#FeatureFriday with Aditi Sinha
BITS Goa Women in Tech interviewed Aditi Sinha, a 2018 graduate from BITS Pilani, who majored in Economics and Finance. She has since worked with various organizations, including Social Cops, YES FOUNDATION and Hyperloop
In 2019, she co-founded Locale.ai, a start-up which uses the location data companies collect and give them insights to analyze and optimize their ground operations.
How was your life at BITS? What were the obstacles that you faced in college?
At BITS, I decided to not go for any dual degree with my Economics major. As a result, I had a lot of free time at hand that I used to discover my interests. I joined clubs on campus and also took up projects with organizations like J-PAL at MIT, Vision India Foundation. I authored research papers in Economics that got published in international journals. Working with clubs also taught me skills that came handy later. “Sponz” taught me how to convince people to give you money, TEDx taught me how to manage people. My research experience helped me get my first job out of college. My time at BITS shaped me as a person and helped me realize my passion. There were definitely obstacles on the way. My decision to not opt for a dual degree and then later on to not sit for placements wasn’t taken well by friends, teachers as well as my parents. But, I believed in what I was doing and that made all the difference.
How did you decide on a career path?
At the time of my graduation, I knew two things. I was passionate about impact at scale and I loved working on challenging problems in a startup-like environment. So, upon graduation, I took up a job at a data consultancy startup called Social Cops (now Atlan). It was there that I met my now co-founder Rishabh Jain. He had been working on different location projects with governments, FMCGs, and startups. This is when we realized that companies are collecting a huge amount of location data and they just didn’t have the right tools to gain insights from that data. They had to build internal products that were extremely painful to use and couldn’t deliver business insights with the speed that was needed. So, we decided to take the plunge and work on this problem. Both of us left our jobs and moved to Bangalore to build something that would empower local teams to get the right insights from their geolocation data just in a matter of a few clicks
If you could go back and give your college-self a piece of advice, what would that be?
Well, I would push myself out of my comfort zone a little more and try out more new things. Because trust me, you really miss college once you graduate and start working. I would try to fail more and work with more startups in their core teams. I would explore many different things, but would like to narrow down and figure out what I am really good at and go deep into it.
Once you start working, you realize that you have to unlearn a lot of what you picked up during college. Failure is not as big a deal. You learn by doing things and by often failing at them as well. The fact that you can iterate, improve and get better with time is something so fundamental to professional life but our college psyche is modelled in a completely opposite way where every submission you do is final.
To know more about Locale.ai, do check out their website and their blogs.
