Who is a leader? What makes a good leader? The answers to these questions are perceptive ones. If you go around asking people, you are bound to come up with virtues one deems essential to make a good leader. Accordingly, leaders too, have a perception about what would make them a good one and adopt a style that suits them. If you read the classic leadership book titled Good to Great by Jim Collins, there is this metaphor that a good leader is a driver who obsesses more about ensuring the right people are on the bus, and less about where the bus is scheduled to go. This is a philosophy Santanu Paul subscribes to wholeheartedly.
Santanu is a part of several esteemed organizations. Many of these organizations are run by competent professionals and management teams, and he often plays the role of a board member or a company adviser, with a commitment of 10-15 active-duty days a year. He is a huge believer in the power of high-performance teams, and therefore a lot of his attention goes into interacting with very smart people who are running these organizations and helping them think through their ideas, challenges, and choices. He deeply dislikes micromanagement of any kind. Working at a conceptual level with intelligent people who know how to get things done on the ground is a great source of joy for him.
His Pathway to Entrepreneurship
Right after he finished graduate school at the University of Michigan, Santanu began his professional journey as a software research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. After a few years, he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and co-founded a B2B tech company named Viveca backed by venture capital. Viveca ran into difficulties during the dotcom bust but they were fortunate to be acquired by OpenPages, where he was inducted as the CTO. As the youngest member of the senior management team, it was a terrific learning experience. After few years, Santanu decided to relocate to India to scale up the India offshore development centre of Virtusa Corporation, and the company eventually went public on NASDAQ. Later he went back to being an entrepreneur again and co-founded TalentSprint as an edtech firm.
TalentSprint was born from a truly revolutionary idea to address the widening gap between skills required in the industry and those provided by the traditional education system. Professionals lacked skill and training in new-age technologies, leaving a huge gap in demand and supply. Therefore, it has kept its focus on creating a highly skilled niche industry-ready talent pool.
As a global edtech company, TalentSprint provides transformational bootcamps and cutting-edge learning programs to modern-day professionals who aspire to future-proof themselves with deep expertise. Its partners in this journey are top-tier academic institutions and big-tech global corporations. TalentSprint’s patent-pending AI-powered platform seamlessly blends world-class academic rigour with industry-leading practitioner experience. They continue to deliver exceptional learner engagement rates and high customer delight.
Keeping the Ship Steady in Turbulent Times
A volatile market that changes with every technological disruption, economic stress or political turmoil takes a toll on everyone directly or indirectly. Most leaders get stressed handling turbulent situations. It has been said that wisdom is about driving change in a world mired in continuity while preserving continuity in a world caught up in change. Santanu is blessed to a great extent that he doesn’t enjoy social media very much, so has plenty of time left over to indulge in reading books across many genres and listening to amazing podcasts. In fact, these habits not only feed him with a constant stream of new ideas, but they also act as excellent stress busters. “In a sense, I am a believer in what Cal Newport writes about in his book Deep Work, which raises legitimate questions about the true nature of productivity,” he says.
In his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz says that the most difficult challenge faced by startup CEOs is how to preserve their own sanity. Running a startup is fraught with stress, risks, and constant encounters with unknowns. Behind every ounce of glory that a CEO enjoys, there is a gallon of grief. There have been a couple of times in TalentSprint’s journey where Santanu felt that all was lost and there was no way to recover from the setbacks at that time. And yet they did. “What I learned from those episodes is that when everything looks bleak, you have to reduce your horizon to take things one single day at a time, one small step in front of another. If you can do that long enough, it is quite likely you will successfully emerge from darkness into broad daylight. It is the same thing Matt Damon says and does in The Martian,” he says.
We asked for his views on the recent turmoil in financial institutions such as FTX and SVB and what impact can it have. To this, Santanu feels that the failure should not negatively affect the public interest in blockchain and fintech. It is widely accepted that these two firms represent serious regulatory failures, not technology failures. The growth potential of both the fintech and blockchain sectors vastly exceeds any hiccups faced by a few companies. “Entrepreneurs should, in my opinion, double down on these sectors, not retreat from them. Even if short-term funding is a challenge, the medium and long outlook is extremely positive,” he says.
Drawing Strength to Traverse the Difficult Path to Success
Two quotes that Santanu loves are indirectly related: “Most overnight successes take a hell of a long time,” said Steve Jobs, and it perfectly nails the idea that there are no shortcuts on the road to success. “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm,” said Winston Churchill, and it is easy to see how this quote essentially underlines the same idea that adversity is usually our greatest teacher on that long road to ‘overnight’ success. In an age of instant gratification, it is important to take a long view of life, work, and what ultimately constitutes success.
On the same note, he advises budding entrepreneurs saying:
“Pick a difficult problem and address it. Do not sell yourself short just to make money. Start your company to solve an important and hairy problem and develop an impactful and elegant solution that makes the world a better place. Such an approach can not only bring you financial success eventually, but it can also bring you a tremendous sense of inner accomplishment and earn you the respect of the world at large.”
Awards and Accolades
Santanu feels that awards and accolades are a testament to the tripod of values on which his company culture rests: customers must come first, quality is indeed everything, and innovation must lead to scale. TalentSprint won the Education Excellence Award at the Indian Achievers Award in 2022. In 2023, they bagged the EdTech Leader of The Year and Digital Learning Company of The Year at the Indian Education and EdTech Awards. These were followed by the titles of the Best Edtech Company of The Year and Best Edtech Solution of The Year at the 2nd World Education and EdTech Awards. Most recently, they won the Most Breakthrough Product of the Year 2023 at the Education Innovation Summit and Awards by Entrepreneur India; for its WE and TechWise bootcamp programs in the DEI space. Both these programs are offered in partnership with Google.
Miles to Go
Today, TalentSprint has carved a niche by bringing forth deeptech programs ahead of their time, preparing early career and experienced professionals for breakthrough futuristic technologies and upcoming career opportunities, thus developing the workforce of the future and bridging the demand and supply gap.
The company’s focus will be to continue to register responsible and positive growth YoY. They have 50+ programs and 15+ partnerships that foray into new domains, new target segments and emerging business models. They will continue to invest in tried and tested business models that drive business profitability and significantly impact the learning outcomes of learners. They are designing and developing new programs in the DEI space to transform careers at a larger scale.
iPearl.ai, their AI-powered learning management system is a true example of platform innovation. “We will continue to innovate to make it more robust and scalable. Parallelly, we are expanding further by launching hyper-niche industry-relevant programs and delivering them through innovative business models that cater to diversified segments of the audience. We are committed to delivering value for every penny invested by learners through the career transformation of professionals,” concludes Santanu.
