Deepak Sekar’s journey from IIT Madras to a PhD in the US and then a job in Silicon Valley is what most Indian techies aspire for. But Sekar did not stop there; he started his own company, Chowbotics, a food robotics firm. It was acquired by DoorDash in 2020 and now Sekar is focusing on using AI to create online learning content. Excerpts from an interview:
Q/ How did you overcome the challenges in the US?
A/ Indians tend to be more accepted as CEOs in America now. But 10 years ago, that wasn’t the case. When you look different, speak with a different accent and come from a different culture compared with the stereotypical CEO, it is not easy. I had to learn a whole bunch of skills to be considered CEO material by investors. The emergence of several high-profile Indian CEOs made things easier.
Q/ There are many startups in the US founded by Indians. What can India learn from the ecosystem there?
A/ To truly make an impact on the world, you need to solve difficult problems, analyse them in depth and be thorough. Today, truth be told, US-located engineers score higher on that front than India-located engineers. The workforce in the US has more people with masters and PhD degrees. While doing those degrees, you learn to analyse things in depth. Not just that, a good portion of India’s workforce has people in IT services and consulting jobs. In those roles, engineers often get mundane tasks that people want to do in low-cost locations. Even in multinational tech companies, Indian teams often get mundane jobs while the most interesting engineering projects are done by US engineers. Spending years of your career doing mundane tasks does not train engineers to do deep technical work, and many engineers lose interest in engineering as well.
Q/ How do you think tech like AI is going to evolve and change our world over time?
A/ You already have AI like GPT-3 that can write like Shakespeare, generate marketing copy, write software code automatically and even write essays on any topic of your choice. Over the next decade or two, the way computing power is evolving, we are projected to have AIs with complexity comparable with the human brain. I believe that will change the world.
Many mundane programming jobs will be automated. You will have advanced robots that can communicate well and do useful tasks at home. We will no longer be limited by language. For example, you can have one person speak in Hindi on a Zoom call and it will get translated in real time into English for another person.