E-Paper
Alumni Connect: ‘PICT College taught me how to approach a new technology’
Milind Borate says he has always been ambitious about pursuing a career in the field of engineering
Milind Borate is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Druva, cloud data protection and management company. Born and raised in Pune, he has always been ambitious about pursuing a career in the field of engineering. He talks about his alma mater and how it shaped his career and life.
Tell us about your educational background.
I did my schooling in Bhave High School, Pune and later joined Government Polytechnic in Pune. I have an computer science engineering degree from Pune Institute of Computer Technology and master of technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
I was always a back bencher. I was good at courses that I liked and did not bother spending time about courses that I did not like much.
What made you choose this career path?
I wanted to pursue an engineering career, right from the beginning. Computer Sciences was just getting introduced in India then. The idea of ‘a universal machine that can perform any task with the right software program” fascinated me. I was fortunate to have some really good teachers in college, and throughout my professional career.
About stepping into corporate world...
After graduation, I joined Persistent Systems after which I joined a US-based startup Advanced Computing Systems Company (ACSC) . During my stint in ACSC, I got a chance to work on Windows NT.
How did your college help you in achieving your goals
College opens up the doors to different technology areas. For me, Pune Institute of Computer Technology college was about understanding the fundamentals of computer science, introduction to the different facets of Computer Science and then an opportunity to dive deeper into systems programming. Computer technology moves at a very fast pace and there has to be continuous learning. College taught me how to approach a new technologyand how to apply it to solve real problems.
I learned a lot about storage system architecture from industry veterans in ACSC and then, Veritas. During our brainstorming sessions, we identified disaster recovery (DR) as a critical problem that was solved only in large enterprises and we started working on a simpler and more affordable solution to democratise DR. That’s how Druva was born.
What about the highs and lows of your career so far?
There are two parts to the journey of realizing your dream. In the first part, you invest time and effort that will give you returns in future. In the second part, you get the returns on your past investment. It is the first part where you grow as a professional and as a person. Early days of Druva was a lot of effort and not much in return. But even today, when Druva has reached a reasonable level of success, the fun part is all about putting in effort to make it even bigger in the future.
