After selling his startup to LinkedIn for $90 million at age 27, Akshay Kothari was promoted to head of LinkedIn India, the company’s second-biggest market. The world’s largest professional network has big plans for Asia, and 30-something Kothari has proven himself as a leader who will deliver.
Just a few minutes into a conversation with Akshay Kothari, it becomes clear why the world’s largest professional networking company has entrusted its second-largest and fastest-growing market to a millennial.
Among corporate honchos in India, Kothari (ECE’07) — part design guy, part entrepreneur, and part product guy — is unusual. That he is younger than his peers (they were in their teens when he was still a toddler) makes it even more so.
LinkedIn India was mostly a sales office when it first entered the market in 2009. In late 2011, the company started building a research and development team that mostly focused on infrastructure, spam detection, and relevance of search. Most multinationals do core product development closer to their headquarters and assign lower value work like monitoring and testing to centers in India. LinkedIn adheres to the follow-the-sun workflow, designed to reduce the time to develop products for market. Teams in India and the United States own and advance projects that are handed off at the end of their workday to their peer teams around the world to continue the work in their respective time zone.
In his first 10 months on the job, Kothari, country manager, India, and vice president, international products, kickstarted LinkedIn’s product engine with the launch of LinkedIn Lite. The scaled-down version of the site loads faster for users with less reliable Internet access, and was built by a team of six Indian engineers in just 12 weeks, which, says Kothari, showcased Bangalore talent to the rest of LinkedIn globally. The successful site launch was followed up in July 2017 with a LinkedIn Lite Android app that loads in under five seconds even on a 2G network, uses only one MB of storage space, and reduces data usage by 80 percent. Designed to work on lower-end handsets and in areas with poor connectivity, the app was extended to more than 60 countries in 2017.
The products Kothari helmed are critical for LinkedIn, with a mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” LinkedIn Lite helps the company reach deeper into India’s job market, mostly smaller cities and towns where data connectivity is poor.
LinkedIn has high hopes for India, home to nearly 37 million college graduates. Nearly one million people are expected to hit working age every month for the next 18 years in India. They will need jobs, and LinkedIn would like to position itself as their platform of choice. It’s something that Kothari is passionate about, too. “I want to enable every college student in India to be able to access any jobs in India regardless of the college they went to,” he says.
Kothari’s smarts with building products played an important role in the launch of the new products in good time, his boss says. “It is so important to have someone like Akshay in place as the country manager because he has that product vision and capability,” LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner told reporters during a visit to India in September 2016. Unsaid: a product vision and capability honed in Silicon Valley.
Lucked out
The second of three sons born into a family of businessmen, Kothari traces his family’s roots to Churu in the desert region of the Rajasthan state of India. He followed in his older brother’s footsteps deciding to study in the United States. After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering from Purdue in 2007, he worked as an investment analyst at a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Elections were approaching, and the noise against the US outsourcing technology jobs to Indian workers was getting louder. That year, as the number of applications for the H1B visa piled up at record speed, the US government had decided to use a lottery system to grant visas.
“Stanford was essentially my backup plan,” says Kothari. The idea was to stay on and study in the US if the visa didn’t work out. That turned out to be a lucky decision. His H1B did not work out, and he continued on a student visa. When the financial crisis hit the markets hard in 2008, Kothari was cocooned in the safety of Stanford graduate school. “Everything around me was just crashing, so it was a blessing in disguise,” he says.
Slowly, he started gravitating toward design and computer science and away from circuits and signal processing. It is common practice for students at Stanford to pick courses across disciplines. Kothari took courses in design and computer science along with electrical engineering.
It was the design school at Stanford that really honed Kothari’s product skills. “The first class at the design boot camp was to redesign how people eat Ramen noodles,” he recalls. They spent hours watching people eat noodles. “Most good products start with user empathy,” he says. Until then, he’d look at technology and see how it could be applied. But now, he’d started thinking of problems that could be solved with technology. “It really changed the way I think about things.”
“Most good products start with user empathy.”
Nothing is overnight
At Stanford, Kothari launched several class projects, hoping to make companies out of them. The first five failed. In 2009, he launched Zaptext, a way for people to quickly respond to messages by clicking on pretyped messages. When that didn’t go as planned, he launched Zenmail, a voice-based in-car email system. That didn’t work either.
The best part of the experience was that they made mistakes — for instance, too many founders and pivoting too often. “All the stuff we did wrong was so helpful in building Pulse,” Kothari says.
Pulse, a new aggregator, was founded in May 2010. That year, veteran technology journalist Kara Swisher described Kothari and his Pulse cofounder, Ankit Gupta, as “sweet natured, slightly naive, energetic, and very product focused.” Gupta and Kothari had worked together throughout their time at Stanford.
Kothari and his cofounder, Ankit Gupta, hacked together Pulse in six weeks and launched on the app store on May 12, 2010. It was their final shot at entrepreneurship before they went on to take up jobs at Facebook and Microsoft.
“We got 120 downloads on the first day, which was way above our expectations,” Kothari says. The iPad had just been launched a month earlier, and only a few apps had been built specifically for the tablet. Even then, it was a huge surprise for the duo when Apple cofounder Steve Jobs talked about their app during his keynote address at Apple’s developer conference in San Francisco in June 2010. Jobs described Pulse as a “wonderful RSS reader.”
That week, the company made $120,000 selling the app for $3.99 a download. “That was our seed round in some ways. It became less of a class project and more of a company,” says Kothari. The company went on to raise $10 million in Series A funding in 2011. It grew over the next three years to 30 million users and 28 employees.
“The company was at a crossroads where it could have raised Series B or gotten acquired,” says Kothari. In April 2013, LinkedIn bought Pulse for $90 million and Kothari joined LinkedIn as a product manager, running the LinkedIn Pulse team for two-and-a-half years.
Ind-yeah!
When the top job at LinkedIn India came open, Kothari jumped at the chance to transition to general management, build products for India, and move back home.
“India is one of very few strategic markets and among the fastest-growing markets for LinkedIn,” says Kothari. It is hard for Internet companies to ignore India’s growth. India has more than 420 million Internet users and is the fastest-growing smartphone market in the world.
“The thing that works for him is that everyone thinks of him as an entrepreneur first at LinkedIn,” says Gupta. “When you are working on 10 different things across sales, products, and engineering, your strength as an entrepreneur shows.”
Still, for Kothari, it won’t be easy. First, the proof of the pudding lies in how the marketplace reacts to what LinkedIn is putting out. The Indian market not only has a new breed of human resources startups helping companies hire but also is very competitive in the entry-level hiring market. Poor data connectivity, multiplicity of languages, and the cost-sensitive nature of the market will be additional hurdles in LinkedIn’s and Kothari’s paths.
Gautam Ghosh, one of the earliest users of LinkedIn India (worldwide membership no. 18,770, on LinkedIn since 2003) and a human resources consultant, says one of the biggest challenges LinkedIn will have is to break the perception that it is an expensive job board. “If they have to expand to the Marwadi business world, they have to show real value. Most traditional Indian firms haven’t really sourced people online. Teaching them is also a steep learning curve,” he says.
The other big challenge is the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft in 2016. Microsoft has said that LinkedIn will run as an independent operation but corporate history has enough examples of even the best intentions in similar acquisitions going terribly wrong. A Microsoft old timer brings a sound perspective to Kothari’s and LinkedIn India’s situation.
“The problem is the mentality that product management is done in the headquarters and code is done in India. They have to realize that not all smart people are at the headquarters,” says Ravi Venkatesan, former Microsoft India chairman, pointing out that Amazon and GE that have been innovative in India. “Typically, Microsoft doesn’t believe in local innovation. But they’ve promised to leave LinkedIn alone. So, let’s hope they do that.” Kothari will be hoping so, too.
Jayadevan PK is cofounder of FactorDaily, a technology news site based in India. A version of this story was originally published at factordaily.com.