Season 1 | Episode 4 

Chitra: Welcome to yet another amazing episode of The Tech Icon. Hi, my name is Chitra.

 

Aditya: Hello, my name is Aditya and we're going to be your hosts for the show.

 

Chitra: Our guest today is Abhinav Khushraj, a leading technology entrepreneur and an angel investor with deep expertise in AI, data, and analytics. He co-founded Petasense, an industrial predictive analytics startup with the vision of making industrial machines smarter and safer. Today, he works at the cutting edge of AI as the head of product at Google in BigQuery, a company that we all deeply respect.

 

He has worked in four continents and seven markets, including Brazil, Greece, Latin America, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, and the United States. He did his bachelor's in computer science from BITS Pilani, India, master's from the University of Florida, and an MBA from the very prestigious MIT. Abhinav lives in the Bay Area with his wife, Pragathi, and his two children. Outside of work, he enjoys being a fencing parent to his son, playing with his daughter, and learning Spanish on Duolingo.

 

We are stoked to have him on the show. Abhinav, you are a technology icon. Welcome.

 

Abhinav: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

 

Aditya: Welcome to episode four of The Tech Icon.

 

Chitra: Cool. While we'll focus on your journey for the most part, let's begin by really learning about the founding story of Petasense and your role at Google. So what was your motivation behind Petasense?

 

Abhinav: First of all, thanks for having me. It's really an honor to be part of this series and what I'm really intrigued by is that we have a young host Aditya who is here to host us and more importantly, I hope some of his friends — friends at his college or peers in that high school age are going to be the audience. I'm really looking forward to connecting with them. It's a passion of mine to connect with youngsters and unlock their opportunity.

 

Why did I start Petasense? Well, the two-part answer is this: First of all, doing a startup has been a long-standing dream. One of the reasons my American dream has been to found a company and then be able to take it to make a massive impact. Why specifically the idea of Petasense and industrial IoT and AI startup? Well, if you think about it, about 10-12 percent of the GDP in the US is industrial and manufacturing. When I started Petasense along with my co-founder, while the tech boom was happening and the technology was impacting many facets of our lives, industrial technologies and manufacturing were still highly running in their own world, not taking advantage of the latest and greatest innovations from the Internet and the IoT world and so on.

 

We said, hey, it'd be awesome if we could bring and bridge that divide between what the tech world from Silicon Valley offers to make an impact at these very critical services from power, oil and gas, mining, you name it, pharmaceuticals, that can then make their operation more efficient, but more importantly also make the lives of the humans working in these places safer, easier and better.

 

Chitra: Very cool. You briefly touched upon making human lives safer and better. Are you able to elaborate on that element a little bit?

 

Abhinav: Sure. Petasense is a predictive analytics company, very specifically predictive maintenance. If you think about it, the innovation from Tesla, Nikola Tesla, one of the best-known innovations beside electricity was being able to have an induction motor. These induction motors, we treat them as something that runs in every place, everywhere. From your phones have tiny motors, to your power plant has humongous turbines and motors that are running our economy.

 

These motors can fail and when they fail, they cause a lot of grief. The grief could be from just having downtime. Imagine if you have a lot of power outage, the chances are that a turbine or a motor somewhere failed, and that in turn caused disruption in somebody's critical operations: could be a hospital, could be a critical work facility, it could be at home where somebody is sick. There are second degree, third degree impact of being able to prevent failures of these machines. Of course, we started preventing induction motors, but we go well beyond all of that at Petasense.

 

Now we do analytics with ultrasound, all kinds of sensors that we have. In fact, here is the first sensor that we launched, the vibration sensor that you stick on these motors that capture the vibrations from these machines. And those vibrations are then sent on the Internet, the  Internet of Things to the cloud where we do the AI to predict anomalies and detect problems in these machines. So that's kind of the impact that a technology like Petasense, both the hardware and software has together.

 

Chitra: Awesome. And thank you for showing that vibration sensor. You have both a hardware and a software component involved here. And that really adds an additional layer of complexity. Why did you decide to kind of dabble in both?

 

Abhinav: Startups, I often try to remind myself and also tell others that we really need to start working backwards. So what is the problem that we are solving? And then think of the solution. So it was never a question of, hey, let's dabble with hardware, let's figure out where we can go hit this hammer and see if there's a nail. You generally don't have good hit rate with that. Instead, what you want to do is, okay, we have this problem, these machines are failing and it's done a certain way today. How can we make it 10X better?

 

Predictive maintenance was the idea, but there was no real solution for that. And so we said, okay, let's try to analyze the machines and their data, but the data was not available. We said, how do we collect this data in a pristine way on which AI can be done? And as you may know, with AI, garbage in, garbage out. If the data coming in is not good, you don't get good AI results. So we said the best way and the cleanest way to get good data is to build our own hardware and that combined a seamless experience between the vibration collected from the machines that brings it to the cloud gives us high quality data.

 

We never have a data cleaning project. The data is what we want. And so that is the motivation to do both hardware and software. But still I want to address the part of the question that it makes the solution more challenging for entrepreneurs to execute because generally hardware, especially vibration sensors are a very delicate instrument because it can introduce extraneous vibrations which can pollute the results.

 

So you want to make sure that the hardware is designed with high fidelity. It's not a consumer device which has its own challenges, but it doesn't have the hardware requirements or what an industrial environment requires. It's a rough environment out there. The temperatures are high. There's a lot of machinery out there. So I think really hardware does make it challenging. But at the same time, when I was a kid, I always loved hardware, just holding things, building things. So in a way, I was scratching that itch, hey, I want to build hardware. But I can tell you for real, it really started from the problem and what's the right solution for it.

 

Chitra: So the hardware really makes you confident of the data. Now, today you sit on the board of Petasense, and you work at Google as the head of product. How has the transition been — from a small startup to one of the biggest players in the world?

 

Abhinav: In some ways, they're very different. I think at a large company like Google, there's a lot more structure which creates friction and so on. At the same time, it's one of the better run big companies. It still can innovate at its scale, despite its scale because of the bottoms up culture, it has still retained to an extent. I think that really plays out. The doing level, once you find the right problem that you want to address in the market, and then you bring together a few folks that are really motivated to address that problem and have the skill set to address that problem, then I think it's the same whether it's Petasense or Google, where you are working together on this mission to solve this particular problem.

 

Chitra: That's beautifully put. The common denominator really here is "solving the big problems."

 

Abhinav: Yeah, small parts of big problems incrementally and then make it big eventually.

 

Chitra: Nice. What's the most exciting project that you're working on at Google currently?

 

Abhinav: So we recently, the generative AI craze has really taken over the world, and rightfully so, there's so much potential in there. And I'm for one not drawn by Kool-Aid. I take more, as much as I love technology, I've also seen how consumers and enterprises are very skeptical of technology, and I bring that skepticism whenever we look at new technology, and technology for the sake of technology always falls flat. So I think despite that, I feel like, you know, unlike some other technologies in the past, where it's more Kool-Aid, this one is real stuff. It's really got too much power in it that one should apply.

 

Really, in my day job at Google, what we did is apply generative AI for data and analytics. Data and analytics is very complex. You know, there's a lot of specialty roles in there. The amount of data that enterprises are dealing with is ginormous. And so as a result, human toil on doing work, you know, you have a lot of laborious manual steps in getting things done. So one of the problems we are solving is being able to do analytics, which is often you use SQL to ask a query on your data. And that process of writing SQL, for basic SQL, it's fine. But the moment you're writing real business world queries, it becomes very complicated and dense. And oftentimes, people may not have skills and they need some assistance.

 

So we created a product called BigQuery Data Canvas that has a natural language interface and iterative experience and notebook style experience that is really very powerful. It's a Figma like experience for analysts because just like Figma helps you design your UX workflow, this helps you design your data workflow. So it's a very powerful product.

 

Chitra: Absolutely. Now for this next section, I am going to hand it over to Adi and we are going to take a walk down the memory lane to celebrate your journey and inspire the world through your story.

 

Aditya: Yeah. The childhood experiences really shape one into their future self. So with that being said, let's get to know a bit about your early years. How would you describe your childhood?

 

Abhinav: My childhood was all positive memories. If I tweak the question, what is unique about my childhood was that I was born in Chennai in a small crowded part of Chennai, which is where even cars can't get in. It's a very packed place. Not just were the streets narrow, but even the minds were narrower for many of the folks. That was because that's all the world could see. Education was looked down upon in that environment. But fortunately, I had parents and my extended family who valued education. For me, it was clear that education is the ticket to doing big things and learning about the world.

 

Not only that, the childhood is about a lot of physical play. The generation of folks who have lived without phones and Internet, I was part of that generation when I was born. I luckily did not have the distraction that the young youngsters have today to really curb your enthusiasm and keep a device away. I didn't have to fight that. I literally had to go play with my friends because that was the only option.

 

Aditya: So you talked about how your parents valued education. What did your parents do?

 

Abhinav: Yes, that was the culture at home. In my neighbor's family, they'll say, okay, you're done with school now, just get ready for learning our family business. At my home, I was like, hey, excel, do really well in education, learn everything that is to learn, make an impact on the world. That was the culture at home. We didn't know what that impact was. We didn't know anything else. But let's just work hard and do that.

 

In fact, some of my relatives would look down upon education and say, hey, what are you going to do? You're just going to go do a job. How are you ever going to make money with education? Look at us, we're doing business. So that had a chip on my shoulder that at some point I'm going to do education and actually show doing business with education is better than without any, you know. And education doesn't mean going to school and learning, education means learning the life skills. So I think luckily I was in an environment where being street smart was necessary to be there. So I think that I think is a big part of education, not just reading books and you know that has its own value, but I think being street smart, being able to interact with people and negotiate with people and learn to be with people is a big part of education. And I luckily had that in my environment in childhood.

 

Aditya: Very nice. What did you want to become growing up? Did you have a dream?

 

Abhinav: It's funny. We used to have these notebooks that had cardboards at the ends. There were no Amazon packages. So the only cardboard I knew was these books that had cardboard front and back. So at the end of the year, all the books were done, all the notes were written, and we're ready to throw these books. So I would tear out all these cardboard pieces and then I would make a building out of that. It could be a temple or a house, a doll house or whatever. And I would make that cardboard using Fevicol, which is like your glue back in India. I loved doing that. Just the flow state I was in over summer, building that and building something out of it. It was rickety, it was nothing fancy. I was just doing myself. And that made me want to be an architect. I said, I'll be an architect one day. I did not know what the job of an architect is, but that's what somebody told me, you're an architect.

 

But yeah, soon I realized, you know, as I grew up, that was not the end goal, but that was my dream and I was really young. Later as I grew older, I realized, look, I love to be an entrepreneur and, you know, make this impact through business because you hire people, you solve a particular problem that can help many customers really. And so those really motivated me to be an entrepreneur. In what, for what problem? That was TBD.

 

Aditya: Okay. Were there certain values that you believed in as a family that you still hold dear?

 

Abhinav: Yeah. I think kindness was the big value that was at our home. My mom was a lawyer and my dad was a finance person. But being a lawyer, you would think, you know, the image shows up is they're very matter of factly bringing legal aid. Actually, my mom was a different kind of lawyer. She was a lawyer because she wanted to help the underserved. So she really helped the case of women who were in trouble. India was a very different place back then. There were a lot of matrimonial issues and women were often at the receiving end. And so she showed a lot of kindness towards people wherever she went, including these women. My dad was always kind. He would never hurt an ant. So I think that kindness was always embodied that we should be kind. There's no reason not to be kind.

 

The other related value that I've learned over time is empathy, which is slightly different from kindness. Empathy is really understanding where the other person is coming from. Right. And empathy is actually not an EQ skill. It's almost like an IQ skill. You need to think logically to see where they are coming from. I think people underestimate how important empathy is. And empathy doesn't mean you're agreeing with them. Empathy doesn't mean that you like what they're saying, but you recognize what they're trying to say, what their feelings are, you know, and those don't come across. And the lack of empathy is killing our world. I think we need more empathy to really understand where the other person is coming from. So those were really there. I think kindness was always there growing up, but empathy over time was something we developed as well.

 

Aditya: Yeah, I really agree with that. And how you said there is no reason not to be kind.

 

Abhinav: Yeah, exactly. Life is short, right?

 

Aditya: All right. Next, let's dive into your educational journey and get some advice for students out there. So which high school did you attend?

 

Abhinav: I went to a school called DAV Gopalapuram, which is bang in the center of Chennai, and that's where I went for high school.

 

Aditya: Okay. And then you went to BITS Pilani. How was that experience?

 

Abhinav: That was one of the best experiences of my life. I think BITS Pilani is a well-kept secret in India and abroad, I feel, which is good because it adds to the charm of it. Back then, it was just one campus in Pilani, which is a village, not a town. It's a village, literally a village where you would see, other than the college campus outside, there's nothing else going on over there. And so really the four years or three and a half years, because the final year, you know, you go do a project, the three and a half years there shaped me, not because of the content of the courses or the education, but the culture of the place, which relied entirely on the students to determine which courses they want to take, or how many classes you want to attend.

 

There was no minimum attendance requirement. So there were friends of mine who would go to no classes. And so the teachers had an incentive to teach well, because otherwise there'd be nobody in their class. So that really was a big part of it. But then being in that hostile environment, but in a hostile environment, where there's nothing else outside, meant that you became brothers with your college friends. So that really shaped how we deal with people, how to learn life lessons, how to learn diversity, because people from all over the country in India came. Until then I was in one part of India, South India. Suddenly I saw people coming from rich families, poor families, South India, North India, and how they fight over things, how they come together sometimes when they're not fighting. With all those human dynamics, it was a great place to learn real life, while also studying technical stuff. And computer science was phenomenal over there. So we learned that as well. I could not have asked for anything better than that experience here.

 

Aditya: Really cool. It sounds like a great place. And then you did an MBA from MIT, which is a hotbed for technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. My friends would love to know, how was it like being at MIT?

 

Abhinav: It is better than you've heard. It is just phenomenal. That place is really a hotbed of things. Of course, first you have the imposter syndrome. How did I get here? All these capable people, smart, accomplished people, either technically, or in a business school. But you find your place, and not only is it known for its technology prowess, but also for entrepreneurship and innovation, which is different from just tinkering with technology. Because for me, technology with impact is more satisfying than technology for its sake. And so MIT really has that culture for entrepreneurship, and so did BITS.

 

So these two colleges really are entrepreneurship killers. I think there are some great companies from BITS, and of course, numerous companies from MIT. I would also say that one thing I realized, especially now that many years have passed, is that entrepreneurship has just blown up, and you can learn to do a startup from anywhere. Pedigree matters very little. What matters is the hunger and the desire to go solve a problem, especially if you're trying to be an entrepreneur. Yes, learning the foundations of how the world works, learning technology of particular domain deeply is highly valuable. For that, school is great because you hang out and learn from the best in a particular field. But pedigree-based careers really suck at the end of the day. You want to chart your own path, and with AI and everything coming, you'll have no other choice. Don't follow the well-treaded path. Try to figure out your own path.

 

Aditya: It seems like you had a really enjoyable educational experience, and I feel like it's also really valuable, not to think of education as a burden, but to actually enjoy it and see it as a tool.

 

Abhinav: Yeah, absolutely. Or it's a community or a social experience, if I had to add that additional point.

 

Aditya: Okay. That leads me to my next question. Would you call yourself a good student?

 

Abhinav: Academically, yeah, I mean, I was compliant in some cases, but there were times when I was non-compliant. I know I got into trouble. I was the class leader once in my eighth grade, and I was a very good leader in creating ruckus. I got all the kids to make a mess in the classroom because the teacher was absent and we said, we're going to have a party. I remember that day when we said, we're going to write on every part of the wall, and I said, I encouraged them, let's go do this. Let's have fun. That was my motivation. I was very immature and I realized it's not the right kind of thing to do. But I'm glad I did because I am better off for it, that I learned not to do those things.

 

Aditya: Okay. What do you call yourself, an introvert or an extrovert?

 

Abhinav: Definitely extrovert. At the end of a party, I feel energized. I don't feel tired. I can do more party and am the guy who'll be at the after party. So I do love hanging out and connecting with people. That's what I mean. For me, it doesn't require, not necessarily going to a club, but just hanging out with four friends, two friends, one friend, for me, that is energy.

 

Aditya: Finally, what is your advice to students and parents around handling pressure?

 

Abhinav: Oh man. Yeah, I think I have an 11-year-old and I can tell you, there's a lot of pressure, especially in an area with a lot of accomplished tech people. And accomplished youngsters, so there's parent-led pressure. There is pressure from the peers, or my friends doing this or that, pressure that the kids bring on to themselves, that I live up to my parents' standards. I think that pressure is just counterproductive.

 

And I think my principle is, it's easier to say it now, but I think when you're young, when you haven't yet figured out, but still I can tell you that, if you remember this fact that for most people, only one generation above you and one generation below you will know you. Okay, you're lucky if you have grandparents, you're lucky if you have grandkids, and even then they'll remember you a little bit. So maybe two generations above and below you, the max, unless you become like a famous figure. And even then, you're not personally connecting with them.

 

So I feel like if you have such a small impact, if you have a flash of time in this four or five billion years of span on planet Earth and many more years to come, in a way, our life is pointless. So let's make most of it, let's have fun. And to have fun doesn't mean like you just go partying, but fun means that you learn about the world, figure out how it ticks, make it better for those who haven't got all the things you have received, maybe an education, maybe food for some people, maybe drugs for some people. I think just helping out the fellow human is my principle.

 

Aditya: That's amazing advice. Okay, now I'll pass it over to my co-host to cover the next segment, work and entrepreneurship.

 

Chitra: Thank you for sharing, Abhinav. What really stuck out to me was your journey from the narrow streets of Chennai to Silicon Valley, the heart of innovation where merit is rewarded. You've had such an incredible ride. Now, what was your first job out of college?

 

Abhinav: Right out of BITS Pilani, my first job was working at ISP in India, which was a government-run ISP at that time. I was writing Visual Basic Code for some administration of the ISP portal or something. I really dreaded it. It wasn't the kind of job I thought I would be getting. But it was good that it was a challenging, not intellectually challenging, but just a frustrating experience to see. If you don't pick the right job, don't make the right choices, you don't end up in the right. So good decisions matter a lot. I think thinking through your decisions, especially the big ones in life, take your time to think through the decision. The small ones move fast. This is the principle even for startups. If they're reversible decisions are not super hard to reverse them, just take them fast. You break it and you move along. That's the fail fast mantra.

 

Chitra: How did entrepreneurship happen?

 

Abhinav: It was on the dream list for a long time, like I said to Aditya. It's just that getting to the US, the land of free, I wasn't free for 13 years until I got my green card. Once I got my green card, I could jump in. I got my green card, I took my fellow friends to a celebration party, and I sent my resignation that afternoon saying that I am done. I'm going to start my startup. That's how the startup journey started.

 

Chitra: Yeah. There are a lot of Indians here who struggle with that immigration challenge in particular, any advice for them?

 

Abhinav: One thing that I would say is that if you don't have a strong reason to be here right away, then don't be here and be where you can start your startup.

 

Chitra: Yeah. I love how you said that if you want to start a company, just go do it. Don't let immigration slow you down. Now, startups are really hard. There's pain and rejection and failure, how do you deal with something like that?

 

Abhinav: It's not easy. I think that's part of the experience. I think that's why most people don't do startups because rejection and failure is just very hard. The default is no. Default is fail. It's like they say, high highs and low lows. No, I think it is. Sometimes high highs and mostly low lows, unless you crack it. Then I think you are in the stratospheric few companies that have cracked product market fit and then you're floating in the air. Even then, there are new challenges, but at least I know you got to a basic threshold level. I think pre-product market fit is the hardest part emotionally. Once you can cross that bridge, then I think at least you get to a slightly better place. Each one has its own way to deal with it. I think a couple of tactics that I would leave with are, one is don't question every decision of yourself at a fundamental level every day. Say that I have this plan for the next two, three months and that's the plan I'm going to execute and evaluate how this plan goes. I call that the feedback loop. The companies that are able to do very fast feedback loops are the ones that really succeed.

 

Chitra: That's awesome. I will pass it back to Adi for some fun stuff now.

 

Aditya: My sources tell me that you share a birthday with your daughter. That's so special and how does your family celebrate?

 

Abhinav: It's pretty exciting, yeah. Since her birthday is being celebrated now, I'm also getting my birthday celebrated well. Before that, it was like a hey, happy birthday and that was the end of it. But now I usually get the big cake is for her and the small little cupcake is for me. So it works out.

 

Aditya: Would you like to share a fun fact that very few people know about?

 

Abhinav: Oh yeah. When I was in fifth grade, I used to do arbitrage. So I used to go to the wholesale market and I would buy these pens that were sold in bulk. They were like these very unique shapes. There would be an animal face pen and a beer keg and a whiskey bottle, pens of that shape. I would take that and then go to my school and sell it at a big premium. And then I got into trouble for that for my teacher. But yeah, I made some money from that and I learned a few things about business here.

 

Aditya: Wow. It's almost like a mini drop-shipping business. Thank you for sharing about your personal side. We're now nearing the end of this episode of The Tech Icon, and we'd love to get some final thoughts in this final segment. So over to you, co-host.

 

Chitra: Thank you, co-host. Let's conclude on a note of celebration and a note of giving back. What would you say to your younger self? Abhinav, is there anything you would do differently?

 

Abhinav: Nothing deeply different. Tactically, I might do a few things differently, but I think I've been very lucky with most of the things. I say proudly, I belong to two amazing countries, India and US, and not too many people are fortunate to have that luxury.

 

Chitra: As a BITS alum and a board member, you founded the first multi-campus, fully online course, and you also created BITS Spark, which is an angel network that's backed companies collectively valued at over a billion US dollars. That's huge. Would you like to share a couple of wins?

 

Abhinav: No, I mean, I would say that was a community effort. Of course, I initiated the course, which is surprisingly back in the day, I just came out of the business school and we had all these amazing courses with great speakers coming to us and talking to us. It was so easy in a way to learn about the basics from the other people's startup journeys about how to build a startup. I felt like, hey, why can't I bring that to my undergrad university?

 

Faculty on campus were thrilled, not bureaucratic. They were thrilled to have that and a few folks on campus really supported that and made this an official course. Done better than I'd ever imagined. It's created the culture of entrepreneurship on campus at BITS Pilani and the other campuses. To my surprise, 15 years on, it's still running and the faculty is still running it there, and the alumni come back and get engaged with that. Even if the students don't end up doing the startup that they envision in the new venture creation course, they eventually go and find something else and make that happen.

 

That led to starting the Spark Angels Network, which is truly a community effort. The board of BITSAA and many other people got involved from all generations of BITS alumni. We said, hey, look, we have the power of bringing our alumni together and potentially invest in startups. That's what we did and there are a few good hits that we've got. Even that program continues to run ten-plus years on, so it's pretty exciting here.

 

Chitra: Well, on that note, Abhinav, thank you very much for joining us in our mission of giving back and inspiring, not just the two of us, but really students and entrepreneurs across the board. We wish you the best.

 

Abhinav: Thank you. Thanks for doing this and good luck, Aditya, and good luck, Chitra.