SPEAKERS

Krishnakumar Natarajan (KK) is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Managing Director of MindTree. In this capacity, he has the overall responsibility of both the IT Services and the Product Engineering Services businesses of the organization. Until recently, KK served as President and CEO – IT Services for MindTree.

KK played a key role in the launch of MindTree’s operations in the U.S. and in acquiring some of the early customers for the organization. He also led MindTree’s expansion into Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Australia. Under his leadership, MindTree has added several Fortune 500 companies to its client list.

Prior to co-founding MindTree, KK worked with Wipro from 1982 to 1999, serving in the roles of Chief Executive – Electronic Commerce & Financial Solutions Division at Wipro, and the Group Vice President – Human Resources at Wipro. KK has been elected to the Executive Council of NASSCOM for three consecutive terms. He also chairs the ‘Emerging Companies’ Forum at NASSCOM, helping the Indian IT Industry build a globally competitive ecosystem comprising of both large and emerging companies. KK is an active member of professional industry organizations such as the Manufacturer’s Association for Information Technology and the Confederation of Indian Industry. He is a regular speaker/faculty at reputed conferences and management schools worldwide.

KK holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the College of Engineering, Madras, India, and a Master Degree in Business Administration, majoring in marketing and systems from the Xavier Institute, Jamshedpur, India. Golf and travel rank high among his interests.

Shereen Bhan is the Executive-Editor CNBC-TV18. She is a graduate from St Stephen’s College New Delhi with a Masters in communication studies from the Department of communication, Pune University. She has been producing and anchoring flagships shows like India Business Hour and What’s Hot for a decade. She is the Anchor-Editor of Young Turks, one of India’s longest running shows on entrepreneurs. She is also the host of the Overdrive show, the winner of the New Television Award for the best Auto show for 3 consecutive years. She is also the recipient of the Best Business Talk show award at the News Television awards for two years consecutively. She won the FICCI woman of the year award for her contribution to the media in 2005 and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. She has interviewed some of the biggest names in business and politics.

Pieter Kemps is responsible for Amazon’s VC outreach activities in Asia, which focuses on making Amazon Web Services more valuable for VC’s, incubators, and their startups. He engages frequently with the leading VC’s across the region and helps their portfolio to leverage the AWS platform to develop, market, and monetize their offerings better and faster.
Pieter has a background in product development, business development, and deal structuring. With over 12 years in blue chip technology companies, his expertise cuts across infrastructure & networking, Location Based Services, mobile, and Cloud computing. He has been in Asia for over 6 years and has an MBA from University of Chicago Booth School of Business (Summa Cum Laude), with a focus on Finance and Entrepreneurship.

Joe worked at Netscape developing some of the first e-commerce applications during the early days of the Internet. His next venture took him to NetGravity and his second classic Internet IPO. After that, he enjoyed building several startups from the ground up in the role of the technical executive responsible for building the company IP and managing the engineering groups. His most recent thriving venture is Iris Data Services, which landed on the “Forbes 500 Fastest Growing Companies in the US” list.

Shailendra is a Managing Director with Sequoia Capital India. Prior to joining the firm in 2006, Shailendra was a strategy consultant at Bain & Company in New York. Earlier, Shailendra was an entrepreneur in the digital media industry. Shailendra received an MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School and a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Mumbai. Shailendra is also a Kauffman Fellow.

Dr. Wido Menhardt is a seasoned technology executive with a passion for taking technology ideas from scratch to market, and to then scale them to volume deployment.
He started his career at Philips medical systems in Hamburg (Germany) and Eindhoven (Netherlands) where he authored more than 50 papers in journals, and at conferences, presented on topics ranging from MRI Physics to Fuzzy Logic. Wido has spent his career in software development and executive management, in multinationals like Kodak and Philips. He has also worked with start-ups in innovative display technologies, artificial vision, and search engines. He has 8 patents to his name.
Wido holds a PhD in Computer Science from Hamburg University, and an MSc in Physics from the Technical University of Vienna. He has studied, lived, and worked in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada and the US.

Ravi Gururaj is Vice President Products in the Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix Systems Inc. and has over twenty years of technology product development, management and marketing experience. Ravi is a member of the Citrix CTO Office, is responsible for regional coordination of the Citrix Startup Accelerator Program in India and serves on the Citrix India R&D engineering leadership team. He is Charter Member of the Bangalore Chapter of TiE and is a frequent speaker on the topics of enterprise-grade virtualization, cloud computing, and entrepreneurship and industry, academic and community events. Ravi joined Citrix Inc. in 2010 through the acquisition of VMLogix Inc, a Bain Capital Ventures & Trilogy funded cloud computing start-up which Ravi founded here in Bangalore. Ravi received an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where he was elected a Baker Scholar, and graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania, as a Benjamin Franklin Scholar in the Management and Technology (M&T) program.

Shradha Sharma is the Founder of YourStory.in – India’s leading online platform for first generation Indian entrepreneurs and also, the official online partner of CNBC TV18 Young Turks. Prior to starting YourStory, Shradha was one of the youngest Assistant Vice Presidents at CNBC TV18 and also, a Brand Adviser at Times of India. With a strong media background, she actively advises startups on marketing and communication strategies. Shradha holds a bachelors and masters degree in History from St.Stephens College, Delhi and an MBA from MICA.In 2010, Shradha won the NASSCOM Ecosystem Evangelist Award for her efforts in building an inclusive startup community. She also won the Villgro Journalist of the Year Award the same year, for covering over 2000 startups in a short span of one and a half years.

Gandhi completed his M.B.A. from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University where he was also named the Roseman – Canfield Entrepreneur of the Year. Gandhi holds a B.S. in Information Decision Systems and Industrial Management from Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Gandhi is also a recipient of the 2008 Fulbright Award for India.
Gautam Gandhi currently manages new business development efforts for Google India. This includes managing early-stage partnerships, explorations and technology licensing. Prior to Google, Gandhi co-founded ClearCount Medical Solutions

Narendra Bhandari is the Director for Asia Pacific of the Intel Software and Services Group – Developer Relations Division at Intel. In this role he focuses on developing the software solutions market across Asia Pacific. Narendra drives engineering, marketing and business relationships with Software Organizations, Academia and software developers in the region across consumer and enterprise segments. Narendra joined Intel in 1993 and has worked in the areas of systems software, CAD tools and 3D graphics. After returning to India from the United States in 1998, he was the general manager of the Internet Solutions Group, working with e-business solution providers.  Narendra also awarded the highest honor for groups, the “Intel Achievement Award (IAA)” for delivering high-performance graphics software.