Nivruti Rai, Country Head, Intel India and VP Data Center Group, at Intel Corporation chats with Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners.

Nivruti is a global leader with 20+ years of technical and business leadership experience in the US and India. Varied roles across engineering & research, innovation, and organizational management. Focused on building strong teams and grooming leaders who can deliver on the global stage. Passionate about Indian technology ecosystem and how we can usher in the next technology revolution for India and the world.

Time Stamps:

• 2:04 Education & Career journey of Nivruti Rai.
• 4:37 Transition from technology to business leadership.
• 7:20 Upcoming plans of Intel.
• 9:35 New trends of Intel.
• 13:32 Challenges faced by women and changes needed.
• 21:07 Advise to the youngsters in terms of their career choices.
• 28:08 Rapid fire round with Nivruti Rai.

Read the complete transcript below

Nivruti Rai 0:02

I always knew work from home or work from anywhere will work because when I had my children, I did take some time off and then I was going part time and part time. I was working from home and I was very effective. In fact I was more effective because I always worried that, I’m working from home. My ROI should better be high.

Sanjay Swamy 0:54

Hi, everybody, this is Sanjay Swamy Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners and I have the pleasure of hosting Nivruti Rai. Nivruti is the head of Intel India, and I had the privilege of knowing her for several years. We’re going to talk to her about several things about her career, about life as a female executive, going up the ranks in a large company like Intel, what the impact of COVID has been on what she sees as opportunities that it has created, how Intel engages with the startup ecosystem, and lots more, so Nivruti, welcome to the show.

Nivruti Rai 1:33

Lovely to be hosted by you and like you said, I’ve known you for so long, and it’ll be wonderful to talk to a friend as well as a person that I really look up to in terms of creating so many startups and the ability to create even more.

Sanjay Swamy 1:50

That’s very kind of you Nivruti I think, listeners here would love to hear a little bit about your background, right from the early days through your education as well as your professional career, so walk us through your life journey.

Nivruti Rai 2:04

Sure. I actually come from Uttar Pradesh specifically Lucknow and I grew up in Lucknow going to schools and college in Lucknow and even I attended Lucknow University. I did my bachelor’s there and before I finished my bachelor’s in mathematics, statistics and physics, I got married, and I moved to US and there I actually finished my bachelor’s and master’s. Bachelor’s from Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York, and then my master’s from Oregon State University because by then, my husband had already gotten a job at Intel and I was so excited about joining my husband’s company because at that point of time, my belief was that only the best and the cream students and engineers go to Intel and that was a reality and that still is a reality.

So, it was a dream for me to get a job at Intel and I was lucky that post my master’s at Oregon State University, I got a job with Intel and the rest is history because Intel is the only company I worked for and I actually forget how many years so now I’ve been saying 25 for a very long time. So it’s definitely 25+ years that I’ve been with Intel and just before this conversation, I was really telling, Sanjay, that if somebody were to see what a company culture does to a personality, you’d see what Intel culture has done to me and today I feel that I really don’t care about my gender. I really don’t see myself as a pitied woman. I see myself as a 200 pound person who has a lot of confidence and a lot of fire and that’s what Intel has made me.

Sanjay Swamy 4:11

Wonderful. So over the course of 25+ years with Intel, you started off in engineering, but you gradually moved into business roles and I see from your LinkedIn profile, you spend a lot of time with business degrees at Stanford and Harvard and other schools as well. What made you make the transition from technology to the business leadership?

Nivruti Rai 4:37

Wonderful question. Sanjay, I’ll tell you something very honestly, and it may not sound as exciting, but it’s the reality that I really did not plan it that way. My career became what the need of the hour, defined my choices to be. So I was in US. I was a hardcore technologist in Intel, you get a brand of principal engineer or fellow when you are recognized as a technology leader and I had become a principal engineer and I was really enjoying having a small team being responsible for myself.

But then what happened is my father-in-law got ill, and he was back then in India, and we, me and my husband had to actually move to India to take care of my father-in-law and back then, which is, 13+ years ago, I did not have that kind of technology work available for me in Intel, India. So I moved into doing management role and eventually became a VP, but I decided to groom myself into being the best Manager I could become and therefore all these classes, degrees and certificates that I signed up for, because I thought that naturally I was a technologist. But inside my heart, I knew I was a very good people’s person, it was very easy for me to make friends. So I knew inside, I was at least reasonable in EQ as well.

But taking these trainings helped me realize that even better, and here I am, half of my career at Intel has been hardcore technology and the other half has been management but I wouldn’t say purely management, I have been able to leverage my technology connect for Intel, India, and as a result, driven a lot of technology initiatives that have become actually global products for the company. So I’ve leveraged, both my experiences to the fullest for the benefit of Intel India for the benefit of Intel, and also for the benefit of India.

Sanjay Swamy 7:01

Terrific. Intel has grown from stre ngth to strength in India and from the the early beginnings to several thousand employees. Tell us about how this journey has been for the company and what the plans are over the coming say 5-10 years.

Nivruti Rai 7:21

I think like many other companies, we are in a state where we are no longer an internal insourcing, for the work that the corporate does out of US or Israel. But instead, we have demonstrated some risk taking some leadership or some defining like I said, we have defined brand new IPs for Intel. We have defined brand new products, SoC, system on ships, different use cases, different business models.

So, today I’m very happy to tell you, Sanjay that other than United States, we are the largest design house for Intel and there’s no technology work that corporate is doing that we are not doing. We are doing all kinds of complex core development. We’re doing all kinds of complex accelerators, whether it’s machine learning, whether it’s sensing, whether it is security, or even graphics, for example.

So Intel, India has grown, demonstrated its R&D leadership and we are at a state where we decide what value can be bring for the corporate. But I also have a wonderful opportunity to not just look at how do I help Intel grow, but in doing so, how do I help India grow? So I consider myself truly Intel- India, and I’m holding hands with both India and the corporate and see what are those activities that I could drive that Intel benefits and also India benefits.

Sanjay Swamy 9:03

I know that you have spoken quite openly about AI and the role technology companies like Intel will play in India’s journey in those areas. What are some of the newer trends that you’re seeing which are perhaps India first rather than necessarily things that have happened in the developed economies. Could you give us an example or two of how Intel is getting involved?

Nivruti Rai 9:35

Absolutely, Sanjay. So, yes, AI is a topic very dear to my heart and one of the products that I was telling you that was ideated by Intel-India, and then taken to the development stage, and now being co-developed for a direct customer use case is a AI engine or AI accelerators that me and my team built and the team at that point of time, and nobody back then was really willing to invest. It was looking like a paper idea. But I took few interns and in one year I had an FPGA solution, earned the trust got the funding because I view MNC’s as a startup, especially MNCs in remote geographies as a startup who is married to a VC which is a corporate, I don’t have a choice to go multiple VC hunting, I have to convince my VC, which is the corporate and that’s what I did.

And I’m very happy and excited to tell you that I truly believe that AI is a technology, which is a huge opportunity for India and if you think of it, who are the people who are making money out of AI? If you think the United States, they are enterprises like Amazon and Netflix, and they basically use AI as a recommendation engine, or upselling to a customer and that’s how they’re using AI. If you think China,China is basically looking at AI being leveraged by the government. All government kind of tracking, tracing or figuring out who has to do what, is the kind of AI that China is using.

I really feel that, India has an opportunity to leverage AI for societal benefit and I truly believe in it and as a result, I am actually leveraging AI to come up with and I’m partnering with CSIR- IGIB, ICMR and Triple IT Hyderabad, to look at how do I leverage AI for better testing for COVID. Beyond RT-PCR, what can we do? Can we use CRISPR-CaS9 nine based testing? Can we have antibody or blood tests or comorbidity tests like diabetes, combine all of this information and come up with a risk stratification for a person and then build a treatment plan based on the risk stratification.

So we are neck deep into this activity with multiple organizations and this is a true use case of AI. Recommendation engine is just scratching the surface of what AI can do. Personalized medication, now, thanks to COVID, it has taught us a lot of very difficult lessons. Many of the things in our lives will become tele or e. So, tele-education, tele-health. Looking at entertainment, I really feel that AI will play a huge role and India has an opportunity to call itself as we are the ones who use AI for societal benefit and with the kind of population we have, with the kind of unstructured data sets we have, with the kind of extreme values of data that we have, I think we are positioned best to leverage AI for these different use cases that help humanity and I’m involved in a few of them and I will leverage all Intel technologies to see how we can create value for India.

Sanjay Swamy 13:32

Wonderful, that’s really exciting to hear. Speaking of COVID specifically, it certainly has some very long term impact in terms of how we work things like working from home, things like as you said, tele-health, tele-education and so on and while you mentioned earlier that you see yourself as not having any sort of reference to gender and professionally in Intel that has worked really well. The reality is that, it is often challenging.

I feel for women working at home where the rest of the family is also at home because there is sort of a blurring of responsibilities between professional and personal and the home responsibilities and at least I have come to the conclusion during these times that working from home is great for certain roles, and certainly for women because it helps, perhaps continue and balance the family provided the rest of the family has actually gone to work or gone to the school and it gets a lot more challenging if everybody is at home. How have you seen some of this and certainly a lot of your team members at Intel with the women folk, how are you seeing the industry coping and what changes do you think need to happen for this to be sort of long term sustainable and viable?

Nivruti Rai 14:59

So first thing, I was not always like that. That gender doesn’t matter to me. Now I have come to this position that, if somebody looks at me with a lens of a certain gender, I view it as his or her problem. But that’s not how I always was. I have grown through a company which is primarily very male-centric and often I would be the only woman in meetings, especially in the technology area.

So I have grown up learning over the years and it is only now that I’ve become like the way I have and it was very challenging and oftentimes when I speak to women or girls, I share my experiences to tell them that, one goes through a lot of learning and today I have come to this stage. I will share a Ghalib sher which actually truly defines me and I’ll explain to you what it means and then you will realize that this is exactly what my life was and that’s how I have learned.

So the Ghalib ghazal goes like this, a sher, “Ranj se khugar hota hai insan tho mit jaata hai ranj”, ranj is difficulties, pain, sorrows whatever you can think of it. Khugar means used to, means so much of difficulties was thrown on you. Ranj se khugar hota hai insan tho mit jaata hai ranj means when many difficulties are thrown on you. The difficulties no longer feel like difficulties. And the second line is, “Mushkilen itni padi mujh par ki asan ho gai”. Just for the benefit of people who don’t understand Hindi, that so many difficulties were thrown on me that they became easy! What that means is that I actually learned to cope. And I actually came back bigger, better, that those difficulties were easy. I solved them so many times, I rose above them that they no longer were difficulties and this is exactly what my life has been.

In technology area there are fewer women and I learned how to deal with it, how to rise above it and make all those difficulties easy. Now, I will tell you one more thing, a lot of women have faced this. I always knew work from home or work from anywhere will work because when I had my children, I did take some time off and then I was going part-time and part-time I was working from home and I was very effective. In fact, I was more effective because I always worried that I’m working from home my ROI should better be high.

So I always knew that work from home or from anywhere works. What happened is with Covid, the realization dawned on everyone all of the managers regardless of the gender that work from home actually works. But having said that, I will tell you that do I like this work from home to be a forever kind of a situation? I think I would never say that Intel India would go 100% work from home. One, because we have a lot of lab like work and a lot of equipments that we need and those people will not be able to work from home. That’s reason number one.

Reason number two, is when you know that this work from home is temporary and you go to your office, you will have those meetings, you will meet people face to face, you will unwind while driving back home, you will unwind while walking to your cafeteria, have a cup of tea with somebody that you work with. I think those things are very, very important and being home, I have realized this in my situation, my work hours have skyrocketed and sometimes it began to feel I’m actually sleeping in my work environment because my room has become my office.

And that’s when I realized that I’ve got to make my meeting place different than where I sleep because otherwise, I felt like I was sleeping working in the same room. It’s like almost I was sleeping in my office. So here is what I think, at least for Intel-India, and this is not something that I’ve decided but something that I feel can work. That 30%- 40% people can work from home, but they will be given an opportunity to come to work like a mobile office or something where they want to meet people face to face, they can.

Having said that, I also have heard people really appreciate work from home, some of the women who had a long distance to travel and were doing homework, meaning like some cooking, or some taking care of the children, they said that Nivruti I’m suddenly saving three to four hours of travel time and that’s the time I’m using to do extra work that I have to. So there are lots of benefits but we have to be very practical about how do we leverage those benefits because on the other hand, I’ve also had people saying that I’m getting mental fatigue because it feels like I’m working almost 24 hours. So it has to be a good balance between how we enable work from home and make it effective for the person, their mental health, physical health and for the value for the company.

Sanjay Swamy 21:07

I think it’s early days for all of us and we’re all going to learn some best practices. I also feel that while I’m able to keep track of the date, I’m losing track of the days of the week, certainly the early part it felt like that, now I think we’ve gotten to a little bit of a rhythm and trying to and also the expectation everybody has that, I’m sure you can make the time its just a zoom call or call that I am asking you to do, not asking you to visit me right! So why do I have to wait 10 days for a meeting?

But I think these are uncharted territories for us doing this at massive scale and I think we’re all going to learn over the next few months certainly. Switching gears a little bit looking back, what would Nivruti of today advice Nivruti of 20 years ago, which is sort of a way of saying what do you advise the youngsters in terms of their career choices?

Nivruti Rai 22:06

Let me start with one personality trait that I would tell myself to change. One simple thing was, when I was new to Intel, and I made a certain mistake, I would figure out how to defend myself and I would give like 25 reasons I did this because I was rushing because I was asked to deliver this code in five minutes or this is somebody else’s code and there was not much documentation.

All those reasons are fair, but it would generate so much discussion back and forth and back and forth and defending, I would have told myself, if you made a mistake, call it out. Yes, this was a mistake, I will learn from it, these are the reasons that I have learned and this will not happen again. These are the kinds of things that would have made things so much simpler and I would have not spend those 25 mails, defending myself writing all those excuses and five different managers asking. I think that’s something that I would definitely tell myself to not do.

Second thing, I would tell myself to not do and I will be very candid with you like I said, now you look at me as one hardcore technologist and somebody who looks very strong and would not buckle down in terms of challenges. I was not always like this.

I do remember my first year at Intel, and one of the very senior technology executive, I still remember his name Yusaf Almansi, very known figure in Intel and driving a lot of Intel technology. I presented to him and my presentation was thrashed badly, what is this? what do you mean? Do you think we don’t know this? You’re spending so much time wasting and what not did he tell me that you’re useless, You have no idea. I went to the women’s restroom and I cried.

I would tell myself that instead of crying, hear what everybody is saying, in my emotion, probably I missed out five other statements that he must have made, which were, maybe a little bit positive or maybe more informative. But, I missed out and I was so touched by what he said, as if he was calling me as a bad person. That’s how it felt like. If I were to tell myself now, Hey, Its just the work! Maybe you understood the problem wrong, it doesn’t mean you’re bad. Just go fix it and come back and do better work, hear what he’s saying. So that is the second thing I would tell myself.

And lastly, you said about career choices. I actually was a big risk taker. I have no idea about actuarial sciences. In my undergrad, I did statistics, but then I joined the most complex semiconductor company. So I was a risk taker. My husband said, this is a good area to be and very few women are there and it’ll be really good for you. I jumped, I could have been an actuarial scientist. I am a semiconductor engineer. So I was a big risk taker and I would tell my younger self to continue doing that because you should not consider yourself any less if something excites you, something you feel that you want to do, you will become the best at it. That’s what I would tell myself.

Sanjay Swamy 26:00

Wonderful, really fabulous advice Nivruti for the for the youngsters. I’m also reflecting on a lot of what you were saying parallels from my career as well and so many times, especially, even now as a VC working with entrepreneurs, where I always tell them look, both of us may have ideas and just because I’m the VC doesn’t make it a better idea and saying that it’s a stupid idea is not the same as saying, you’re calling me stupid, right or vice versa and the ability to separate the comment on the topic versus reacting and thinking it’s a personal comment, I think is what you were saying in the second example. That’s really very true and great advice overall. So I’m gonna end with a little fun note. I know we can keep on talking.

Nivruti Rai 26:50

If I can ask you, what would you tell your 20 year old self? One thing?

Sanjay Swamy 26:56

Yeah, so I think I’ll tell you what my dad told me when I was 20, which I still remember and try to apply still, which is three rules. One is, common sense is not very common. I think we all take that for granted, but it is not as common as one things it would be.

The second is, pretty much everything in life and decision making. Just be open, honest, transparent and fair, if any situation in life or at work needs to pass that sort of common sense and fairness test and if it does, I think good things will happen.

Focus on creating value especially in the startup world people talk a lot about valuation, I keep reminding people just focus on creating value, valuation will come as an outcome, never make it the goal. So I think, even financial success and things like that, in fact, I’ve also learned and experienced, whenever it’s a goal, it never happens. Whenever you make it an outcome and then just focus on doing the right thing I’m doing them right.So that’s the, I think, slightly more philosophical bent, but it applies to everything in life.

Nivruti Rai 28:07

Yeah. Wonderful.

Sanjay Swamy 28:08

So, last set of quick questions. I have a little rapid fire round for you. The one word answers. Okay. All right. Favorite food?

Nivruti Rai 28:18

Dal Chawal.

Sanjay Swamy 28:19

Okay, two words allowed there. Favorite movie?

Nivruti Rai 28:25

Golmaal.

Sanjay Swamy 28:26

Wow, same here. Favorite music or genre?

Nivruti Rai 28:31

I love Kishore Kumar.

Sanjay Swamy 28:34

Okay, so you answered the next question. Favorite restaurant in Bangalore.

Nivruti Rai 28:39

Benjarong, Thai.

Sanjay Swamy 28:40

Wow! And when you’re not thinking about work and not spending time working or with the family, what’s your favorite pastime? What do you do in your “me” time to relax?

Nivruti Rai 28:54

Cooking and designing clothes.

Sanjay Swamy 28:57

Great! Designing clothes that’s awesome. When you say cooking, what is your favorite dish that you cook?

Nivruti Rai 29:03

I actually enjoy the journey and I think I cook many things good, but I think my Biryani is really good. I think even a simple Dal the kind of tempering I do, my whole family loves it. I can make Aloo Gobhi also really delicious. So I do both extremes I love simple food cooking and I just put my heart and soul into it, depending on the whether I change the tempering and then I can do fancy cooking also, I can do a shepherd’s pie. I can do lovely Rajma and I can do Biryani also

Sanjay Swamy 29:41

Wonderful. Nivruti, everything you’ve just said, is all about doing everything with your heart and soul. Really awesome to have you on the show and I’m sure a lot of the listeners would like to certainly follow your posts on social media. Where are you most active and where can people follow you on Linkedin or Twitter.

Nivruti Rai 30:01

I’m mostly active on Twitter and then a little bit on LinkedIn and Facebook I just keep for my personal friends.

Sanjay Swamy 30:10

Nivruti, thank you so much. I know It’s a very busy time as you said, really appreciate your making the time and I’m sure our listeners will be thrilled to hear about your journey. Really appreciate your taking the time for us.

Nivruti Rai 30:22

Lovely talking to you, Sanjay, my best wishes.

Sanjay Swamy 30:25

Thank you Nivruti.
 

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