Upraised can be your career transition accelerator.

To earn a job can be easy, but sometimes it is a Sisyphean task to match it with your passion. Though there are several opportunities before you, it becomes hard to pick the right one. At other times you fail to achieve what you like even if you get the chance to catch hold of it. Now, this is where professional help is required to polish your positives and perform the best. 

Upraised is an up-skilling ed-tech start-up that aims at transitioning careers based on one’s true potential. It is the only full-stack candidate oriented job platform that guides engineers with all stages of the job hunt process — Upskilling, Job Searching, Application & Interview Preparation. The brand promises to tackle the problem of employability for the youth and fulfil the hiring needs of tech companies. Head over to the interview with Mona Gandhi, Founder, Upraised, to know more about the company.

Give a brief info about your startup?

Upraised is an up-skilling ed-tech start-up that aims at transitioning careers based on one’s truest potential. Funded by Airbnb co-founder & CTO, Nate Blecharcyzk, Kunal Shah, Vijay Shekhar Sharma as well as Lightspeed and South Park Commons–Upraised is focused on up-skilling high-potential candidates to be world-class Product Managers, further fulfilling the hiring needs of tech companies in India. 

It is a unique platform that provides a 16-week program–that is inculcated with a dedicated career coach, learning guide and an interview expert to get professionals a job offers. The ethos of the brand is to enable professionals from varied backgrounds to become Product Managers and assist in realizing their full potential. With an assurance of 100% guaranteed job, Upraised offers a rich learning experience that is fully personalized based on the strengths and blind spots identified during its KYS test.

Upraised is the only full-stack candidate oriented job platform that guides engineers with all stages of the job hunt process — Upskilling, Job Searching, Application & Interview Preparation. Currently, Upraised offers the following:

Preppa for interview preparations: You can practice with experts to nail your upcoming PM Interview as well as get the opportunity to interview at companies hiring from Upraised

Career Accelerator Plan (CAP) for full-time jobs: The fastest and most sure-shot way to land your dream PM job at 300+ companies hiring across India, SEA & Europe

Embark for paid internships: Standing out with the right internship – a gateway to Product Management right after undergraduate degree

The brand is determined to tackle the problem of employability for the youth and fulfil the hiring needs of tech companies in India. Its goal is to get people to start their careers right and better; which could further pose a compounding value for 10 years of their career journey.

What made you start your startup and what problem does it solve?

Aspiring engineers are always given to believe that the prospects for a fulfilling career in engineering are boundless. However, with more than 3 million students graduating every year, approximately ~40% continue to be engineers out of the pool of 1.7 million people who start-out with this, as their career paths. This problem was intriguing for me.  

High growth businesses need access to trained talent across verticals but are unable to find. Hiring such skilled talent continues to remain a big challenge! To decode this better, I personally connected with close to 127 people to understand their perspective. After months of pondering, questioning and collating facts and insights, I decided to do something in the tech hiring space in 2018. 

The relevance and the need for Upraised, helped us raise a funding of $1.3 million from some renowned names in the tech industry and in mid 2019, we launched Upraised, an upskilling platform with the mega-vision to help people realise their true potential, in the engineering domain.

Tell us about yourself, your previous jobs/ventures? What were you doing before this startup?

With over 10 years of Silicon Valley experience building consumer tech products that reached 100M+ users, in 2019 – I took the plunge to start my own company – Upraised which is aimed at tackling the problem of employability for the youth of India.

Prior to this, I was at Airbnb for 7 years, splitting time across US & APAC markets. I joined Airbnb in 2011 as the first female engineer. Before Airbnb, I was the Head of Analytics at Apture (acquired by Google), and Software Engineer at Social Media Networks (acquired by LivingSocial) and SixApart (acquired by VideoEgg). I continue to be a part of the Board of Advisors at LBB – Little Black Book, Mentor to 500 startups and an active angel investor.

Where is your startup based out of? Why do you think that is the best place for you?

With a diverse team of 28 members based across India & US. Upraised is a Singapore based company with a wholly owned subsidiary in India. Upraised is diverse in terms of gender, community, and geography, with a multicultural team united by a common goal – help people realise their true potential.  

As a startup founder, what are you paranoid about? What keeps you awake at night?

As a founder, I’m really paranoid at constantly reducing attention spans & desire for instant gratification. Both these behaviors make it difficult to stay committed to learning, relationships [personal and professional] and most importantly playing the long term game.

Who are your competitors and how are you better than them?

When it comes to product offering, there are companies that enable upskilling [ex: Upgrad, Coursera etc] & then there are companies that focus on discovering jobs [ex: Linkedin, Naukri etc] but there’s none that focus on upskilling with a job guarantee. We are the only company that gives you a money back guarantee if we can’t get you a job. 

But if you purely focus on the user, we actually think our biggest competitors are products like Netflix, Instagram etc because we need our users to spend that 1-2 hours everyday on learning that they could have just spent on these services.

How hard is it to have a work-life balance as a startup founder and how do you manage it?

I have a 5 year old daughter.  I know I only have a finite number of hours to work and that makes me extremely productive and focused. And naturally creates a work life balance.

Have you raised funding? If yes, then we would like to know the details. If no then please tell us if you are looking to raise.

We have raised funding of $1.3 million from some renowned names in the tech industry, such as Nate Blecharcyzk (Co-founder & CTO, Airbnb), Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED) and Vijay Shekhar Sharma (CEO, Paytm) as well as Lightspeed and South Park Commons.

What’s the biggest misconception people have about you? Why do they have that? What’s the reality?

Many people [founders, VC’s etc] think that it’s hard to be a founder if you are a mother. I’m much better at mutl-tasking and prioritizing because I’m a mother.

What gets you excited about this company?

With the belief–that everyone who’s motivated deserves a chance at a fulfilling career; the company’s vision is to be a global organization maintaining high value on intellectual integrity. What keeps all of us going is the vision of Upraised to be the career transition accelerator. 

Tell us how a day in your life looks like? Your schedule for a day right from the time you get up till you hit the bed at night.

Wake up at 7-7.30 am, get my daughter ready for her online school from 8 am to noon. My first work meeting is generally at 9/9.30 am. I generally block 2-6 pm for deep work, try not to schedule meetings and go offline on whatsapp. 7-9 pm is time for dinner & chill time with my daughter. Once she sleeps at 9.30, I’m back to emails until 10.30 pm. 

Tell us about your team and how did you meet each other?

Every single person on the team has gone through a career transition where they have had to upskill themselves and work hard to get that first break. This is what attracted them to Upraised. They understand the pain deeply and hence are able to be creative & nuanced in coming up with solutions.

Author