Amit Ranjan on

The Source Code for Building World-Class Products

Business, Product Development

January 10, 2022

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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.

This Episode is also available on: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Anchor.FM

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

Companies / Institutions Mentioned

SlideShare

Digital Government Initiative

Digital Locker Project

Human-Computer Interaction

Product Virality

Hunter S. Thompson

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ernest Hemingway

iSPIRT

NASSCOM

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)

Nandan Nilekani

National Informatics Center

Cryptocurrencies

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Books / Show Mentioned

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari

Buy the Paperback Version

Buy the Kindle Version

Rafa: My Story – Rafael Nadal (with John Carlin)

Buy the Paperback Version

Buy the Kindle Version

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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