We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Aveneel Waadhwa. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Aveneel below.

Aveneel, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

My life motto is ‘To live is to risk it all.’ I wake up every day to this label on my alarm and I think about this statement before making any decision, big or small, in my life. Someone once said that the biggest risk in life is to not take one, and I could not agree more with that statement.

In high school, I was at a crossroads: should I apply to a college in the United States or should I stay in India and go to a college there? Everyone in my family encouraged me to stay in India to help develop the economy there, prevent brain drain, and be a part of the education system there. This reasoning seemed compelling, but I had different plans: I always wanted to be at a university to explore my varied interests, and more importantly, be a part of Silicon Valley and the tech industry in the US. My dream school was Berkeley. After I made the decision that I was going to apply to colleges in the US, I had about one year to take the standardized tests, develop my extracurriculars, and apply to colleges. My mom would have allowed me to leave my home country on one condition: if I made it to one of the top colleges in the US. I had my sights set on Berkeley and on March 30, 2017, all my dreams came true when I received my acceptance letter at 4 AM India time.

Life has never been the same since that moment. If I hadn’t gone to Berkeley, I wouldn’t have met the amazing people who set me out on the path that I find myself on today. I wouldn’t have discovered Data Science, I wouldn’t have discovered Product Management, I wouldn’t have discovered the startup school in Portugal that made me want to be an entrepreneur, I wouldn’t have gotten that job at Microsoft, and the list goes on. Moving to a new country as a teenager is a daunting and scary task, but also a masterclass in character development and risk-taking.

Can you imagine your life had you not taken that one risk? I can’t either.

Aveneel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a Product Manager based in New York City. I grew up in New Delhi, India, and then moved to the US at the age of 18 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where I double majored in Data Science and Economics. I have worked at Microsoft for three years as a Product Manager and at three different startups as a product manager intern during college. I currently work on artificial intelligence products at Microsoft, where I have made a great impact by helping the company save millions of dollars to accelerate innovation.

I like to give back too. I am the co-founder of the Aspiring Product Manager, a non-profit organization that aims to help up-and-coming, aspiring product managers break into the tech industry by providing mentorship, guidance, and feedback on the job application process.

I am an aspiring entrepreneur and am working towards starting my own company in the next few years. I frequently host coffee events on Saturdays to connect with my friends in New York City to build community. These events are called ‘Customs’ and I hope to expand them to be public events in the future. I am an avid traveler who has visited 43 countries, am a big cinephile, and also a big soccer fan.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is a book by the American entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel and is a classic book to read for any aspiring entrepreneur. The book lays out the blueprint for someone to go from 0 to 1 ie to go from nothing to something and outlines the successful examples from Silicon Valley along the way. An essential read for a product manager, an entrepreneur, or any creative at the starting point of their journey.

Another resource that has helped me a lot is Y Combinator’s founder Paul Graham’s essays. Specifically the essay “Do things that don’t scale” taught me the importance of catering to your first customers and being able to address all of their pain points, something that you cannot do when a company is big. I am always thinking about the big picture and want to scale up as fast as possible, but it is imperative in the early stages of any product or venture to think small and successfully onboard early customers and make them happy before focusing on exponential growth, which will come as a butterfly effect of this customer obsession.

Probably my favorite book of all time is Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I have read this book thrice and every time I am captivated by Steve Jobs’ journey, his eye for products, and his magic of thinking big. He did not have a technical background or degree, but he was creative and bold and lived each day intentionally. His journey has impacted my life and work philosophy more than anyone else.

Books focusing on social psychology are also very important to me in understanding how people think and how they would react to certain products and features. Freakonomics and the subsequent books in the series are some of my favorites for this. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers also comes to mind when I think of books that made a massive impact. ‘The Magic of Thinking Big’ by David J. Schwartz is a great read as well for any entrepreneur or creative who wants to think big.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I finished my senior year of college during the global pandemic, which was also the time when I was interviewing with different companies for a full-time Product Manager job to join after I graduated from Berkeley. I always thought I would join a startup since I had interned at three of them during college, but instead, I ended up joining Microsoft, the complete opposite of a startup.

I decided to make this pivot after struggling in a very poor job market where startups and other companies were laying off employees in the face of an impending recession due to the pandemic. I witnessed job offers being rescinded and interviews being canceled as the tech industry braced for impact. I also accepted the fact that it would be nice to have a big company on my resume and it would be extremely beneficial to learn the inner workings of one of the most successful companies of all time. And that is what I did as I joined Microsoft right before the AI wave it was going to experience.

My experience at Microsoft taught me how to navigate within a big company, how to ideate and execute on launching products, and how to cross-collaborate with multiple teams and team members with different job functions. The amount of competent and smart people with a portfolio of successful products launched is unparalleled to Microsoft and it was a pleasure working alongside these folks to develop and mentor me as a product manager, which resulted in massive growth for both my professional and personal life. This pivot impacted my early and mid-20s, some of the most pivotal years of my life, and made me who I am in a certain way. For that, I am strangely grateful to the pandemic and the struggled that it brought upon us.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://aveneel.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aveneel
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aveneel/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/AveneelW

Image Credits

https://www.ceoportrait.com/ (CEO Portrait NYC)