[Techie Tuesday] Meet STS Prasad who constructed databases and algorithms for Amazon and Walmart Labs and now heads engineering at Freshworks

Posted On Oct 28, 2019 By admin With Comments Off

Knowledge, they say, is strength. And 55 -year-old STS Prasad, the SVP of Engineering at business application companionship Freshworks, is a firm believer.

He may look like a philosopher with penetrating introspective attentions and a cherubic disposition, but Prasad believes that there’s only one truth to engineering.

” Get your basic maths and reasoning right. Then you can apply any engineering communication for any given problem evidence with ordeal and practise ,” he says. STS Prasad

STS Prasad, SVP of Engineering at Freshworks

Prasad, who graduated from IIT-Madras and went on to work with HCL, Junglee, and Amazon, am of the view that” practice and persistence alone can make an individual successful “.

YourStory caught up with him at Refresh 19, the flagship event of Freshworks, in Las Vegas, US, recently, where he talked about his passage and his successful tryst with technology.

The journey to IIT

Prasad’s storey isn’t limited to one municipality; his childhood was expended chugging across India as his father is an engineer in Indian Railways.

Born to a family into bibles and literature, Prasad was prepped with a broader view of the world at home. In the late 70 s, he was completely drawn to mathematics. He cleared his Class 12 quiz in 1982 from Rishi Valley School in Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh, cracked the IIT entrance, and took the set to Chennai( then Madras ).

He recalls that there was ” no mad rush” for IITs back then and the” computer science stream was the least in demand “. It was clearly not the pecking order of things in post-independent, pre-liberalisation India. It was a time when chemical engineering and mechanical engineering were the most preferred subjects, and computer science was only available to graduate students.

Prasad’s batch was one of the first to take up the computer science programme in 1982. The computer science undergraduate program became formally available to students at IIT-Madras from 1983. Lingos like C and Fortran were learnt, and only students who could afford access to computers could learn Applesoft Basic.

” Back then , no one had access to computers. But I was fascinated by the fact that they are able to programme machines to do human undertaking ,” he says.

After graduating from IIT-Madras, Prasad flew to the US to study at stormy Wisconsin. He ended his MSc in computer science, graduating in 1988.

” I was just blown away with the show; so many programming languages and new technologies. Those dates, database technologies were going through a revolution and the world was just waking up to the power of data. Corporations were spending a lot of time and effort creating their own databases ,” Prasad says.

The common delusion is that databases are easy to build. But back then, designing and implementing them took a lot of time. Relational database modelings- where data was stored under rows and pieces – began to take precedence over hierarchical and system database models.

Returning to his roots

Back then, “it wouldve been” common had Prasad been one of IITians who left the country for good. But he returned to India immediately after his master’s to work for one of India’s premier IT corporation, HCL.

Prasad says he was married then, and he and his wife wanted to do something in India. Landing a job was easy as the fledgling IT firms of India were more than eager to hire someone with a master’s degree. Prasad determined a lieu in HCL, and his job description was akin to a long-term science project.

In those eras, the likes of Infosys, Wipro, and HCL were constructing application concoctions.

At HCL, Prasad and his unit had to build a relational database from floors up. HCL called the project ” Genesis” and improved the entire operating system on Unix. For the next eight years, he was a technical individual writer and also premised lead capacities in database storage, indexing, deal processing, and inquiry optimisation organisations. While at HCL, which also had a tie-up with Sybase, he began to hone his sciences in Sql engineering, a database language.

From a startup to Amazon

In 1996, life made another turn when Prasad hastened back to Sunnyvale, California, to work with the Founders of Junglee.com, Venky Harinarayan, Ashish Gupta, Anand Rajaraman, and Rakesh Mathur. His work has been noticed by several in the IT world, and Venky and Anand, his juniors at IIT-Madras, roped him in become members of the tech squad.

”There, I improved a organized virtual database by creeping information from the early web. It was like an early search engine for job descriptions that morphed into concoction research on the internet ,” Prasad says.

The power of those algorithms conducted Junglee to be acquired by Amazon in 1998.

In the two years he spent at Junglee, he architected and developed the Junglee Shopping Guide, an application of web data aggregation engineering in retail ecommerce. The Junglee Shopping Guide powered the store assistances of Yahoo! and other heading entrances, prior to the acquisition of Junglee by Amazon.com.

At Amazon, he was an architect and technical lead for the Amazon Marketplace where third-party sellers sold exerted and new volumes, CDs, and other makes through Amazon.com.

This led to the development of Amazon.com& apos; s Universal Product Finder, a thorough browse navigate of over one million products from over 1,000 shopkeepers. Junglee& apos; s web data aggregation engineering was enhanced to improve scalability of agent creation and reliability of agent execution, which mostly means processing data against a decision located. Think of it like a probe query executed to several results and recommendations.

Life seemed named for Prasad, but then he caught that biggest of infections from Silicon Valley, a certain bug announced& apos; entrepreneurship& apos ;. He felt that” hazard taking abruptly becomes a necessity, peculiarly when one is gave with ordeal and knowledge “.

STS Prasad

Bitten by the startup imperfection

By 2001, Silicon Valley was watching the early dotcom success fizzle out and the bubble had embed countless an financier. Swimming against the tide was Prasad, who co-founded Aventeon, an enterprise mobile solutions produce that allowed porting data from ERP lotions to mobile phones.

This solution gained in power when his unit constructed an access organisation between a bequest its implementation and a portable manoeuvre.” We exercised GPRS and WAP to cache enterprise data and it was engineering that was ahead of its time ,” Prasad says.

Aventeon germinated organically and went on to raise money in 2004 from 3i, Intel Capital, and TVM. The product was used in the logistics industry and Prasad spend meter shuffling between the US( Seattle ), India, and Europe to build the product and flake the company. In 2005, he decided that it was time to move on and left his startup.

Prasad, who had by then surmounted databases, data collection, and caching data for mobile lotions, met himself to become involved in another startup, Kosmix.

He extended the development of the Muppet( mupd8) real-time river analytics platform and composed the foundation for the Tweetbeat product, seeing occurrences from social media creeks. At Kosmix, he again worked for one of Junglee’s Founders, Anand Rajaraman.

Kosmix allowed businesses to categorise the internet into topic pages and appointed personal dashboards for customers. The busines was eventually acquired by Walmart in 2011 in a multi-million-dollar deal and became what is today known as Walmart Labs. As VP of Engineering in that company, Prasad scaled the business from 100 members of parliament to over 2,000 members.

His advice to young people is that it is imperative to learn new developments in existing engineering and that one can adapt to any programming language. He had built Genesis on C, Junglee and Aventeon on Perl, and at Amazon he had to work with Java. He most recommends Python and GoLang for automation.

The move to Freshworks

By then, Prasad had devoted 20 years in the US and was keen to return to India. An introduction to Girish Mathrubootham, the Co-founder of Freshworks, conducted him to a brand-new call.

Today, he is responsible for technology development and administering infrastructure enhancements to support the growing customer base of Freshworks, which is a bonafide Unicorn with 35,000 compensating customers and a purchaser base of 250,000 businesses. He has 300 designers submit reports to him.

” Today, I have blended my expertise in business and technology. I understand what the customers want and set myself in their shoes ,” Prasad says.

He remains extremely focused on ensuring that the Freshworks platform aces the user experience.” Technology is strong and it should be able to identify what difficulties can I solve ,” says Prasad, a conglomerate devotee in the fact that tradition and hard work trump talent.

That said, he ascribes his success to his wife, Sharanya, and his four sons who have seen their father build one business after the other.

Prasad’s occupation stands witnes given the fact that once the basics are in place, you are unable to climb from infrastructure technology and databases to mobile applications, data science, and automation.

What’s next? Artificial intellect, for sure. However, Prasad alerts parties” not to be artificial about their knowledge” and” realize your foundation solid “.

( Edited by Teja Lele Desai)

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