Getting to the Root of the Problem
How Entrepreneur Madhura Maskasky is De-bugging Business Logistics
As a young girl growing up in India, Madhura Maskasky was involved in a wide variety of competitive activities both in and outside of the classroom, exposing her to diverse interests and experiences early on. As a top student and competitive athlete, she also learned another important lesson:
“It’s okay to fail, because you learn how to make a plan to improve next time.”
Little did she know at the time, these lessons in resilience would prepare her for an exciting career journey in entrepreneurship.
Madhura started building her technical skills at 17. While she chose to study computer science because it was the most popular path for her high-performing peers, she quickly realized it was the perfect choice for her. Computing aligned nicely with her natural inclination towards logical thinking and problem-solving with algorithms. After completing her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Savitribai Phule Pune University in India, she moved to the Bay Area to pursue a master’s degree in Computer Science, Databases and Distributed Systems at Stanford University. She remembers a particularly challenging course taught by Mendel Rosenblum, which really helped her to understand how digital computers work at a fundamental level.
Madhura’s education at Stanford helped prepare her for her first job with Oracle where she worked on automatic storage management, solving challenging problems such as a disk data corruption issue that required building an automated system to reproduce the error. Her path eventually led to one of her favorite career chapters when she joined VMWare’s integration management team:
“The time I spent at VMware was some of the best of my career. I learned a ton there, from some highly distinguished distributed systems engineers in the industry, some of them are now my co-workers at Platform9.”
Today, Madhura is the Co-founder and Vice President of Product for Platform9 Systems. Madhura’s competitive spirit aided in the development of Platform9, a SaaS-managed hybrid cloud solution built on open source cloud frameworks.
“Studying your competition is always a good way to learn about portions of market trends that you might need to strengthen your products around. Knowing your competition also tells you what the rest of the world is focusing on, so you can evolve your differentiators accordingly.”
She leverages her technical experience as a trained computer engineer to solve the people-related challenges involved in building a company. Although working with people requires a unique non-technical skill set, Madhura describes her work as “debugging business logistics” requiring the same core principles: breaking a problem down and identifying exactly where the issue is.
To keep her problem-solving skills sharp, Madhura focuses on cultivating balance, finding time for exercise, meditation and gardening. Making time for herself allows her to “take a step back to separate from the emotions so [she] can think clearly in an unbiased way and use logic to break the problem down.”
When it comes to the future of tech, Madhura sees real opportunity for women to step into entrepreneurship. She encourages women to boldly take initiative and know they can have it all: success and enjoyment.
“Figure out where your interests and abilities are, and don’t let fear hold you back!”
This story was written by Hillary Fleenor, 2018 Wogrammer Journalism Fellow. Connect with her on Linkedin!
