Lasting Impact and Tea Shop Conversations with Sathyanarayanan Vijayaraghavan

In this podcast episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Sat (Sathyanarayanan) Vijayaraghavan, Founder and CEO at Adept Labz AKA "Ajira.Tech" and CASA Retail AI

• Sat started dabbling with computers at the age of 11 and started keenly interested in problem solving
• Sat also shares his interests in computers while also sharing his earlier thoughts of following his fathers business and gently moved towards software technology
• Joined Cognizant as one of the earlier employees and moved to back to US and showed early interest in the field of product development and consulting. 
• At this time (late 90s), Building a web page was a cutting edge and started building a product in work flow development. Sat shares his learnings of nuts and bolts of problem solving
• His next experience was with Diamond cluster consulting that sharpened his strategy consulting skills for about 5.5 years and built the first marketplace 
• Sat later talks about his decisions of location from India to US to across the globe and his love for problem solving
• Sat covers the initial set of vision that started in a Tea shop Mangalambika and conceptualized the company 
• Sat shares his stories of creating a brand new firm Ajira in 2016. He also shares the struggles and wiggles that he had to ride out of
• Sat has sold off his first venture and building the next set of ventures
• What is the impact that we are leaving behind in the workplace that we are in. Sat shares some profound ideas from his experience and links it to general happiness and financial freedom
• Differences between being a executive and Founder and risks and struggles of being an entrepreneur 
• Sat shares how as a start up first question to answer is there a person out there who will be ready to pay for it and ensure that you build fault tolerance from the get go.

Sathyanarayanan (SAT for his friends) did his bachelor engineering in Venkateshwara college in Chennai and post grad in Cincinnati college. Started working for Cognizant. Moved on the Diamond Cluster and later to Wpro. He became the General manager and the vertical head for Retail in ThoughtWorks.

Sat has about 23 years of overall IT management and delivery experience with 4 years in management (P&L responsibility, operations etc), 6 years in technology strategy and 9 years in global software sourcing; 8+ years in US working with ‘C’ level executives of Fortune 500 firms

He has been a Founder and CEO of Ajira, General Manager of Chennai at ThoughtWorks, Retail practice development at Wipro and created Retail practice at ThoughtWorks

Sat shares a passion for enterprise architecture having architected some of the largest online and trading platforms for Fortune 500 customers. He has also defined strategic enterprise architectures for several Fortune 100 customers

He is a true Thought leader with international publications in global retailing, customer experience, cross channel retailing, supply chain and eCommerce

Sat can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/satvijayaraghavan/