Shouvick Mukherjee is a reticent man. But get him close to a topic on technology and his colours change and he warms up in a jiffy. This is our second meeting in the last two years, and I distinctly remember our first encounter. He was even more restrained and calculated at that point. But now, having spent a couple of years as CEO of Yahoo India R&D, he is a bit more chilled out and greets me with a big smile.
For Shouvick, it has been a meteoric rise to the top. He started off in 1999 as a senior software engineer at Yahoo India R&D, and now he has become its CEO. ?I always loved to think out of the box. Never wanted to do the same things over and over again. My attempt has always been to see how I can do something differently,? says the man from Jharkhand.
The Yahoo India R&D centre is the second largest R&D hub for the internet giant globally outside of the US. The Indian centre has become a great source of intellectual property for Yahoo, a fact that Shouvick is personally very proud of. ?I always tell my people what I believe in.
I urge them to push the boundaries constantly.?
Shouvick started his career at TCS as a technical consultant in 1996. He also worked at Oracle for some time, but it?s probably fair to say that he discovered himself at Yahoo. He joined Yahoo in Sunnyvale before shifting to Bangalore. Shouvick has contributed enormously to Yahoo?s search, advertising, listings and data products. ?I was always curious as a child. There are many things I destroyed at home, while growing up. I would rip something up, and sometimes end up not being able to put it back together.?
All that did not go to waste, quite obviously. Yahoo India R&D is today a beehive of high technology activity and Shouvick is in the thick of things here. Set up 10 years ago, the centre is responsible for delivering product and technology innovation that create a significant business impact globally. ?Personally, I don?t believe that if there is a path that is made out, you always have to go through that and you will get to the other point. If you don?t experiment enough, your creativity doesn?t come out. At the centre, our employees are trying to invent the internet of the future, and are engaged in end-to-end product development,? he says.
Over the last four years, Yahoo?s Bangalore centre has yielded a 50% average year over year increase in idea submissions for patent consideration. It has undertaken end-to-end development of more than 20 products including Yahoo! Cricket, OMG, Helium, Vertex and NGD Marketplace. ?There was a time, when Yahoo was trying to see if it can do a remodel. People in the management chain were not sure whether it is going to be successful or not. Today, Yahoo India handles the most strategic centre. I think if I look back there are two things that happened, we were able to demonstrate that we have the capabilities. Second thing that I would say, is that we also helped the company solidify its processes but clearly it requires certain level of maturity to handle remote development,? he says.
?Our competitors have figured out that if you don?t have a strong content strategy, strong media strategy, a robust user strategy then you won?t be successful. All of a sudden media has become more important. If you look at the new devices that are coming up, you can see that the whole media consumption is changing.
Everyone wants to convert their media into something digital. So Yahoo all of a sudden has become much more relevant now. We think we are actually in a cusp where we will see a huge growth of digital media consumption because of the devices that?s coming in today.?
Outside his sphere of work, Shouvick does little else but read. Everyone knows him as a man with a voracious appetite for reading. He also believes that traveling extensively has helped him to become a better leader. ?It?s important to appreciate sensitivities and be open,? says the Rabindra sangeet lover.
