From the chief architect of Aadhaar to CTO of India’s first non-banking platform, meet the Speakers at Future of Work 2020
Future of Work 2020, scheduled for February 28-29, 2020, is a one-of-a-kind gathering of technologists, leaders, entrepreneurs, and hiring managers to find some real answers to technology and talent problems.
For the last two years, YourStory has brought together design and product experts of the startup ecosystem under one umbrella through its initiative Future of Work. As one of India’s largest product, tech and design conferences, Future of Work is designed to take over 2,000 participants through the next frontiers of innovation and technologies.
The two-day event will be packed with curated talks, workshops, and sessions covering topics such as product, engineering, design, data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, among others.
Future of Work 2020 promises more than 15 hands-on workshops, 60-plus sessions, and 30 exhibits and stalls.
Audience will get to attend sessions by Amod Malviya, Co-founder of , India’s fastest growing unicorn; Mukesh Bansal of soonicorn ; Meeta Malhotra, the Founder of ; Abhinit Tiwari, Head of Design at Gojek; Swapan Rajdev, Co-founder of , and many more.
Here’s the second list of Speakers at Future of Work, who will discuss the way ahead for product, technology and design in India:
Yaw Yeo
General Manager for International Product & Business, Alibaba Cloud
An alumnus of Cornell and Stanford Universities, Yaw Yeo is the current General Manager for International Product and Business for groups including CDN, Edge Computing, Video, and cPaaS under Alibaba Cloud. He leads the product teams to drive international business growth.
Based out of Singapore, Yaw thrives in the world of tech startups. Prior to Alibaba, he was responsible for new market expansion in the Asia-Pacific region for cloud communications platform . Before Twilio, he was the founding Investment Director at growth-stage fund Infocomm Investments. He also headed the E-Payments Committee and iGov at the Ministry of Finance in Singapore. Yaw is a tinkerer at heart.
Pramod Varma
Chief architect of Aadhaar
Dr Pramod Verma is the chief architect of , the world’s largest identity project, and the chief architect of India Stack. With a career spanning over three decades, Pramod has worked across organisations and customers to evangelise technology and help product teams make strategic technology and architecture decisions.
Pramod is also a member of the Advisory Board of National Payment Corporation, Goods and Service Tax Network, and of several tech startups.
He is currently the CTO of not-for-profit platform EkStep. Passionate about technology, science, society and teaching, Pramod is most interested in internet scale distributed architectures and intelligent systems.
Rahul Chari
Founder and CTO, PhonePe
The Co-founder and CTO of found success by not attending IIT, but by rejecting it. The three-time entrepreneur has over 18 years of experience in storage visualisation, content management, and supply chain technology.
Previously the VP Engineering at , Rahul built the stack for eKart logistics, before building India’s first non-banking payment platform, PhonePe. An alumnus of Purdue University, Rahul has previously worked with Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, and Flipkart. He is also an angel investor and advisor.
Shayak Sen
VP, Product Design, Meesho
Shayak Sen is the VP Product Design at social ecommerce platform . A graduate from IIT-Roorkee and IIT Bombay, he has almost 16 years of experience. He is a design executive with experience in building and leading design teams.
With a forte in entrepreneurship and in product innovation, Shayak previously co-founded boutique design firm CheeseCare and was the Head of User Experience at real-estate portal CommonFloor. He has also been an Executive Coach at Institute of Product Leadership and AVP Design at Practo.
Navneet Nair
Director of Product Design, PhonePe
Seasoned design leader Navneet Nair comes with more than two decades of experience in building software products. He is currently the Director of Product Design at PhonePe. An alumnus of the University of Sydney, Navneet has previously worked as the Interaction Designer at Google and Principal at Yahoo.
He was one of the founding members and Design Director at boutique design studio Design Ventures, which helps startups and growth-stage companies realise their potential.
Sumit Dagar
Design Manager,
Sumit Dagar was previously the Senior Director, Head of Product Design and Research, at Messenger. He has spent a decade at the intersection of design, technology, impact, and entrepreneurship.
Internationally acknowledged as a TED fellow, Rolex Laureate, and Echoing Green fellow, Sumit now closely works with startups as design and product mentor. In 2013, he invented a unique device that could convert SMS or emails written in any language, into Braille.
Sumit holds a postgraduate degree from the National Institute of Design (NID) Ahmedabad and shares his learning through teaching and speaking opportunities at global forums.
Arnab Kumar
Programme Director, Frontier Technologies, NITI Aayog
Arnab Kumar leads the Government of India’s strategy and implementation of artificial intelligence, digital economy, fintech, and blockchain initiatives. He is the Programme Director of Frontier Technologies at NITI Aayog.
An alumnus of Birla Institute of Technology and Indian School of Business, Arnab has previously worked with Oracle as a Project Leader. With a career spanning more than 12 years, he has experience in leading product development teams across three global locations, has developed financial ERP products, and been an investment banker.
Chetty Arun
Design Manager, Razorpay
Self-taught product designer Chetty Arun was one of the early hires at . He currently heads design for two major verticals at the payment gateway platform.
An alumnus of IIT-Roorkee, Arun has experience of over nine years and he heads Payments and Capital at Razorpay. He was previously the Head Designer at SDSLabs.
Vibhore Sharma
Ex-CTO, Info Edge India, Naukri
A creative technology leader, Vibhore Sharma has the knack for building products that consumers use. The former CTO of Info Edge India and Naukri.com was earlier the Head Solutions Architect at AWS.
Without any formal education, Vibhore spent over 18 years in the internet industry, of which 16 years were dedicated to Naukri.com. A self-taught technologist, his strength lies in design thinking, product innovation, and building high-performance and resilient systems, and discovery and recommendation platforms.
Sidharth
Product & Design Head, Headout
Sidharth, Product and Design Head at tourism and leisure startup , has more than 10-plus years of experience of leading design at product companies. Prior to Headout, he was the Product Manager at fintech startup Instamojo. It was under his leadership that Instamojo scaled its design and core product from 100 to more than six lakh customers.
Sidharth is a Speaker at TED Conferences and has previously co-founded UX and Design Agency Mutiny Labs.
(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)