I am Jayakumar Balasubramanian, an EdTech Entrepreneur based out of Bangalore, India. Before plunging into my Entrepreneurial journey, I started off my career as a software developer and have worked with organizations like Ishoni networks (a venture funded start-up in the hay days of networking boom) followed by Hewlett-Packard and Huawei Technologies. My corporate tenure has seen me in a variety of roles, starting off as a software engineer to senior engineering / group manager. I got an opportunity to work on various technologies, geographies and products that gave me perspectives on organization building experience.
I spent my initial 17 years in small and mid-sized towns of South India. Studying in government schools and learning in the regional language (Tamil) was convivial. Thanks to my academic performance, I got a privilege to do my Computer Science and Engineering in National Institute of Technology, Warangal. It is one of the top tech schools of India, which gave me a stronger and better outlook to life. By the time I completed my engineering, I understood what quality education could do for a small town boy like me. What a transformational experience it was!
After my Engineering, I got the first taste of Entrepreneurship in my first company – Ishoni Networks. It was a venture capital funded company that created an innovative System-On-A-Chip (SoC) product, addressing the upcoming broadband networking market. It had all the captivating elements a fresh engineer could think of — Dynamics & Chaos of start-up, Power of equity, Working in cutting edge technology and a team who believed they can make a positive impact with technology. However, Ishoni was a major leadership mess-up, which resulted in the company getting closed. To get a view of what has happened, check out this Lightreading article about Ishoni Networks. This ‘first failure’ also gave me early exposure to the importance of leadership in making entrepreneurs successful.
In summary, the combination of Education + Tech + Entrepreneurship started fascinating me, then Emertxe happened. Starting off as one of the early investors in the company, I eventually took an entrepreneurial leadership role after quitting my corporate career in 2014. We offer hands-on educational / training programs in order to make entry level engineers employable. Over the years, we have worked as a team and positioned Emertxe as one of the top-notch tech finishing schools in India with key focus in Embedded Systems and IoT. In this process we also did a spin-off named WebStack Academy (WSA) whose focal point is Full / MEAN stack based training programs. We are in the process of pivoting WSA, soon will be making stronger foothold into online learning space.
Writing is something that has stayed with me over the years. Check out my writing journey page to get a view of how it all started off. This blog is my humble attempt to share my learnings and also learn from like-minded individuals. Do connect with me on my social media handles given below or simply leave a message in the form and I will respond as soon as possible.
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