Meet Ajeet Singh, Muzaffarnagar-born IIT Kanpur alumnus who built two companies worth $10 billion in Silicon Valley

An IIT-Kanpur engineer, born into a family of farmers from Western UP, created two unicorns. One of the companies he created saw one of the biggest tech IPOs in NASDAQ in 2016. Ajeet Singh went on to create two billion-dollar companies, cloud computing company Nutanix that is worth over $6 billion and ThoughtSpot, a technology company that produces business intelligence analytics, worth over $4 billion. 

In a podcast with Myntra and Cult.Fit founder Mukesh Bansal, called ‘SparX by Mukesh Bansal’, Singh spoke about the days ahead of founding the billion dollar companies. He said he never imagined he would foray into the world of business. “I come from a family of farmers, my grandparents were farmers in Western UP. My dad was a research scientist in the Department of Agriculture and he was a chemist, so I grew up all over UP,” he said, adding that the visits to his father’s labs had a lasting impression on him. Singh was eventually the topper in Chemical Engineering in IIT-Kanpur.  

“Some of the things that had a big impact in shaping me was that in the early days, my dad would take me to his research lab and we would do simple things like titration. I would get so excited in mixing two things that would mix colour. Going to his labs left a lasting impression on me,” said Singh. He went to IIT-Kanpur, and was in the same batch as Mukesh Bansal. Singh also completed his MBA from Kolkata, and moved on to work in Bengaluru for 6 years. After that he went to the US. 

“I never imagined that I would end up doing business because my family is farmers, scientists and that sort of thing. My brother was the first engineer in the family,” said Singh. 

After he completed his MBA, Singh went to do management consulting but said he hated it. “I felt like I was just creating powerpoints and telling others how to run a business but I am only out of school and have no experience of anything. I then left it quickly and came to Bangalore to join a company called i2 Technologies that was in supply chain planning software and it had the highest concentration of really smart people I have ever worked with. I have learnt so much from them and they kept me on my toes. So now when I recruit people, I try to see if they have been inside a high-quality environment, it does not matter what role. But once you have seen excellence, it kind of sets the bar for you,” he explained. 

After three years at i2, Singh joined Honeywell that presented an opportunity to build something new. “I went to the US with Honeywell and once the product was ready to be launched and I didn’t want to stay in a very large organisation for very long. I wanted to be closer to technologies, and went to Oracle. And once I was in the Bay Area, I thought I really can’t be here and not work for startups. So then I joined a startup,” said Singh.

Ajeet Singh explained that every employee, early on in their career, should focus on maximising learning and getting to know good people.

Singh said that Nutanix has had a big team in Bengaluru for a while, but so does ThoughtSpot now. They have 400 employees globally in R&D, out of which 300 are in India. “In India we have three locations now – Bengaluru, where we started,” said Singh. It also has its presence in Hyderabad and Thiruvananthapuram. 

Ajeet Singh explained that they don’t have a headquarters culture in ThoughtSpot. “We have a no-HQ culture. I hated the HQ term,” he said, explaining that it gives a false impression that all the important work is concentrated at the headquarters. 

He said, borrowing from the learnings he has had, he is very picky about the people he works with, including co-founders, investors as well as team members.

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