Bollywood Showtime August 2014 | Page 23

Local / Featured 17. DHEERAJ PANDEY Co-founder and CEO, Nutanix Dheeraj Pandey founded Nutanix, a company that offers an all-in-one hardware box for corporate data centers that combines a computer server and storage. Nutanix is essentially changing the datacenter as we know it, and the company looks like it’s set firmly on the IPO path. Before Nutanix, Pandey was a VP of Engineering at Aster Data and worked on the development of Oracle’s Database storage engine. “I’ve always challenged the status quo, but I’ve also learned a lot about what not to do,” he told Forbes at the end of last year. “While our company is growing exceptionally fast, I also know that business is not a ‘Hail Mary’— you need to build the business 10 yards at a time,” says Pandey. 18. NAVEEN JAIN Founder, Immunity Project Serial entrepreneur and investor Naveen Jain is working with a team of scientists and entrepreneurs who are trying to cure HIV/AIDS through their non profit organization Immunity Project. They have already developed a prototype vaccine and completed preliminary lab testing, but are raising $20 million to start an official human clinical trial. 19. NEAL MOHAN Vice President, Display Advertising Products, Google Neal Mohan is the $100 million man. He came to Google in 2008, after the company acquired DoubleClick for $3.8 billion, where he was senior vice president of strategy and product development. DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt ended up working for Twitter, and tried to poach Mohan from Google in 2011. It looked like Mohan would accept a position at Twitter, but in the end he didn’t. Why? Reportedly, because Google made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: More than $100 million in stock. Colleagues have described Mohan as a visionary who predicted how brand advertising would fund the Internet, turned this vision into a plan, and then executed it. Besides working for Google and DoubleClick, he has served in strategy and consulting roles at Microsoft and Accenture. 20. GURJEET SINGH Founder and CEO, SlideShare Fast Company named Gurjeet Singh’s startup — Ayasdi — one of this year’s most innovative companies in big data. Ayasdi helps people find new trends in their data without the need to write code, queries, or ask questions by creating 3D visuals. The goal is to make it easier to use data to solve complex problems and the company has raised $44 million. He develops multi-legged robots in his spare time. August 2014 23