YourStory
caught up with Pesto Tech Co-founder Ayush Jaiswal as he readies to welcome
Swiggy Co-founder and former CTO Rahul Jaimani.
Ayush
Jaiswal (24) grew up in the Holy City of Varanasi, a small-town situated on the
banks of the river Ganga in Uttar Pradesh, flying kites and playing games on
his computer. He aspired to be a chess grandmaster and even represented his
school in national competitions. But the launch of the first iPhone by Apple in
2007 altered his life’s plans. He got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug at the
tender age of 12, seeing Steve Jobs unveil the iconic device. Intensive reading
and research on the tech mogul followed.
Pesto
Tech Co-founder Ayush Jaiswal
“Everything was right there in your pocket! It
was fascinating to think about the possibilities using that device,” he
recalls. “After eighth grade, I started skipping classes and worked on making
websites and designing graphics. When I went to study engineering in Delhi, I
wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started my first startup during my initial
college days by making ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software for
colleges,” says Ayush. Coming from a business family, where almost no one ever
has held a job, entrepreneurship perhaps runs in Ayush’s blood. But had he
continued the Jaiswal legacy of inheriting the family business, he would have
ended up running a furniture shop. Ayush had bigger dreams. Like his hero Apple
co-founder Steve Jobs, Ayush too ended up dropping out of college. “One day, my
teacher told me that I’ve to have minimum 75 percent attendance and at the same
time he said, ‘Your career won’t be made from 9 am to 5 pm classroom learning.
You should learn after college, by yourself, using different online platforms’.
After that, I didn’t see any logic in going to college and decided to leave,”
he says. His “middle-class” parents were “strictly against” the idea of him
dropping out, so Ayush decided not to tell them, but quit college anyway. “The
amount of advice they got from relatives during this phase was absurd. So, I
decided to not tell them because it was one less problem to have.” Ayush
stopped attending college six months into his engineering course, and
officially dropped out about a year later. But for the next couple of years,
his parents had no idea that he had quit college. “This gave me a couple
of years to do what I wanted without any family interruptions. I ended up
spending the next two years bankrupt, living out of the coworking space Innov8,
tried so many ideas, and worked for a bunch of startups for free,” says Ayush.
Andrew
was earlier the Head of Technology at New York-based serial entrepreneur Gary
'Vee' Vaynerchuk’s VaynerPublishing. Pesto Tech functions as a career
accelerator and runs a 12-week bootcamp, where it trains software engineers
(with minimum two years of experience) in soft-skills by connecting them to
mentors in the US, who have worked with companies such as Facebook, Twitter,
and Uber. The training fee is free upfront and the mentors do not charge
anything either. However, before joining the programme, students have to sign
an income share agreement. Once the trained software engineers earn 1.5X of
their previous salaries (or minimum 2X for low salary ranges) at a full-time
remote job in an international tech company, they have to pay 17 percent of their
annual income as training fee for the next three years on a monthly basis. If
the students are not making 1.5 times their previous salaries, the training is
free. It charges a management cost of around $500 (nearly Rs 40,000) from its
hiring partners.
Last
May, the Delhi-based startup raised $2 million in seed funding led by Matrix
Partners. Swiggy co-founders Sriharsha Majety, Rahul Jaimini, and Nandan Reddy;
Innov8 Founder Ritesh Malik; Posist Founder Ashish Tulsian; and Jack Yeung of
OIC Capital also participated in the investment round.
Ayush (L) with Swiggy co-founders
Nandan, Rahul and Sriharsha (L-R)
A couple of months back, Andrew decided
to move on from Pesto to build something of his own. “He will always remain an
integral part of the Pesto community; we can’t wait to witness his journey
ahead and wish him immense success,” says Ayush.
The
32-year-old IIT Kharagpur graduate, who had earlier worked with Myntra, was
responsible for building Swiggy’s technology backbone while overseeing its
evolution into the complex system to deliver personalised experiences at scale.
At Pesto, Rahul is still transitioning into his new role and will be
joining the young startup as a co-founder and COO (Chief Operating
Officer). “Rahul has been an early supporter of Pesto. I met the Swiggy
founding team in early 2019 and it took not more than 30 minutes for us to
connect. Rahul had always been our cheerleader since then. He had been advising
us since last year and was quite passionate about the problem we were trying to
solve,” says Ayush. Pesto’s problem statement is to take opportunities to
places where talent exists. “Talent is universal, but opportunity is
not.” Commenting on Rahul’s association with the startup, Ayush says, “He
was first an investor, then a mentor, then a brother, and now my co-founder. I
think you have to be blessed to get that lucky. His belief in our mission and
potential has been a huge driving force behind what we have accomplished so
far.”
Former Swiggy Co-founder and CTO Rahul
Jaimani joins Pesto as Co-founder and COO
Rahul
will also be investing more funds in the startup. Ayush believes that Rahul’s
experience in seeing scale at Swiggy will be critical for Pesto to enter the
next phase of growth, and says, “He obviously brings on board a very strong
business acumen, having been part of building a unicorn in his previous role, a
keen sense of agility, and organisational productivity that we at Pesto are
eager to be inspired by.”
Future
plans At present, the startup has a lean team of 12, but plans to double it over
the “coming quarters”. It is hiring for several positions across sales,
partnership, strategy, product, and finance. Amidst industry-wide job and
salary cuts owing to the coronavirus pandemic, edtech is one of the few sectors
still thriving and hiring as social distancing becomes the norm in a new world.
“Currently, over two billion people in the world are under some sort of
lockdown because of the ongoing pandemic. Global workforces have been forced to
adapt to the new reality of remote work overnight,” says Ayush. He believes the
edtech industry is likely to achieve its targets for the next 10 years in the
next couple of years itself. Last year, education market intelligence firm
HolonIQ estimated that the global edtech market was poised to reach $341
billion by 2025. But, given the current tectonic shift to remote learning and
working, this milestone is likely to be achieved much sooner. Edtech
majors such as Byju’s, Vedantu, Toppr, and Unacademy have all seen a
significant spike in both users and revenue, amid the pandemic. For instance,
Unacademy has seen an 82 percent month-on-month rise in its April revenue, as
well as 10 times more registrations compared to the same period last year.
Vedantu, on the other hand, has seen its collections and revenue surge 80
percent month-on-month, during the same period, achieving its highest growth
over the collective last two and a half years. Pesto, which competes with the
upskilling platforms such as TalentSprint, is however, reticent about sharing
numbers. Ayush believes since people are now more open to behavioural changes
than ever before, Pesto has “a massive opportunity and responsibility” to shape
the new way of doing things. “We at Pesto have been enabling a remote workforce
since its inception. As a champion of remote work and remote learning, Pesto
takes it as a responsibility to help the world, and specifically India, to be
prepared and skilled for the future of work, which is essentially remote,” he
adds.” Ayush says, “Our prediction in January was that by the end of 2020 many
engineers would go remote. Now, in a post-pandemic reality, people have
realised that remote work is not just possible, it’s more productive.” He is of
the opinion that top talent will dictate terms in a post-COVID-19-world, which
will force all companies to go remote to attract or retain talent. In January,
Pesto launched an online version of its upskilling programme for engineers.
Ayush says, “Through this programme, we are providing next-level
learning, development, and skills solutions to candidates across the country
from the convenience of their homes. This was another step towards our mission
of enabling global parity and borderless opportunities for Indian engineers.
Given the new reality, our launch happened well in time for Indian engineers to
take advantage of it remotely.”
Tags
Entrepreneurship