anWith a career that involves working for reputed firms across the country and even across the sea, in the United States, one might think that this might be satisfying enough but according to the man himself, it is not the reputation of the firm but the quality of the work that excites him. Challenging himself throughout his career, Sanjay Jain has seen his fair share of ups and downs, when the country was just getting acquainted with the idea of computers in 1991, he came back to Mumbai, after studying and working abroad for a long time, to start something of his own.
Pairing up with his colleague and friend, Rajesh Jain, their first idea for a business venture did not work, and Jain opted out of the second venture and pursue other opportunities. His interest in technology is inherent, as well as, nurtured. With his father working as a scientist himself, he was surrounded by technology all around him as a child.
“I grew up with a lot of science around me…and I did grow an interest in technology, computers, and so on, I did see some of it around me, plus I think, it worked out well that I did well at science,” Jain says.
Growing up in the early ’80s, Jain developed an avid interest in science fiction movies and stories, and like many in those days, also had an interest in computers. Apart from being a brilliant student, Jain also had a strong affinity for sports like basketball and stimulating games like chess.
To further cultivate his interest in computers & technology, he pursued a degree in computer science from IIT-Bombay in ‘83. Speaking about his experience there, Jain adds, “IIT-Bombay was great fun, It was the first time I was away from home, hostel life was a great difference, plus I was with peers who were all doing the same thing, so it was a great time to bond…It was a great learning experience, we got to be very hands-on with technology, we had faculty members with whom we interacted, and the campus was a great place to make friends and grow up,” Jain says.
After graduating from there in ‘87, he got the opportunity to finish his Master’s in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles. “UCLA was a different experience, I was away from home, and yeah, it was a different environment, lots of new things to see and learn, new friends to make…it was a different experience but I thoroughly enjoyed it,”
Immediately after finishing his Master’s, Jain managed to land his first job at Sun Microsystems in 1989 in the Bay Area, where he was part of a benchmark team that simulated Next-Gen CPUs that would help them predict their performances before they were ready.
After spending two years at his first firm, Jain came back to India to start something of his own. After the first attempt, he returned to the industry, choosing to consult for a project that had an edge to it, a technological challenge that would interest him.
He went back to the US during this time, where he joined a startup named Praja Inc., working alongside C.K. Prahlad and Ramesh Jain. Talking about his unique experience there, Jain adds, “We were doing very exciting stuff there with multiple sensors, looking at space, trying to make sense of it and that idea morphed around in many ways and we built, today what we call, analytics but back then, it was not called that,”
Jain moved to India with a small team from Praja, and during this process, the firm was acquired by TIBCO. Working there for 2 years as the Senior Architect, he sought a new challenge and lucky for him, this was around the time, Google made its footing in India, and in 2004, he joined the tech giant.
“…and Google was very young, when I first interviewed with them, they had just received their IPO and it was a very exciting place to work because almost anything you take would be able to impact a lot of people, I mean, the smallest of feature had millions of page inside,”
Having immense experience as an engineer, he joined the team as an engineer and initiated the Google Mapmaker project. He was instrumental in making the version that allowed the people to contribute to the map data.
Jain was appointed as the Product Manager where he was responsible for launching the Mapmaker itself. After putting on the Product Manager hat, he was able to help launch the Mapmaker that was able to make the maps for the entire developing world, putting 170 countries on the map through crowdsourced data.
After serving for a significant time at Google, Jain got the opportunity to work for the Government of India in 2010 on the Unique ID Authority project, today known as the Aadhaar, and became the Chief Product Officer.
“As the part of the government, I had to specify much of what Aadhaar was then and of course, it has evolved since then and helped get team, which was procured by the government, we helped them build it, deploy it, launch it, and go live, and I was there from the time of design phase till about 250 to 300 million IDs were issued,” Jain says.
Two years after joining, Jain believed he had achieved what he had set out to when joining the program and decided to make a shift in his career by returning to the private sector.
In 2012, he joined Khosla Labs where he was instrumental in setting up Novopay. During his time there, he was involved in a lot of conversations that helped develop various APIs such as the India stack, as it is known today, and also contributed to the design of the UPI, digital locker, and many more.
After leaving the Labs in 2017 for a new challenge, Jain joined EkStep, helping them through their platform strategy but it was at his current organization that he found his footing.
In 2018, he became a part of the CIIE.CO team as the Chief Innovation Officer and assisted in running the Bharat Inclusion Initiative.
“I play a mixed role, I am a bit of thought leader, bit of a VC, and a lot of my body of work is around inclusion, getting more and more people into the parts of society, and all of this work compliments each other,” Jain says.
Speaking on the challenges he has faced throughout his career, he says they range from technical to people management and even distance. “I think if you look at Google Maps if you are part of the Google India team and a lot of the maps development efforts were from the US, and to ensure that you can keep everybody in sync across these distances.”
Having to coordinate with the Google offices from around the world, and making sure the data entered was accurate was one of the biggest challenges that he faced in his career and also manages to showcase the plethora of challenges that one might face in his stature.
Even shifting from the private sector to working for the government was something of a challenge, “Aadhaar was not really about people (the scale of the project) as much, in terms of those challenges, I think, coming from the private sector, working inside the government, dealing with the government way of procuring, building, working with many stakeholders to make it a success, so the major part of it, the challenges had been more of the, making sure that you can keep everybody aligned towards the goal and making it happen,” Jain says.
Being a man of varied taste, it should come as no surprise that when he is not entangled in all things technology, he likes to spend his time in nature, clicking photos of the wildlife. Although the last year or so has severely impacted his trips, he is looking forward to going back to the wild. Stuck at home, he has turned to challenging games like Sudoku, which take the better part of his day, when not working.
Constantly, through his career, his motivations and efforts have been to impact and improve as many lives as possible, “I think, the last 10-12 years has been around this, to make sure that the work that I do is about finding technology and bringing it to the service of all of us, and to make the world a better place,” Jain says.
With many still wondering about the future, Jain has already planned it, “My plans are to, immediately, as soon as we can, get back to normalcy as quickly as possible, in terms of interaction startups, in terms of interaction with youngsters, new ideas, and those kinds of things, that would be the first set of things that I would want to do.”
