SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — Ernst and Young this week named 24 Northern California regional finalists for its 30th annual Entrepreneur of the Year award, of which three Indian-Americans received nominations.
Manish Chandra founder and CEO of the app-based fashion marketplace, Poshmark; Jyoti Bansal founder, executive chairman and chief strategist of AppDynamics and Vivek Ravisankar, co-founder and CEO of HackerRank, represent the South Asian’s on the ballot.
Chandra received his bachelor’s in computer science from IIT Kanpur, master’s in computer science from University of Texas, Austin, and his MBA in marketing and finance from University of California, Berkeley. His resume is vast, and lists positions at such companies as Intel, Sybase Corp., Versata Corp. and Versant Corporation. In 2005, he founded Kaboodle, a social shopping community where users discover, recommend and share products. He served as CEO of Kaboodle until 2011, when he shifted all of his attention towards Poshmark.
Jyoti Bansal
Bansal founded AppDynamics in 2008, and served as the company’s CEO until last year before charging another with the duties. A graduate of IIT Delhi, he previously spent time in engineering roles with Silicon Valley startups such as Wily Technology, Datasweep and netLens.
Ravisankar co-founded HackerRank with Hari Karunanidhi in 2012, and previously worked as a software development engineer based in Chennai for Amazon.com. The National Institute of Technology graduate followed up that by founding Bangalore-based Interviewstreet, where he remained until his current project. HackerRank carries a large portfolio with some of Silicon Valley’s largest companies, including the likes of Facebook, Zynga, Walmart and his former employer, Amazon.
Vivek Ravisankar
According to Ernst and Young, the 24 companies selected as regional finalists nearly doubled their workforces over the last two years, and saw a combined revenue growth of 160 percent from just shy of $1.9 billion to nearly $5 billion over the same timeframe.
