into the Spring 2017 cohort receive the support of a personal business coach, a team of mentors, peer cohort work sessions, as well as curated classes to help them succeed with their individual learning paths to help them reach their goals.