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Alumni Connect: My alma mater (College of Engineering Pune) helped open opportunities
Vinod Parmar is the head sales and marketing at Vayana Network, a fintech startup, platform in the supply chain
Vinod Parmar is the head sales and marketing at Vayana Network, a fintech startup, platform in the supply chain. An alumnus of the College of Engineering Pune (COEP), he shares his journey as a passionate sales and marketing professional and how his alma mater helped open door of opportunities.
The school/college you call alma mater is...
I did my schooling from Jnana Prabodhini and completed junior college from St Vincent’s. Then I opted for BE Mechanical and completed it in 2000. The city has been blessed with an active manufacturing and industrial culture and so mechanical engineering was a natural choice. Post which I completed management education from IIM Bangalore. I would say an above-average student. Since the school years, we were encouraged to participate in a lot of extracurricular activities; fortunately, I also managed to do well in key academic milestones.
Why management studies in particular?
I was always fascinated by the business world and the opportunities it provides to create something meaningful and scalable. Our engineering projects led us to factory shopfloors at large companies and I was impressed with the machines and growing automation, but what intrigued me more was the scale at which these companies operated and the sharp business minds behind them. That’s when I decided to pursue management education. COEP and IIMB are iconic institutions and we were lucky to have teachers and professors who got us thinking on any problem with first principles. A first principle is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” Friends also played a vital role in shaping my mindset.
Climbing the corporate ladder, what were the key steps?
I began my professional career in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) space as a management trainee with Colgate Palmolive. Soon after I moved into the banking space with ICICI Bank. This experience led me to my first entrepreneurial venture in the form of a boutique advisory firm helping small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by creating cross-border joint ventures and strategic alliances. The entrepreneurial bug finally brought me back to hometown Pune to join the team at Vayana on our journey to democratize access to finance for the smallest of SMEs in the country. COEP days were quite relaxed then. Bunking a few theoretical classes was not uncommon, and some of the subjects were discovered only during the study leaves.
And then the startup bug bit?
Post my management education, I was always keen on staying back and working in India. I loved meeting new people and talking to them to understand their business situations and stories, which probably shaped my entrepreneurial and sales oriented choices throughout.
Highs and lows of your career so far?
Building any new business is a brick-by-brick process and one has to go through the learning curve and fair share of challenges. It needs grit and hard work, an ability to identify mistakes and then doing course corrections. Above all, you need an awesome team to turn these dreams to reality. As they say, the biggest risk is of never trying.
From here, to...?
Our journey to make Vayana a global trade financing network of choice has just started, we have miles to go. In my personal capacity, I hope to connect back with my alma mater and contribute in any way possible. I would love to share my network and learnings to mentor younger entrepreneurs.
