Sanjay Vijayakumar

Sanjay belongs to the new breed of Indian Entrepreneurs who are young and fearless. Starting an entrepreneurial journey at the age of 22 while in third of engineering, Sanjay led and created a team of engineering graduates who were passionate about technology to build MobME Wireless, one of India’s most exciting and innovative mobile–internet companies. MobME quickly raised angel funding from investors based out of India, Middle East and Silicon Valley.

Defying convention in India, Sanjay turned down MNC job offers to scale up MobME, building a team of over 250+ people spread across offices in Trivandrum, Cochin, Mumbai and Delhi and presence in 17 locations in India. Sanjay is also a Rajeev Motwani Fellow instituted in the memory of late Stanford Professor Rajeev Motwani, mentor to Google Founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, A Scholar of Aspen Institute, Colarado, he was selected by World Economic Forum as a Global Shaper for making significant contribution to the community. India Today has rated Sanjay as one of the 37 Indians driving the future of India and Forbes selected him for the Just 30 Club. Asia Society also selected Sanjay amongst the Asia’s 21 young leaders under 40.

What he has built since

Sanjay is the Prime Minister’s Champion of Change (Education) and the co-founder of Pupilfirst, an open-source technology company that carries a mandate from the Indian higher education regulator to train 100,000 faculty and 24 million students in emerging technologies, in service of the National Education Policy 2020.

He represents India at the bilateral Indo-US Science and Technology Forum, set up by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, and the US Embassy. He is also a member of the Empowered Committee at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which oversees the implementation of the startup scheme across academic institutions in the country.

Policy is the other half of his work. A board member of Kerala State Technological University, Sanjay co-authored India’s first state startup policy for Kerala in 2014, and went on to advise the Chief Ministers of Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh on implementing similar policies. In 2017 he co-authored India’s National Student Startup Policy. He now works with the leadership team at the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to build and scale the Leadership in Teaching Excellence (LITE) programme, which aims to train 100,000 faculty and take the National Education Policy 2020 from a document to something students actually feel.

Along the way he has been named a Rajeev Motwani Fellow, an Aspen Institute scholar, a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and an Asia Society Fellow — and, as above, one of India Today’s 37 Indians driving the future of India and a member of Forbes’ Just 30 Club.

Why I write about him

Sanjay was my mentor and the CEO at SV.CO, and a lot of how I approach work traces back to that period.

What stayed with me was not advice so much as a standard. He treated students as people who could ship real things, not as people who needed to wait their turn, and that assumption changes what you attempt. He was comfortable with ambiguity in a way I found unusual at the time — willing to back a direction before it was obviously correct, and equally willing to say plainly when something was not working.

Looking at the arc of his career, the through-line is fairly clear: he keeps choosing the harder, slower version of a problem — building a company instead of taking the job, writing the policy instead of complaining about it, training a hundred thousand teachers instead of a hundred students. That is a difficult example to be handed early, and I am grateful I was.

His ideologies have influenced my attitude to a great extent, and I do not think I would have taken the risks I have taken without having watched someone take much larger ones first.