Rohan Murty, son of Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murthy, spoke to Business Today about his venture Soroco and how the firm has "invented DNA sequencing but for office work".
In an exclusive interview with Business Today's global business editor Udayan Mukherjee, he explained how Soroco works, "What we recognise is that if you want to bring about a rigorous way of understanding and improving office work then we should focus on the parts of office work that employees do not have any control over and yet are subjected to. If you can gather data about this then management can use this to figure are how they can help their people and their teams be have a better experience at work and the end result being be more productive at work."
Murty, a computer scientist-turned-entrepreneur, said Soroco's data-based software is all about using technology to improve office output.
"We are saying that in the white collar world you don't have a direct relationship between how much effort or time you spent on an activity and the outcome you produce. You can't just say oh you spent five hours on Outlook therefore you send lots of emails, no that doesn't work. Instead, the big leap that we have made is is to take the same kind of information and to produce a map or a set of sequences that will tell you if I have 50 different people in my team are they doing work one way or are they doing it 500 different ways. So, we therefore produce these sequences you can sort of think of it like DNA sequencing what we have done is we've invented DNA sequencing but for office work and it's very powerful because it starts to tell you about variations in how we work."
He also said that the main source of influence in his life is his father. However, later in his 30s, he realised that he has imbibed other aspects of his life from his mother (famous writer Sudha Murthy).
“My mother’s eternal sense of optimism and incredible ability to reinvent herself and her ability to always to find a solution for any problem should be greatly applauded,” he added.
On being asked about his brother-in-law Rishi Sunak becoming UK’s Prime Minister, he said, “ We are not a family that understands politics. He is breaking new ground in an extended sense and we therefore wish him well.”
He also answered whether his father would be disappointed to see him as a technology entrepreneur. He admitted his father would have liked to see him as an Ivy League professor.
“I think my dad’s unfulfilled ambitions for his own life was that he had been admitted to the PhD programme in Computer Science but his father passed away and then he had to take up a job to send money to his family. So in some sense, I achieved some part of his hope and desire and he thought that I would continue to do that only. But I am not suggesting that I disappointed him otherwise, but it certainly matters.”
With offices in Boston, London and Bengaluru, Soroco works with a range of Fortune 500 companies across the globe. Murty also owns 1.45 per cent stake in Infosys.