This Dean left the US to build IITM's entrepreneurial future | Prof Ashwin Mahalingam | BP2B S2E13

Ashwin Mahalingam 0:00 I was trying to get students to call me by my first name, so they would say, uh, "Okay, sir." I said, "It's not sir, it's Ashwin." And they'd say, "Yes, Ashwin, sir." [laughing] Today, I think a civil engineer is someone who goes beyond just working with steel and concrete. So a big thrust in civil engineering today is really saving the planet. A lot of people say, "What is the scope for civil engineering?" It's a typical concern that- Yeah ... particularly parents have. Why do large infrastructure projects not get built on time and on budget? And I learned very quickly that it had nothing to do with the engineering. Hey, there are these guys called Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who just stayed in the same dorm, and they've started this company called Google. And our head of the department came and said, "Look at that guy. He's just selling soap." I even had a call from an irate parent once, saying, "You are, uh, you know, purpose- Ruining my child. [chuckles] Uh, exactly. It's exactly what that person said. Hi, this is Amrit. We are at IIT Madras, my alma mater, and India's top university for people who like to build. We are here to meet some builders, ask them: What

Ashwin Mahalingam 1:00 are you building? What does it take to build? And what makes IIT Madras the best place to build? [upbeat music]

Ashwin Mahalingam 1:25 Hello, and welcome to The Best Place to Build podcast. Today, we are sitting with Professor Ashwin Mahalingam, who's an alumnus from the batch of '98. Uh, he was a lit sec in Godav, uh, but currently a professor in the Civil Engineering Department, and the Dean of Alumni and Corporate Relations, ACR. Uh, we'll learn a little bit about what that is. Professor, welcome to the podcast. Hi, Amrit. Pleasure to be here. Um, Professor, I want to start by just tracing your career a little bit. I know that you were studying here from '94 to '98. Uh, were you a civil engineering student? I was, uh, did a BTech in Civil Engineering from '94 to '98. Uh, when I was here, uh, uh, my, my life at IIT was a mix of academics, but also literary and, uh, you know, athletic pursuits. I played a little bit of tennis. I used to quiz quite a bit. Uh, it was a very enjoyable time. After I graduated, I went to Stanford. Um, I had the opportunity to do a master's in a field of civil engineering called construction management. Okay. A lot of civil engineering is about designing things, buildings and bridges, and airports, and things like that. Construction management is all about getting them built, so it's an interesting field that's at the intersection of technical engineering, but also requires you to understand finance, contracting, how to deal with people. So it's a little bit of a engineering-meets-management- MBA ... kind of program. Uh, right. And after that, I actually... So I- at Stanford in, uh... if you were in the, in the Bay Area in the late '90s, uh, you could not be- you could not avoid the, uh, being, being bitten by the dot-com bug, right? So everybody was starting up companies. The people were coming up with these valuations that were astronomical. And at Stanford, I stayed in this dorm, and people said, "Hey, there are these guys called Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who just stayed in the same dorm, and they've started this company called Google." And the next thing we knew, it- Blew up ... this was a, uh- '98? They'd already finished by then, so they'd already started up. But there were still these stories about, "These guys are in the same student accommodation that you're in." So the thinking was, "These guys can start a company. I mean, they use the same toilets, they eat at the same cafeterias, then why not us?" Mm. So, uh, as soon as I graduated, I helped start up a company in Silicon Valley. Oh, okay. Um, and it was, uh, uh, I guess it was... People call it the sharing economy now, and it was probably the sharing economy twenty years before it was time. Uh, so this was a company that essentially said, "If you're a construction firm and you have equipment that you're not using, can we find a marketplace where you can rent it to other construction companies?" and things like that. Uh, so it was going well, uh, but unfortunately, two things happened. We had the, the dot-com bust, uh, and then also we had 9/11, where the airplanes sort of crashed into the World Trade Center. And so the bottom of the market fell out. Investors lost confidence because the world was a very uncertain place. Mm. And we needed to raise a round of funding, which we were unable to do, so we did a fire sale to another company. Uh, so we got acquired, uh, but then I ended up leaving the company and was wondering what to do when my advisor at Stanford called me and said: "You wrote a piece of code when you were here. It doesn't seem to work, and no one else [chuckles] seems to know how to fix it, so can you come back?" So I went back to Stanford, and, uh, in his words, I ended up staying too long, and they made a, a professor out of me, so I ended up doing a PhD. And towards the end of my PhD, the then director of IIT Madras, Professor Ananth, and a team had come to the US and were meeting a bunch of people. And they painted a wonderful picture of how IIT Madras could be a place where you could really do meaningful and cutting-edge research. So I essentially, in early 2006, just bought myself a one-way ticket and ended up flying back from San Francisco to Chennai, and I've been here, uh, ever since as a professor in, uh, civil engineering. I remember that time. I think, uh, I was here on campus, and you were teaching some of my friends, so you were a young faculty back then, uh, who had just come back and had a startup in the US, and- That's right, yeah ... It was, uh- It was very exuberant. I was trying to get students to call me by my first name, so they would say, uh, "Okay, sir." I said, "It's not sir, it's Ashwin." And they'd say, "Yes, Ashwin, sir." [laughing] So, yeah, so those, those were fun times. Yeah. Professor, this is very interesting. Um, can I ask you, just for my understanding in, uh, civil engineering, you mentioned

Ashwin Mahalingam 5:50 it briefly, but civil engineering as a discipline, what are all the things that contain civil engineering? Yeah. So that's actually, uh, you know, becoming a difficult question to answer. Earlier, we had these silos where we would say, civil engineering contains this, and mechanical engineering contains this, but now the boundaries are blurring.... I think a long time ago, there were two kinds of engineering. There was military engineering, and, uh, which was essentially what the army did. Uh, and then there was everything else that was non-military, and that was called civil engineering. And in those days, because electrical and electronic technology had not really evolved and computers were not even there, and we're talking about decades ago, civil engineering was really more about building physical assets. So these could be houses, these could be, uh, you know, factories, these could be dams, these could be bridges, airports, railways, things like this. Um, and a lot of civil engineering at the time was brick and mortar. So essentially, you use materials, you put them together, and you built a structure. And because technology had not really evolved, building was actually quite easy. Designing was the difficult part, so people spent a lot of time figuring out the mathematics behind, "How do I design a slab that will not break?" and things like this. But over a period of time, the field has evolved. Today, if you look at a, at a building, for instance, there's quite a lot of mechanical and electrical equipment in a building. So you have, uh, you know, building management systems that monitor temperature, uh, you know, you automate your air conditioning systems. There's all kinds of smart lighting that's available. So anything that you build now is a composition of materials, but also electrical, mechanical, communication kinds of equipment. So civil engineering today is a lot more complex. Uh, it involves creating assets that impact people's lives, um, but it involves creating assets that bring together a multitude of disciplines. Um, and also one of the things that people don't really realize, because it impacts people's lives, the people side of, uh, of the equation is something that's part and parcel of civil engineering. So if you want to build a water treatment plant, for instance, it's a very nice thing to do, because you can treat wastewater and bring out fresh water, but the local community is probably going to be unhappy that you're doing it close to where they stay, because they're going to be worried about-

Speaker 8:12 ...

Ashwin Mahalingam 8:12 Exactly, right. So you've got to figure out, as a civil engineer, how do you also convey the benefits? How do you take people along? So there's a lot of social engineering that comes into, into civil engineering. So today, I think a civil engineer is someone who goes beyond just working with steel and concrete. Someone who obviously understands steel and concrete, but also understands a little bit of computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, social engineering, uh, principles of finance. You know, when I did my PhD, I, I, I was looking at, why do large infrastructure projects not get built on time and on budget?

Speaker 8:48 Mm.

Ashwin Mahalingam 8:48 And I learned very quickly that it had nothing to do with the engineering. We know how to design these things. It's just that in the process of getting built, some delays happen. Because of that, somebody loses money. Um, and that then sets into motion a series of events that lead to delays on projects and things like this.

Speaker 9:05 Mm.

Ashwin Mahalingam 9:05 So understanding how finances on a project work, understanding how contracts work, understanding how people respond to incentives, all of these are part and parcel of civil engineering. So to me, when I joined civil engineering at IIT Madras, the only thing in my mind was, uh, these bridges-

Speaker 9:21 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 9:21 ... that would span over rivers. You know, these, these drawings that little children draw with mountains in the background, and this river, and all of that. Um, uh, and that's sort of what I thought I was going to build. But as my journey has sort of expanded, I've realized that this is, uh, it's a melting pot of interesting perspectives, and it allows you to develop some expertise in varieties of engineering discipline, management disciplines, sociological disciplines, and things like this. And just to sort of conclude with where the field is going today, I think we all realize that, uh, the planet is in a bit of a crisis from a sustainability perspective, right? So everyone has heard about global warming and how global temperatures are rising, and that's leading to all kinds of uncertainties in weather patterns, and that's affecting people, because you have unseasonal floods, and droughts, and things like this. So you wonder, why is this happening? And fingers are now being pointed towards the civil engineering profession, because the process of building all of these things that we're building across the world is leading to the emission of greenhouse gases that are exacerbating global warming. So civil engineers have been responsible for where we are today, and civil engineers, therefore, have the responsibility of providing solutions-

Speaker 10:37 Mm

Ashwin Mahalingam 10:37 ... to where we are today. So a big trust in civil engineering today is really saving the planet, okay? And that, again, is, is fascinating, because you've got to understand technically what you can do. But you've also got to understand sociologically, how do you bring people along? From a policy perspective, how do you put in the right policies that encourage people to build in a certain way, that will reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that you emit, and things like that. So again, my life is super interesting. I speak to engineers, I speak to people, I speak to, you know, bureaucrats, politicians, I speak to financiers, and all of them have a role to play in the kind of work that we do to make the planet a greener and safer place to live.

Speaker 11:18 Professor, let me try and see if I understood this. Uh, so you started by saying that, yes, buildings and bridges-

Ashwin Mahalingam 11:24 Yep

Speaker 11:25 ... but buildings and bridges have become more and more complicated as time has evolved. Bu- buildings today, for example, have electrical systems, mechanical systems-

Ashwin Mahalingam 11:33 Yep

Speaker 11:33 ... all kinds of systems. It's not just doing the load diagram, and it's not just-

Ashwin Mahalingam 11:37 Yep

Speaker 11:37 ... selecting the material. Uh, but you're also saying that in constructing these massive projects, there's a lot of other things that come in, not just the engineering.

Ashwin Mahalingam 11:45 Yep.

Speaker 11:45 The people aspect, project management, finance, dealing with the local community, especially i- the example you gave with the wastewater treatment plant.

Ashwin Mahalingam 11:53 Mm.

Speaker 11:54 Uh, and the last thing you said was that there is, uh, uh, uh, uh, a sort of the, the, the latest in civil engineering is to do with: How do we do all these things sustainably?

Ashwin Mahalingam 12:04 Yep.

Speaker 12:05 Did I oversimplify it?

Ashwin Mahalingam 12:07 Um, well, I think you've... If you had to-... you know, compartmentalize it into a 30-second [chuckles] module, I think you did a fantastic job. But yeah, uh, the simple point being that civil engineering is, is diverse,

Ashwin Mahalingam 12:20 it's interesting, and it's definitely an area... I know, I talk to people, a lot of people say, "What is the scope for civil engineering?" It's a typical concern that-

Speaker 12:29 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 12:29 ... particularly parents have, right? When, when our incoming class of civil engineering undergraduates come in, got a bunch of parents saying, "What is the scope?" And one of the things we say is, the scope is, is, uh, a- a- and the, the conception is that the scope is shrinking a little bit because, you know, building is, is not as, as sexy as, for instance, AI and all of these other things that are coming up. Uh, but if anything, it's the contrary, right? There is so much more that humanity needs, humanity needs to build physically, and the impact of that on climate, on people, et cetera, are going to be so important that the scope of civil engineering is widening, to a point where many of these disparate fields are actually merging.

Speaker 13:08 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 13:08 So, you know, somebody asked me, "You know, what do you mean they're merging, right? What's the connection between

Ashwin Mahalingam 13:13 AI, which we think is the hottest, newest thing on the block, and civil engineering, which is probably the oldest engineering discipline, right?" Because people built pyramids and whatever-

Speaker 13:22 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 13:22 ... uh, you know, centuries, millennia ago. Uh, and what's happening is we are... we're trying to sort of use technologies like AI to, uh, make our lives easier as civil engineers. So for instance, I'm out building something somewhere in rural India, and I have no way to understand whether my project is going on schedule or not, when do I ship the next shipment of materials, and things like this. Now, today, I can fly a drone over the project, I can take some images, I can use AI to process those images, and sort of literally at the click of a button, understand how my project is doing and what needs to be done, if anything-

Speaker 13:58 Mm

Ashwin Mahalingam 13:59 ... to push the project along. So the fact that new technologies are emerging are enhancing civil engineering, not restricting-

Speaker 14:07 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 14:07 ... its scope. So to me, yeah, civil engineering is something that's, uh, there, there's, there's a great future ahead for, uh, civil engineers, provided you take this interdisciplinary perspective.

Speaker 14:17 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 14:17 Right? If you spend four years or whatever, just figuring out how to design with, uh, reinforced concrete, I think those days are past.

Speaker 14:25 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 14:25 Right? I think you really need to figure out how to get things done.

Speaker 14:28 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 14:28 Um, right.

Speaker 14:29 Or unless you're mean- building a 3D printer for reinforced concrete or something like it.

Ashwin Mahalingam 14:34 Correct. And so that's, again, an interesting mixture of robotics and material science for a civil engineering application, and I think that's super cool as well. And so we've got people trying to figure out: how do you create material that will flow in a 3D printer, but still give you the kind of strength that you need in a regular building? How do you sort of put in enough robotics into these printers to print accurately? Uh, because, again, these structures need to be dimensionally perfect, and things like this. So the traditional civil engineer would never be able to do it, but the new civil engineer, who understands a little bit of instrumentation, embedded systems, material science, and traditional civil engineering, would be someone who comes in and develops this kind of a robotic 3D printer, which is going to save, uh, a lot of time, money, and have, uh, considerable impact. Because one of the big problems today is you don't have enough people on construction sites.

Speaker 15:29 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 15:29 Uh, right? So every construction site is complaining, saying, "We can't find enough people to do the work."

Speaker 15:34 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 15:34 And that's because of a mult- multitude of reasons. One is there's so much construction happening, the people, of course, are distributed. Second is, in the old days, maybe people didn't have an option, and they had to go and work, do hard physical labor. Today, they do. There are a lot of other jobs that people can do that require less physical effort, and a lot of people gravitate towards that. But at the end of the day, you've got to build something, you don't have enough people. How do you solve that problem? You have to automate. 3D printing is one way-

Speaker 16:00 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:00 ... in which you automate. So if you can then bring that knowledge of civil, mechanical, electrical, computer science, all of that together, and develop these devices, then you're doing the world a huge service.

Speaker 16:10 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:10 Right? And, and that's all part of civil engineering, as far I'm concerned.

Speaker 16:13 Yeah. I was listening to some, uh, startup pitches in the civil engineering side. Of course, 3D printing in civil engineering-

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:18 Yeah

Speaker 16:18 ... is a big hot topic. I was listening to a pitch about, uh, using drones to paint buildings.

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:24 Yep.

Speaker 16:24 It's fascinating.

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:25 Yep.

Speaker 16:26 Uh, especially a really tall building or-

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:27 Mm-hmm

Speaker 16:27 ... something like that. So again, the pitch there was that you can't always have people around.

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:32 Yeah.

Speaker 16:32 It's risky, it's costly, and all of that. Thank you so much, Professor.

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:36 Yeah.

Speaker 16:37 Um, I understand civil engineering a little better now. I have lots of friends in civil engineering.

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:41 Oh.

Speaker 16:41 Um, never really spoken too much about their discipline to them-

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:44 Yeah

Speaker 16:44 ... but [chuckles] in future. Professor, the one thing that you mentioned, that you were a student entrepreneur in

Speaker 16:50 the US.

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:50 Yep.

Speaker 16:51 Um, o- obviously, you were not a student entrepreneur here when you were here.

Ashwin Mahalingam 16:54 Yeah.

Speaker 16:55 Uh, but since you've joined, I know that, uh, you were faculty advisor in CTIDES-

Ashwin Mahalingam 17:00 Yep

Speaker 17:00 ... which is the entrepreneurship cell.

Ashwin Mahalingam 17:01 That's right.

Speaker 17:02 I don't know if it's still called that.

Ashwin Mahalingam 17:03 Yeah.

Speaker 17:04 Um-

Ashwin Mahalingam 17:04 No, we changed the name at some point because, uh, CTIDES was a mouthful. I think it stood for Center for Technology, Innovation, Development, and Entrepreneurship Support. So even the people who are running CTIDES sometimes forgot what-

Speaker 17:16 Right

Ashwin Mahalingam 17:16 ... it stood for, and so we figured we've got to go with something simple. So we just changed the name to ECell.

Speaker 17:21 ECell.

Ashwin Mahalingam 17:21 Maybe about a decade ago or, um, uh, yeah, seven, eight years ago. I can't quite remember, but it's the same.

Speaker 17:26 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 17:26 Yeah.

Speaker 17:26 So the entrepreneurship cell you were heading, you were a fac- faculty advisor for the entrepreneurship cell when Tarun Mehta was the student head.

Ashwin Mahalingam 17:32 That's right. That's... Yeah.

Speaker 17:33 Uh, I think that was 15 years ago.

Ashwin Mahalingam 17:35 Yeah.

Speaker 17:35 Uh, so from your own entrepreneurship experience to when you were the first, uh, a faculty advisor for student entrepreneurship on campus, to now-

Ashwin Mahalingam 17:43 Yeah

Speaker 17:44 ... how has that journey been? How have things changed?

Ashwin Mahalingam 17:46 Yeah, so, uh, you know, if I, if I go back and start from when I was a student at IIT Madras, I don't think we even knew that entrepreneurship was a word. [chuckles] Okay, I, I, I think, you know, even though we prepared for the GRE and we went through these word lists and things like that, I don't think people even knew that such a thing existed. Um, so the, my first brush with entrepreneurship was, of course, when I went to the US, and, you know, I landed at Stanford, and suddenly everyone was talking about startups and things like this, and I reluctantly-... poked my head in to understand what was happening, and of course, it's a, it's an amazing world. It's an exciting world, particularly if you're a young student and things like that. Um, when I came back to IIT Madras, entrepreneurship was still not a thing, but there were a few pockets of entrepreneurship on campus. So the CTides thing was there. It was actually housed in the Department of Management Studies. It was sort of, um, you know, I think somewhere in the corner of one wing or whatever it is. There were a few people who were trying to start up. Um, and this was a handful, I think, out of however many thousand students we had on campus at the time, probably five or six.

Speaker 18:50 Can I just say that-

Ashwin Mahalingam 18:51 Yeah

Speaker 18:51 ... my startup was one of those.

Ashwin Mahalingam 18:52 Oh, you were one of those? Okay, fantastic. And my impression, by and large, was people were smart, people were motivated, but they were clueless in terms of-

Speaker 19:00 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 19:00 ... how to go about doing this, right?

Speaker 19:02 For sure.

Ashwin Mahalingam 19:02 So in engineering, you always fall into this trap of saying, "I've invented technology. It's super cool. I'm done." Right? But then when you become an entrepreneur, you realize that the development of the technology is probably 10% of the game.

Speaker 19:15 Mm.

Ashwin Mahalingam 19:15 How do you market it? How do you sell it? How do you commercialize it? How do you set up supply chains? How do you run a successful business is a whole different thing, and we somehow never had the resources, uh, to do this. In the US, you find kids, when they're in the sixth grade, will probably spend the summer selling lemonade.

Speaker 19:31 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 19:31 And they learn a little bit about how to run a business, right? They learn that customers don't automatically approach them for lemonade, so they start thinking about, "How do I market this?" They realize that they've got to price it at a point where they get enough money to make the next batch of lemonade, otherwise they run out of business, right? So somewhere you, you develop all of this, but here in India, people rarely used to do that. So you had the beginnings of an ecosystem, but really very nascent, without enough support. At the time-

Speaker 19:58 Can I just say that also-

Ashwin Mahalingam 19:59 Yeah

Speaker 19:59 ... not, I agree with what you're saying, but also in many ways, at least in the family that I grew up-

Ashwin Mahalingam 20:06 Yep

Speaker 20:06 ... but also maybe through my friends, selling something was, uh, frowned upon.

Ashwin Mahalingam 20:11 Right.

Speaker 20:12 So it's-

Ashwin Mahalingam 20:12 Correct

Speaker 20:12 ... it's almost like a negative influence.

Ashwin Mahalingam 20:14 Exactly, right? [chuckles] And if I remember, uh, there was this really successful guy, a few years my senior, um, IIT Madras, then went to one of the IIMs, and then joined one of the, the big FMCG companies. It could be Hindustan Lever, can't quite remember. Was doing really well. And our head of the department came and said, "Look at that guy. He's just selling soap," right? So there was this thing, you know, exactly like you're saying, you know, selling this was infra dig, whereas building something was, was-

Speaker 20:40 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 20:40 ... considered better. But because of all of this, no one really developed that, uh, that-

Speaker 20:45 Muscle

Ashwin Mahalingam 20:45 ... ability to, to sell and so on. And even those days also, uh, the, the catchment of people coming into IIT Madras was very much the, uh, "let me work my way up a large organization"-

Speaker 20:55 Mm

Ashwin Mahalingam 20:56 ... kind of catchment, as opposed to, uh, people from maybe some of the more entrepreneurial segments of Indian society.

Speaker 21:04 Right.

Ashwin Mahalingam 21:04 Uh, the Gujaratis, the Banias. You know, never had as many of, uh, of those people at IIT Madras. So it was a bit of a sleepy entrepreneurship ecosystem, but around that time, a few things happened, and this is, I think, important because entrepreneurship is a bit of a social movement. Um, right? And until then, we didn't have critical mass. One thing that happened, circa 2008, was the start of the Centre for Innovation, right? So people were actually coming together and trying to build things. All right? Second thing that happened is, I believe it was Professor Bhaskar who was director then, or it may still have been Professor Anand's time, uh, a group went to the US and asked alumni there, saying, "We want to push entrepreneurship a little bit. Can you guys help? Can you guys mentor?" And of course, we have alumni entrepreneurs, because people have become entrepreneurs much, uh, later in life. So a bunch of alumni put up their hands and said, "Uh, let us know what we need to do, and we'll help." And then that group came back to campus and looked around and said, "Uh, here's a Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, who's been trying to do this for a while, and so he has a lot of experience. And then there are people like, uh, Ashwin Mahalingam, who've just come in, a young faculty, but they have sort of burnt their fingers a little bit with entrepreneurship. They sort of know how it works. So can we create a small team of these people?" Uh, right, and so Jhunjhunwala, of course, was heading this, this entire effort, and I was sort of lucky to be a part of it, and I was, you know, heading the, the student cell, E-Cell, CTides, and things like this. Slowly... In, in the beginning, it was very difficult, because we would try to evangelize entrepreneurship among students, and we'd say, "You guys are technically brilliant. You guys should be able to build a bunch of things. Now, why don't you guys build, set up a company, and, you know, who knows? You could be the next, uh, Infosys," or whatever the role models were in those days. Uh, but the students would say, "Hang on, uh, I've got a 15 lakh per annum job waiting for me at the end of, uh, my, my BTech. And, uh, uh, you know, you're telling me that I need to go down this very, very difficult path, where the chances of success are minuscule, where I probably won't earn anything for the first couple of years."

Speaker 23:05 Mm.

Ashwin Mahalingam 23:06 "How does this even make sense," right? So that's where we started. I even had a call from an irate parent once, saying, "You are, uh, you know, purpose-"

Speaker 23:13 Ruining my child. [chuckles]

Ashwin Mahalingam 23:15 Exactly. It's exactly what that person said: "You're purposefully ruining my child. He has worked hard. He has studied at IIT. His next step is to be, is to get into a large multinational company, and he'll work his way up and be vice president or higher at some point in his life before he retires. What is this entrepreneurship? How could you do this?" Et cetera, right. So this is where things were when they started. Uh, but we persevered. You know, you were, I guess, one of the early guys in the system, you probably, uh, had-

Speaker 23:41 Before, I think this, uh, the committee you're talking about had Venky and Anand, right?

Ashwin Mahalingam 23:46 So Venky and Anand were part of this, and then Rajan Srikanth-

Speaker 23:49 Rajan Srikanth

Ashwin Mahalingam 23:49 ... and, uh, you know, a few other-

Speaker 23:50 That must have been 2012.

Ashwin Mahalingam 23:51 Around that time, yeah, yeah. So Venky and Anand, um, who are both our alumni, who've done very well as entrepreneurs in the US, put in a little bit of money because we said: "Look, we've got to fund these startups. They've got to build something. They've got to travel, they've got to sell." And people like Rajan Srikanth, and a whole set of others, Seshan Ramamurti and others, said-

Speaker 24:08 Mm

Ashwin Mahalingam 24:08 ... "We'll get alumni together to help provide some mentorship, uh, to these guys, so that they understand what next steps are," and things like this. Um, so-... you know, uh, it was around that time when Tarun and Swapnil were both, uh, students-

Speaker 24:21 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 24:22 -in the, uh, at IIT Madras, and they were interested in entrepreneurship, so they were the, uh, student heads of what was then still called CTides, is now called the E-Cell. Um, it was a very small body then, but they sort of had this idea of doing something. I remember I, uh, taught a course on entrepreneurship back in the day. They took that course. They had a completely different product that they had in mind. Then they started doing these things on something called the Stirling motor.

Speaker 24:47 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 24:47 So they just kept dabbling at things before they hit upon the idea that finally became Ather Energy. And we slowly started seeing a few people, uh, you know, attempt entrepreneurship. What also simultaneously happened is that the Flipkarts and the Zomatos, and so on, started becoming more high-profile, and entrepreneurship automatically became a little sexier in that sense. So, you know, fueled by the success of a Tarun Mehta, the fact that a place like CFI existed where people could build whatever they want, the fact that you had this alumni ecosystem that would mentor, and the general uplift of entrepreneurship as an aspirational goal that people could aspire to, suddenly sort of led to, uh, you know, this, this sort of a catalysis of entrepreneurship on campus. And it's very difficult to, I think, uh, point out an inflection point, but somewhere around 2017, 2018, 2019, this thing started, uh, to take off, to the extent where today, every year, there are 100 aspirational

Ashwin Mahalingam 25:45 student-

Speaker 25:45 Teams

Ashwin Mahalingam 25:46 ... teams that start up, uh, today. Hopefully, many of them will actually become successful startups. But, you know, that's an enormous, uh-

Speaker 25:52 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 25:52 ... number from the time from when we started.

Speaker 25:54 Yeah. Um, just to give that a number, if there are 100 startups on campus, that will be about 500-odd people in their founding teams.

Ashwin Mahalingam 26:02 That's right.

Speaker 26:03 There are about 10,000 kids on campus-

Ashwin Mahalingam 26:05 Yeah

Speaker 26:05 ... so that's a significant, like-

Ashwin Mahalingam 26:07 Yeah

Speaker 26:07 ... I'm doing bad math here, about 5%.

Ashwin Mahalingam 26:11 5%, right? And, and that's therefore... And it's very doable. 5% is a, you know, it's, it's a- if you, if the goal is to say, "I want 5% of the student body to aspire to become entrepreneurs," I think that's very doable. If you start saying, "I want 75% of students to aspire to become entrepreneurs," I think that's, that's a yardstick that's very difficult to achieve. But if every year I can get a minimum of 500 students to start thinking about entrepreneurship and starting up companies, and even if some fraction of them go on to become Athers, you know, that's still, you know, that will-

Speaker 26:43 It's a huge impact.

Ashwin Mahalingam 26:43 Absolutely.

Speaker 26:44 But I want to just, uh, talk about the other 95%. Um, entrepreneurship is about building, and not every builder needs to be an entrepreneur.

Ashwin Mahalingam 26:52 Correct, yeah.

Speaker 26:53 So the, the culture of building that has percolated into the campus goes well beyond these-

Ashwin Mahalingam 26:59 Yeah

Speaker 26:59 ... 500-odd people who are starting up there.

Ashwin Mahalingam 27:01 Right. Yeah, so I look at it as a funnel, and I say this now when I meet alumni, is that when I was on campus, and many of my contemporaries were on campus, or people even senior to me, we spent four years, or five years, depending on which vintage you were, uh, getting a degree at IIT Madras, and while we learnt a ton of things, we built nothing, right? There's absolutely no building. A lot of it was theory we learned. Of course, we'd do some experiments in the lab, but those are just experiments, right? You're not really building anything. So we came out never really feeling like a true engineer.

Speaker 27:33 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 27:33 Right? So we had a lot of knowledge but hadn't really built. Today, particularly with CFI, that's changed. Uh, right? You've got a space to build, and there are no barriers to building. So you can be a naval architecture/ocean engineering student, and you can go build a drone if you want, or you can be part of the Raftaar-

Speaker 27:48 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 27:49 ... race, uh, you know, racing team. So you can follow your passion, um, and, and actually build. And I think it's important, the, the journey of entrepreneurship, I think, starts with building something.

Speaker 27:59 Mm.

Ashwin Mahalingam 27:59 Only when you have something that is sort of worth building and has been built, can you really then talk about commercializing and things like that.

Speaker 28:07 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 28:07 Otherwise, ideas are a dime a dozen. You can actually-

Speaker 28:09 And actually, all that, I wanted to say that in that early journey-

Ashwin Mahalingam 28:12 Yeah

Speaker 28:12 ... there has to be some positive reinforcement also. You're building something, it has to work, somebody has to appreciate it.

Ashwin Mahalingam 28:17 Correct. Yeah.

Speaker 28:18 There has to be, like, a, a, a joy that you get from it.

Ashwin Mahalingam 28:22 Right.

Speaker 28:22 And if your first attempts to building, everybody's frowning upon and, and it doesn't work, then that's very demoralizing. So it's also that-

Ashwin Mahalingam 28:29 Yeah

Speaker 28:29 ... the sort of the culture that comes with it, right?

Ashwin Mahalingam 28:31 Absolutely. And it's a huge learning experience as well, exactly what you just described. The fact that I built something, it didn't quite work. It might have technically worked, but then the person who was potentially going to use it looks at it and says, "Uh, this doesn't really do it for me," right? You go back to the drawing board. So you've got to understand what the user is expecting from it, what technology can del-deliver, how do you innovate? So I think it's, it's a really important iterative journey between just technological prowess, uh, but also trying to do something that's actually fit for use. So I think you develop all those skills. And I think the whole point of a CFI is just build, right? Don't worry about building for a purpose, right? Just, uh, the, the, the motto seems to be, "Come in with an idea... Walk in with an idea, walk out with a product. Don't worry about whether that product is useful or not." So I think it's important to build. And if you want 500 entrepreneurs, I think you need 5,000 or, uh, you know, so people building stuff. But then the question is, what happens to the other 4,500 if only these 500 become entrepreneurs? A company will never just be five people, right? A company will need to grow, and to grow, you need a lot of talent that can help you build out, that can help you commercialize what you build, and things like this. And these other 4,500 people who have that experience of building will be exactly these people, right? So if you look at the Amazons, the Googles, the- even the Athers and so on, it's... You talk about the founding team, but it's, I mean, there's hundreds of engineers out there who know how to build. So I think the knowledge of, of building, I think is, is very important, even outside of just the founding team, right? But the second thing is, we also have to push the envelope of technology forward. So research is also equally important, and we're hoping that a group of these people within that, within the 4,500, will actually say, "I'm actually going to push technology for the sake of pushing technology. Others can be entrepreneurs. I will be an innovator, so I will patent," uh, you know, so on and so forth.... and that, I think, is also going to push India's intellectual capital forward, right? So I see, out of these five thousand people, I see five hundred, and hopefully we can get to five thousand people using a facility like CFI. I think the number is heading towards that, but not quite there yet. Five hundred people becoming entrepreneurs, another couple of thousand saying, "We work with entrepreneurs to actually build out their projects," and another thousand or so saying, "We'll be innovators," right? "We'll be researchers. We'll push the boundaries of technology forward, but we will supplement what's happening in laboratories, which is really more experimental, with actually building out some of these products and testing them at, uh, at scale." So research, development, entrepreneurship, I think all of that is going to be a by-product of this, uh, building, uh, you know, building ecosystem-

Speaker 31:05 Yeah, fair enough.

Ashwin Mahalingam 31:06 Yeah.

Speaker 31:06 The word build, we are thinking of it more as a, a roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty-

Ashwin Mahalingam 31:13 That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 31:13 ... but not necessarily, uh, a set up a company.

Ashwin Mahalingam 31:16 Correct. Exactly.

Speaker 31:18 Or, or, uh, since you're a civil engineer, build a bridge. [chuckles]

Ashwin Mahalingam 31:21 Exactly.

Speaker 31:21 Exactly.

Ashwin Mahalingam 31:22 That's right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 31:23 Okay, Professor, this is great. Thank you so much. Do you feel like, um, among other options that students have,

Speaker 31:30 IIT Madras is... I know at this place, this pod- podcast is called Best Place to Build.

Ashwin Mahalingam 31:35 Yeah.

Speaker 31:35 Do you think we are living up to that name?

Ashwin Mahalingam 31:36 Oh, absolutely. I can't think of a better place to build. You know, as an academic, I do get invited to a number of other universities. I either go there, um, you know, to present papers and conferences, or I'm advising on some committee or whatever it is. So I've... I think I've seen a fair bit of Indian academia, and I've still- I'm still yet to see anything that comes close to, uh, I- IIT Madras, as far as the building ecosystem is, uh, is concerned. And, uh, you know, of course, people will accuse me of being biased because I am a part of IIT Madras, and I've had some role to play in setting up all of this. But I think genuinely, uh, you know, we seem to be ahead just because this is a, you know, a barrier-free environment, right? So you don't necessarily have to be a mechanical engineer to build a mechanical piece of equipment, right? Anybody can walk in. Anybody can be part of any team. You could even be a master's student or a PhD student who, like me, feels that: "Oh, when I was an undergraduate student, I never built anything. Here's a chance for me to build." So the complete lack of barriers is sort of, I think, one, s- you know, secret sauce, which I've not really seen elsewhere. And the second is the fact that people have somehow now very nicely organized into teams, and each team sort of progresses from year to year by piggybacking on-

Speaker 32:49 Previous work

Ashwin Mahalingam 32:50 ... on, on previous work, right? And so you're not constantly reinventing the wheel, because when you reinvent the wheel, in a year, you just sort of make a quick and dirty prototype. And, you know, the next year, you move on to something else. And I see a lot of this elsewhere, but here you can actually come into a mature team, and you can take the technology that has already been taken to a certain level, uh, to one or two notches, uh, you know, higher down the stream, if you will. So-

Speaker 33:14 Fair enough, Professor. You were, you were here as a student in '94 to '98.

Ashwin Mahalingam 33:17 Yeah.

Speaker 33:17 I was here as a student from 2003 to '8. Uh, one thing that I've always admired about the student culture at IIT Madras is it's a very paid-forward kind of culture.

Ashwin Mahalingam 33:24 Yeah.

Speaker 33:24 There's a lot of, like... I've never had a senior who said, "I didn't get this, so you won't get it."

Ashwin Mahalingam 33:29 Yeah.

Speaker 33:29 It's always been, "Please do better than me."

Ashwin Mahalingam 33:31 Yeah.

Speaker 33:32 Uh, and there's, it, it's a sort of like, not, uh, in- v- very institutional building kind of-

Ashwin Mahalingam 33:37 That's right. Yeah

Speaker 33:38 ... process.

Ashwin Mahalingam 33:39 Yeah. No, absolutely. I think, uh, and even now, even today, our alumni support us quite a bit, right? In terms of providing a lot of mentoring. Can you go back to the Ather story, and if you, you know, ever have a chat with Tarun, he'll tell you many touch points with alumni that, uh, you know, really made them pivot at very important times in the journey of their company. And without that kind of advice, without that direction, they may have ended up in a completely different place. Um, you know, today, when we bring alumni, one of the first things they want to see is CFI. They want to come here, they want to see some of the teams, talk to them. So this paid forward culture, I think, is, uh, is very, very important. And to some sense, that's sort of, um, uh, what this office that I'm now a part of, the Alumni and Corporate Relations office, is trying to do, right? What we're saying is we've got today, what? Ten, twelve thousand students on campus, but we've got about sixty, sixty-five thousand alumni outside in the world, and those alumni are super accomplished, right? We've got people... You know, take the top technology companies, right? People think about Google, people think about Microsoft, people think about Amazon, Walmart, whatever it is. You look at all these companies, and you look at the top leadership, you'll find an IIT Madras person there, right?

Speaker 34:46 Mm.

Ashwin Mahalingam 34:46 The person who's heading engineering at, uh, OpenAI-

Speaker 34:49 OpenAI, mm.

Ashwin Mahalingam 34:50 ... is an IIT Madras alumnus, right? So, you know, you, we can, we can sort of... And I'm not just talking about the big American companies, right? You go to the Tata Group, and you look at the top, and you'll find, uh, there are a number of executives at the top who are IIT Madras alumni. So these are fantastically accomplished people, right? And they want, uh, you know, to give back to the institute, right? And what our office therefore does is a bit of matchmaking. It's try to say, "How do we get you guys to get engaged with the institute, uh, right, so that the institute can benefit? Can you mentor teams? Can you be on advisory boards of research centers, right? Could you contribute a little bit of funding so that we could actually develop things?" CFI, for instance, is, uh-

Speaker 35:28 Alumni funded

Ashwin Mahalingam 35:28 ... alumni funded, right? So the 1981 batch was one of the batches that contributed, uh, generously. Then there was a particular individual from the '81 batch who then put a little bit more money, so we could actually build the building and things like that. So, um, I think alumni support, to me, has been very critical to us getting this building ecosystem to the point where it is today, which, in my honest view, is best-in-class in India.

Speaker 35:52 For sure. It's very hard to explain to someone, actually. Uh, when we talk to parents who are, whose kids have given JEE, and we tell them that the alumni network is very strong, uh, if they have been part of a similar alumni network-

Ashwin Mahalingam 36:04 Yeah

Speaker 36:04 ... that is rare, uh, then they get it. But in general, they don't understand the kind of power that it brings and-

Ashwin Mahalingam 36:11 Yeah

Speaker 36:11 ... how, how much it guides you through your entire life.... yeah, I, I don't even know how to begin explaining it-

Ashwin Mahalingam 36:18 Yeah

Speaker 36:18 -to someone who doesn't know it.

Ashwin Mahalingam 36:20 Yeah, it is, it is difficult because it's, it's one of these things that you've got to experience, right?

Speaker 36:24 Mm.

Ashwin Mahalingam 36:24 Um, you know, I've experienced it in a few ways. One is now as in my role as dean, I see on a daily basis, a bunch of alumni coming to IIT Madras for some reason or the other, and I get to talk to each one of them about how they're actually impacting something meaningful at IIT Madras. And then you realise that we are India's number one university because of all of the support that we've been receiving, right? And, you know, without this, we might actually be 20% behind where we are currently, right? So that's significant impact, but that's very difficult for others to see. But if you go to an alumni meet,

Ashwin Mahalingam 37:00 right... So we had this thing called Sangam in Bangalore in-

Speaker 37:03 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 37:03 ... in July, where we had big IIT Madras alumni, uh, sort of gathering with talks and things like that. You go there, and first of all, you see that there are these extremely accomplished people that you can now have conversations with, right? And so you enrich yourself. But also tactically, I know situations where, uh, somebody's looking to change jobs, and there's somebody within the IIT network who sort of says, "Uh, hey, you know, these guys are actually looking for somebody with exactly your profile."

Speaker 37:29 Mm.

Ashwin Mahalingam 37:29 And because everyone's an IITan, there's a basic level of... Or everyone's an IIT Madras alumnus-

Speaker 37:34 Yeah

Ashwin Mahalingam 37:34 ... there's already this basic level of trust built in, that, you know, you have a quick conversation and say, "You know, come on board. You're hired," right? And all of a sudden, this person goes from sort of being in a little bit of a dead-end job to now shifting towards a, you know, very exciting career trajectory, primarily because of the strength of the, of the alumni network. During COVID, for instance, right, just the fact that we had this alumni network allowed us to come together and raise funding for a lot of very important causes, oxygen cylinders for the underprivileged and things like this. So the fact that you have a network that's connected, that also all have this shared sort of sense of belonging, I think allows you to multiply many things, right? Personally, your career could take off, but also the institute, society, communities, all of these can benefit because you've got a large group of extremely accomplished people who are willing to come together only because they are tied together by this one mourn.

Speaker 38:26 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 38:26 Right? And that, to me, is the strength of the IIT Madras alumni network. Of course, of any other alumni network as well, but we are privileged to have been in existence for-

Speaker 38:35 A little longer

Ashwin Mahalingam 38:36 ... yeah, 65 years or whatever it is today, and yeah. Um-

Speaker 38:39 But also, I think we've taken the effort to keep it engaged.

Ashwin Mahalingam 38:42 That's right, yeah.

Speaker 38:43 Mm.

Ashwin Mahalingam 38:43 And that's very important as well, because, you know, when you finish, the last thing on your mind... Or when you're, when you finish your studies, the last thing on your mind is engaging with your alma mater, right? Because you're looking at the next step of your career. Uh, very often, as you... You know, after you graduate, you, uh, you might study a little bit more, you try to make your way upwards from a career perspective, but also you're trying to start a family. I mean, there are lots of things. You're looking at taking care of parents. So it's, I think, the institute's responsibility to go out and start engaging with people. And what I've found is, while IIT Madras may not necessarily be automatically top of mind, when IIT Madras goes and projects itself, alumni are more than willing to sort of sit, listen, understand, and see what they can do to help. So one of the privileges of being the dean is I get to go around the world meeting alumni. I never have a challenge with getting, you know, meetings with people, even though they're extremely busy. Never have a challenge, uh, in, in terms of engaging them, and it's just a question of trying to find the right fit.

Speaker 39:41 Mm.

Ashwin Mahalingam 39:41 Uh, but, but you're right, the institute needs to put in a little bit of work to develop that network. But it's, it's, it's like a sleeping bear in some sense, right? It's there.

Speaker 39:49 Yeah, it's there.

Ashwin Mahalingam 39:49 You just have to prod it a little bit, and lots of-

Speaker 39:52 It's there, and it's... Of course, any network is made of people, and, uh, you mentioned, uh, Seshan. Seshan, right?

Ashwin Mahalingam 39:58 Yeah.

Speaker 39:58 Earlier, and he's such a heart of gold, like-

Ashwin Mahalingam 40:02 Absolutely

Speaker 40:02 ... you just give.

Ashwin Mahalingam 40:02 Yeah.

Speaker 40:03 If you just say, "I need some help," he'll just give.

Ashwin Mahalingam 40:05 Yeah. Yeah, uh, uh, Seshan's a great example of an alumnus who will personally give, and he's given both his own time, and he's also given us some money to help us with a few things. But he's also a, a fantastic cog in the network. I mean, he just knows so many people, and he's so well-respected, that, you know, we've been able to... Many of our startups have benefited because of Seshan.

Speaker 40:26 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 40:26 Not because Seshan directly, uh, advised the startup, but he was able to connect the startup to others. And the thing is, there are many Seshans, right? And that's the beauty of the alumni network, right? If you had this one guy, and you had to scour the Earth trying to find him, that would be a challenge, right? But, uh, you know, you've, you've got... There's so much goodwill that alumni have for their alma mater, that this coming together, this networking, all of that just happens automatically.

Speaker 40:51 Fantastic. Professor, you mentioned the ACR office a couple of times. Just to formally understand, what does the office do, and, um, how is it organised,

Speaker 41:00 and what is the impact like?

Ashwin Mahalingam 41:01 Yeah, so we are, uh, uh, you know, essentially we also call ourselves the Office of Institutional Advancement, and so our, uh, goal is to help the institute advance. We do it through, you know, two key mechanisms. Uh, we call them friend-raising and fundraising. So friend-raising is, of course, connecting with not only alumni, but also influential people who, uh, may have a stake in IIT Madras, uh, corporates and businesses that are in the larger engineering and technology space that could have some connection with IIT Madras. So we just try to engage people, uh, make them more aware of what's going on, try to find ways in which collaborations could happen. So that's one part of what we do. The other part of what we do is fundraising, because essentially a lot of entrepreneurial activity or research activity, all of that requires funding. Faculty, of course, will write grant proposals, but those are typically smaller proposals. We try to raise larger, institutional-

Speaker 41:56 Mm

Ashwin Mahalingam 41:56 ... sort of funding arrangements, if you will. Um, we have- we're actually organised like a, a corporate office. We have a sales team, as we call it, and they go out knocking on the doors of alumni and corporates and others, trying to sort of see if people are interested in-... in, uh, interacting with IIT Madras. Um, uh, then we have people who sort of say, "Okay, if you've actually committed to spending some time or money at IIT Madras, let me then tell you what the impact has been." So we've got what we call a donor stewardship team. Uh, we do our own events, uh, so we have sort of a marketing team as well, that sort of tries to, um, uh, uh, tries to broadcast the image of IIT Madras to get more people interested in the story, uh, you know, things like that. So, uh, but, but these are... And of course, there's, there's a big back end that works towards if somebody wants to institute a scholarship for a deserving student, making sure that, uh, that scholarship is implemented on a, on an annual basis, and things like this, right? So there's a sort of a more mundane deployment perspective that we have. But yeah, so it's essentially, it's, it's like running a company.

Speaker 42:57 Nice. Yeah. Is... How old is the office? Like, when was it set up?

Ashwin Mahalingam 43:03 So the Office of Institutional Advancement is probably about maybe close to about 20 years old.

Speaker 43:10 20 years.

Ashwin Mahalingam 43:11 But, uh, the... in its current incarnation, uh, with a dean and, uh, you know, this kind of structure, the genesis was about 12, uh, 13 years ago. So Professor Nagarajan was the first Dean of Alumni and Corporate Relations, and he set the office up. Um, and he sort of developed it for about six years. Mahesh Panchagnula came in after that and did another six years, and now I've been here for a year. So 13 years in this avatar, probably another decade, um, you know, in its sort of from its infancy to where it is today.

Speaker 43:44 And already, I think, uh, from what I have understood, in terms of alumni engagement and alumni funds coming to the institute, um, we are leading in the numbers by quite a significant margin there.

Ashwin Mahalingam 43:57 Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think, uh, uh, in terms of alumni engagement, I think definitely. In terms of funding, I think there are a few other universities, IISC Bangalore, IIT Bombay, that attract, uh, you know, similar quantum. We may be a little bit ahead, but, uh, not really. Uh-

Speaker 44:13 Sure, these things go up and down.

Ashwin Mahalingam 44:14 Yeah, go up and down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but certainly in terms of engagement, which I think is a more important metric, if you just sort of look at the number of alumni that you touch, uh, you know, I would expect that we're probably a little bit ahead.

Speaker 44:25 Nice. Professor, thank you so much. I think I have... I, I wanted to talk to you about three broad lines. One is civil engineering-

Ashwin Mahalingam 44:33 Yeah

Speaker 44:33 ... what is it like? And I wanted to talk to you about student entrepreneurship, and I wanted to talk to you about the ACR office. So my checklist is done. Professor, is there anything else you want to talk to us about?

Ashwin Mahalingam 44:42 Yeah, maybe just one other thing, and this is because I know there are a lot of, uh, people listening who are probably aspiring to be, um, students at universities, perhaps at IIT, and also people who are probably already students at universities. And I think one of the questions that I never really thought about was, how... what's the best way to spend, um, you know, four years or five years, or whatever it is, on campus? And I think in hindsight, I would say the best way of doing, of sort of spending your time as a student at an IIT or at any other university, I think you should do a mix of things. Uh, right? I think the world is a changing place, and, uh, you need to have certain technical skills, so you need to spend some time, uh, you know, trying to upgrade your knowledge on a particular aspect. It could be mathematics, it could be civil engineering, whatever. But I think it's also important to build, uh, you know, a bunch of societal skills: the ability to speak, the ability to think critically, and things like this. And very often, those come from other avenues. Those could come from playing a sport, being on a team. Those could come from... In those days, I used to do a lot of quizzing and going to very-

Speaker 45:46 Yeah, you mentioned to me you were the Lone Wolf winner.

Ashwin Mahalingam 45:49 Yes. Uh, still the highlight of my, of my entire life [chuckles] is winning the Lone Wolf quiz at IIT Madras. Uh, so, uh, there's a... It's one of these things that you only learn about in the wee hours of the morning, but, uh-

Speaker 46:01 Just for the audience, the Lone Wolf quiz happens in Saarang. It's a quiz that starts at midnight, and obviously, it's a Lone Wolf quiz. Each person is one. It takes a lot of effort to get there, and then you're quizzing from 1 to maybe 12 in the night to 6 in the morning.

Ashwin Mahalingam 46:14 Yeah.

Speaker 46:15 So there are very few winners, because every year there's obviously one winner, and [chuckles] then that's why we were telling-

Ashwin Mahalingam 46:19 Once upon a time, it was actually an open quiz, which meant-

Speaker 46:22 Okay

Ashwin Mahalingam 46:22 ... you didn't even have to be a college student.

Speaker 46:24 Okay.

Ashwin Mahalingam 46:24 And so the winner of the Lone Wolf quiz could legitimately claim that they were the, the best-

Speaker 46:28 Top

Ashwin Mahalingam 46:28 ... quizzer in India. Right. Now, by the time I came in, it wasn't quite as open, but, uh, still a prestigious quiz. But the point is, you know, uh, by virtue of quizzing and things like that, I used to sort of go all over the country to these cultural festivals. You meet, you meet different kinds of people, you learn how to negotiate and things like this. And I think those skills, the, the, the fact that you have some technical knowledge, but you also have these other kinds of, you know, I don't know, societal skills or business skills, and so on, is the potent combination that I think will take people forward. Um, so I think, first of all, if people were looking at, "How do I invest the next two years, or three years, or four years of life in college?" and things like that, then I would think about: can you mix it up a little bit? Can you do technical stuff? Can you also do other kinds of stuff? And I think places like CFI, you know, actually bring all of that together. Uh, right?

Speaker 47:17 Yeah.

Ashwin Mahalingam 47:17 You, you can, you, you can, you can sort of... Not only can you work on building something, but you can also work on writing a business plan, pitching it to an investor, getting rebuffed, getting rejected, coming back, going back to the drawing board, iterating, things like this. So I think it's really important to find a home where you can do all of these things together and not be a one-trick, uh, one-trick pony. I think it's gonna be very important as the world moves forward, and really no better place to do it, I feel, than IIT Madras and the building ecosystem we have here.

Speaker 47:47 Thank you, Professor. It's a great place to stop. Uh, thank you for watching. Please remember to share, subscribe, like, uh, comment, uh, and, uh, send it by WhatsApp to your friends. Thank you.