Piyush Gupta '15 Receives ROE Award
By Mary Kilcoyne
Piyush Gupta, a 2015 graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s Master of Science in Software Management Program, received the Return on Education Alumni Award during the virtual diploma ceremony for the MSSM Class of 2021.
Since 2009, the ROE Award has been given to a MSSM alum in recognition of their professional leadership and their commitment to inspiring students.
Gupta is the Chief Product Officer at Sounding Board Inc., a leadership development platform that offers scalable, personalized coaching to several Fortune 500 companies and 10+ unicorns in Silicon Valley.
“Our vision is to enable 125 million full-time working Americans to become effective leaders through leadership coaching, which is limited to less than 1% of the working population today,” Gupta said.
Before joining Sounding Board and prior to enrolling at the Integrated Innovation Institute, Gupta worked in India for a decade at two "amazing and demanding" startups, including the Fintech startup EKO where he created a disruptive mobile-first payment system for money transfers.
Gupta implemented this system for the Indian Government’s Ministry of Health, automating one of the world’s largest government-to-citizen payment programs. He received the United Nations’ World Summit Award in recognition of his work.
“I had tears in my eyes when I read a World Bank Report that stated that more than 50% of our customers accessed banking for the first time in their life. There’s never been a better accomplishment than that,” Gupta said.
Gupta also co-invented the world's first "landmark intelligent driving directions" technology, which led Google to redesign its routing algorithms in Asian markets.
Working in startups exposed Gupta to new concepts, frameworks, and best practices that he hadn’t previously known while also challenging him to make several big decisions that impacted the business and people’s lives.
“In those moments, I always thought of going back to school one day to systematically understand some of those concepts and to dive deeper. I discovered the MSSM program through an intern at my first startup. I wanted to start my next venture in Silicon Valley and find an environment that would enable me to make that leap," he said. "The MSSM Program's Silicon Valley presence and connection with the entrepreneurial community motivated me in a big way."
Gupta leveraged opportunities at CMU to further his goals: He was chosen for the prestigious James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Fellowship and accepted into VentureBridge, the University’s in-house startup accelerator.
“While studying, I launched a social messaging product and tried raising capital that allowed me to put my newly acquired knowledge to practice. While the startup didn’t work, the combination of theory and practice calibrated my thinking and approach substantially,” Gupta said.
He advises current students and recent graduates to go beyond learning and to focus on the journey.
“It’s our choices and decisions during the journey that impact our ability to get to the destination. So, reframing to be journey-centric rather than destination-centric almost always leads to meaningful discovery. Development is the process of applying information to get results and growing from there,” he said.
Piyush Gupta, MSSM '15
Chief Product Officer, Sounding Board Inc.
Background
B. Tech., CS/IT
Cochin University of Science and Technology