About Amit Ranjan
Amit is best known as the co-founder of Slideshare, the world’s largest community for sharing professional content including presentations, infographics, documents, and videos. In 2012, Slideshare was acquired by LinkedIn and as of 2020, it has been acquired by Scribd.
He is also an Angel Investor and Advisor to several early stage startups in India, Singapore and the United States such as Open, Tracxn and Khatabook, among many others.
Amit is currently the Architect of two projects under the Digital India Mission at the National eGov Division, Ministry of Information Technology. These Projects are:
- Digital Locker: A national ecosystem for paperless governance by digitizing citizen records and enabling digital usage of these records.
- Open Forge: An open source initiative aimed at building a national source code sharing platform for collaborative development of eGov applications.
Amit holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from NIT Jaipur and an MBA in Marketing from the University of Delhi.
Listen to the Episode
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Selected Links & Show Notes
Selected Links
- Connect with Amit
- How India can birth software product giants
- Rise of a new tribe of angel investors
- What It Will Take to Create the Next Great Silicon Valleys, Plural
- SlideShare
- Digital Government Initiative
- India Stack
- Digital Locker Project
- Open Forge
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Product Virality
- Hunter S. Thompson
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Ernest Hemingway
- Picasso
- iSPIRT
- NASSCOM
- Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)
- Nandan Nilekani
- National Informatics Center
- DAOs
- Cryptocurrencies
- The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Books Recommended by Amit
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari
- Rafa: My Story – Rafael Nadal (with John Carlin)
Show Notes
On the difference between Project Thinking and Product Thinking (03:36 – 10:12)
On India becoming a Core Platform and Infrastructure Powerhouse (11:02 – 13:19)
Building an Ecosystem that connects Research, Academia, and Industry (14:17 – 16:11)
Why technology isn’t enough to build a great company (16:45 – 22:12)
Core Skillset needed to build the Great Indian Product Company (23:05 – 26:03)
Amit’s journey to becoming a self-taught Product Manager (26:37 – 32:18)
Moving out of a 1-to-N mindset and into a 0-to-1 mindset (33:28 – 37:16)
On why imitation isn’t as bad as people make it to be (38:10 – 38:43)
On Product Management Frameworks and the PM Stack of Skills (39:30 – 42:03)
Transitioning from Startups to the Government (43:03 – 50:15)
On the difference between a Digitized Nation and the Digital Nation (51:04 – 57:01)
Building and Scaling Projects out of Ambiguity and no previous data (57:52 – 01:06:15)
How to drive conversations and collaboration between technologists and public policy experts (01:17:18 – 01:10:38)
On Venture Capital versus Patient Capital (01:12:00 – 0:16:32)
On the difference between VCs with Operating Experience versus VCs without Operating Experience (01:17:41 – 01:20:36)
What ‘Successful’ means to Amit (01:20:50 – 01:21:32)
Books that have influenced Amit (01:21:38 – 01:23:08)
The best piece of advice received by Amit (01:23:17 – 01:24:31)
Amit’s Dream Dinner (01:24:40 – 01:25:15)
Advice Amit would give an 18-year old today (01:25:21 – 01:27:32)
What is something Amit believes in that nobody agrees with him on (01:27:37 – 01:28:06)
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