Frankly Speaking with Sandeep Jain - Founder of GeeksForGeeks

Written on January 14th, 2023 by {"login"=>"jcbphc21", "email"=>"f20181005@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in", "display_name"=>"Journal Club, BPHC", "first_name"=>"Journal Club", "last_name"=>"BPHC"}

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• GeeksforGeeks, as a name, stays with the user right from the first interaction. How did you come up with this name?

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In our time, we used to use Orkut. I had a friend from IIT Kharagpur, whose Orkut handle was Geekforyou. The name stood out in my friend list and was very appealing to me. That made me pick the GeeksforGeeks.

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• Being from an IIT yourself, with a severely competitive and challenging environment, how would you advise the students to keep up with the increasing pressure?

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For the students, I have always said, don’t compare yourself with others. Everyone has a different learning curve and if you keep improving yourself, with a set goal in mind, whether it be placement, or entrepreneurship, you will definitely succeed. What happens is, we look at our friends excelling at, say, codeforces, or getting a very high CGPA, and start thinking “Mera to kuch nahi hoga”; even I felt this way - my roommate was great at academics, and had a very good rank in the university, and I always felt if there are people like him, what would become of my career goals! But in the end it turned out well, you just need to keep improving and working towards your goals.

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• In your past interviews, you have talked about not having easy access to CS resources - so how was it in your college life? How did you prepare in your time?

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In my time, of course there was no platform like GeeksforGeeks, neither any other online platforms, and not even YouTube was that popular. When the companies were about to start coming in, we started preparing for our placements. I remember during my B.Tech, and then M.Tech from IIT Roorkee, I only realised two months before the placements were about to begin, that it was the DSA and problem solving parts that would help me secure a job. These days, students have an idea right from their first year on what to study, and they should begin early as well.

I remember my placement days, I used to call my friends from other IITs; IIT Chennai me ek friend tha,  I called him and asked, “yaar tumhare yahan D.E. Shaw aayi thi, unhone kaun se questions pooche the, kis type ke questions pooche the?”. So when D.E. Shaw was about to come to our campus, it was only then we used to start our preparation. Now it’s a fair and easy game for people.

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• As an IT professional turned entrepreneur, and a beloved teacher, what were some of the challenges you faced along the way, and how did you overcome them?

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I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. My plan to become a teacher, and I joined an engineering college as well. That was my offline teaching journey, but teaching in a college involves things other than just teaching, as well as students who are there not from their own interest, but because of their parents. It was challenging, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. If I compare it with my Software (sector) journey, I was never a really good employee, but was a much better teacher.

An entrepreneurship journey is, well, always challenging. It's like a treadmill- the speed goes on increasing, and you need to keep running faster to keep up. There are different kinds of challenges at different stages - as a beginner, it’s difficult to build a team to join you, because you will not have much money to start with, and then when you grow, you will have to align your vision and manage a lot of people. Financing and generating revenue becomes a major challenge when your company size increases.

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• How was your experience in the IT industry, and when were you really sure that you were ready to move ahead into teaching, and entrepreneurship?

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When you join a company, it’s like your honeymoon period. For the first 6 months you really enjoy it; you get a very high salary, you avail all the perks from your company, and start buying gifts for your friends and family. These top product based companies won’t even give you much work for the first 6 months, they’ll train you, assign you small tasks, jaise yeh vala bug fix kardo. After 6 months you start getting some real work, and if you are not into it, you realise it is not your cup of tea. I started feeling the same way, I felt I only joined because of the lucrative salary, and then started applying for teaching jobs. But teaching jobs don’t pay you highly, most offered half or a third of the previous salary. Although I did learn a lot from my software company (DE Shaw), as an engineering student you don’t even know how to name your variables correctly. It was a learning experience that helped me later.

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• So would you say an industry exposure, like in IT, helps you in building your own company?

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In my opinion, if you really want to dive into entrepreneurship, don't go for a big company. In my company, I only learnt the coding part, and was only a part of a bigger software team. I wasn’t interacting with other teams such as sales, marketing, HR. Our manager used to talk to people in the US and give us tasks to work on. But if you work in a Startup, that’s where you learn how everything else works. Startups have small teams, and everyone is on the same floor. You get to learn how the sales, HR, even hiring process works. It’s a close environment. So I would always suggest first working in a Startup if you want to pursue entrepreneurship.

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• What are your opinions on platforms that promote and promise teaching coding to primary school children? Is it efficient, or should it be practised?

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Teaching primary school kids to code is too early, they should be at least in 6th or 7th standards when they are introduced to coding. They should not be pushed towards it. Maybe young kids can learn basic logic, puzzle solving or basic maths. But I strongly believe that down the line, students will begin to learn to code right from an early age. There are school students I’ve seen who are data scientists or working as software developers. An engineering degree teaches you a lot of courses, but only a select few are required in our work, so I feel in the future, children can learn them themselves, prior to pursuing a degree. So there is a good side to it as well.

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• GeekforGeeks started off as a startup, but now has an extensive team, revenue, and consumer base. How has your experience been?

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I have been working with and building GeeksforGeeks for 14 years now, and that's a long period. There have been many entrepreneurs who started late and built a bigger company, and many that started early and couldn't. Something we believe in is that we should be improving our product consistently by talking to our students and the software developers directly, who are our actual consumers. We never raised any funding, so we're a completely bootstrap company and we've enjoyed it a lot, because it gives you a lot of power as a bootstrap company to pivot in any direction and take big decisions and act on them very quickly. So it's been a long time, and as a person, I have never been the brightest or smartest, but I believe in the theory that if you keep working on something for a long time, you definitely get success. A long awaited success is more cherished than an early attained success, so the journey has been really nice.

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• Any advice for budding entrepreneurs?

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You'll feel this guy is now 40 plus, has made a lot of money, it's easy to give a lot of gyaan, but there are certain things that you guys, as students, have in your prime age that founders of companies don't. We can't spend entire nights working on ideas. You have a lot of time. People in larger companies typically don't have time to build something new. They're already working on something and they'll have to align everyone together to make any changes. If you're a beginner entrepreneur, with a small number of customers, and you keep taking their feedback and pivot from time to time according to their reviews, you can spend a couple nights with your team working on it and create some magic. I would always suggest building an end to end product in the early stage, and having limited customers, and pivot and change to make it perfect using the time and energy that you have.

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• There is so much competition in the field of CS today. Any advice that would make things clear for them?

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Make yourself employable as soon as possible. Make getting a job your first priority. Begin from the first year itself, most of you guys know what . Begin from the first semester, get done by the end of second year. You can test out your preparation yourself too, go through questions and see if you have the problem solving skills. Earlier you reach the stage, the better it is for the rest of your engineering. You can follow your passion, follow any form of tech, or do what you feel like.

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• Best college memory?

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Getting placed ofcourse! It was the third or fourth company to come to our campus that I got into. Coming from a lower middle class family, it was a very good moment.

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• Best memory as a teacher?

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Hard to think of one in particular, but when I was teaching offline, there was a batch of 128 students and I remember teaching without a mic and all of them used to listen very keenly. I taught them for a few semesters consecutively, and I really enjoyed teaching that batch. That gave me a lot of confidence as a teacher.

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