A friendship that defied all the boundaries of age and blurred the lines between the boomer and the millennial generation is the one shared by billionaire businessman Ratan Tata and his General Manager Shantanu Naidu. The 30-year-old manager has befriended the ex-chairman of Tata Sons with his love for animals.
Shantanu Naidu completed his Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from Savitribai Phule Pune University in 2014 and went on to pursue Masters’s in Business Administration from Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management in 2016. Throughout his time at Cornell, he has been part of clubs and participated in various activities, and held several significant positions as a student. He was even awarded the Hemmeter Entrepreneurship award and won the Johnson Leadership Case Competition among many others.
His journey at Tata began at a very young age in 2009 when he was the engineering intern where he led the design team to prepare guidelines that eliminate design defects now used by all designers in the company thus saving 27% design time. He also worked as a design engineer for Tata Elixsi, where he led an automotive body design project for the national award-winning electric vehicle “Tata Iris” that created an entirely new vehicle segment in the industry among many other areas of responsibility.
While being employed as an automobile design engineer at Tata Elxsi in Pune in 2014. During his late-night trip along the Viman Nagar motorway, he would come across dog carcasses that had been ran over by speeding vehicles. This bothered him and made him question how he could rescue the lives of street dogs. In an exclusive with Your Story, he said, “I spoke with citizens who had been involved in dog-related road accidents, and the issue wasn’t just visibility; it was visibility with enough time for the driver to decide which way to go without risking his life.” “Being an automobile engineer, I had the idea to make collars for dogs that would make them visible at night even without streetlights.”
This startup changed the young boy’s life forever as it caught the attention of Tata who himself is a dog-lover. Naidu wrote a letter to Tata about his new venture and to his utter disbelief one day he was invited to meet with Tata. A meeting that led to a friendship and Naidu becoming Tata’s manager in the later years.
Ratan Tata supported Motopaws and was one of the investors. Motopaws has skyrocketed in business and innovation. It developed a sensor circuit-based anti-poaching device for tigers in India and assisted in its installation through the forest department in four separate national reserves. It even created reflective dog collars from scrap denim and industrial fabric in India to prevent human-animal accidents, which reduced animal-related night accidents by 37%. Naidu led the organization’s expansion to 17 cities and hired 250 employees in 8 months.
“We already have an all-women team in Nepal. We are also exploring larger animals like cows, etc, which also lose their lives when they stray on the highway,” Shantanu said in an exclusive with Your Story.
In 2021, Shantanu added another feather to his cap as he started Goodfellows, with the aim to provide the elderly with all the assistance they need in their final years. “I realize over 15 million elderlies in India live by themselves. While they may have found ways to fulfil their utility needs, they often lead isolated lives be it because of the loss of a companion or genuinely busy families.” Shantanu said in a statement. With a small group of young, empathetic and eager individuals, goodfellows is one the growing startups today and is here for a good cause.
Shantanu has been serving in the managerial post at Ratan Tata’s office since 2018 and has been close to him ever since, being his millennial friend. Naidu has also published a book: I came upon a lighthouse in 2021 under Harper Collin’s publication.
