My Story: Kartik Mandaville, CEO of SpringRole

I grew up in Delhi, India (capital of India) and have always been fascinated with computers from the age of 6, which is when I started learning programming. I remember completing all the exercises in my computer science textbooks during summer vacation for most of my schooling and then chilling for the rest of the year. I was the top student in computer science on every exam and it came very naturally to me.

Throughout my teenage years, I always looked up to Bill Gates. All my books in school were about Microsoft Windows and how to use it. Gates basically taught the world how to use computers and Microsoft had empowered me to save time and automate repetitive tasks at an early age. In that sense, Gates’s technology had improved the quality of my life… and not only that, Gates had done the same for millions of people around the globe and created something useful and easy-to-use for the masses. I knew early on that I wanted to do something similar with my career- to create something useful to many people.

It always fascinated me how I could make dumb machines intelligent with just a few lines of code. I’ve always been a chess fan and I think the first game I built was an online chess game — it was so much fun to see my favorite game come to life on my computer screen.

Me in my dorm room coding away.

My confidence was at an all time high going into freshman year of college where I was a declared computer science major. Everything was going as planned in my goal to make the same global impact that Bill Gates had until I applied for my first internship during my freshman year at the age of 18. I knew that skills-wise I was the best in my freshman CS classes. However, as some of my peers started to look for internships by networking with cousins, uncles, parents’ friends, I knew I could game the system through technology and save myself the time and trouble. Similarly to how I had created a program to navigate the complex do’s and don’ts of chess, I wanted to automate the process of navigating the recruiting landscape in order to obtain an internship.

As my friends walked together in groups to career fairs dressed in suits with their hair slicked back, I hid in my dorm room and applied to 200 companies online in my pajamas, taking the time to find the email of each HR rep of each company I was interested in and then sending emails to each.

I was devastated when after my painstaking research, I only received 20 replies and only 5 interview calls compared to my more extroverted peers whose exam scores and coding skills were not even comparable to mine. Wasn’t the world supposed to reward the smartest and hardest-working talent? How was I going to make the same impact that Bill Gates had in the world if I couldn’t even secure an internship?

The feeling that I had after I received an unexpected number of rejections from recruiters.

Luckily, I was able to stand out in other ways to recruiters. In college, I created a Facebook application that automatically wishes your friends happy birthday on their birthdays. I had built this out of need — I had five friends to wish one day and I didn’t want to type the same message multiple times. After scripting and building an app, overnight I went from the sole user to having millions of users with people from all over the world started paying for it. It was one of the first applications built on Facebook in India.

Me and my friends featured in The Times for creating a Facebook app to wish multiple friends Happy Birthday at the same time.

I went on to study Masters in Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. This was a dream come true — studying cutting-edge technology at the best computer science university in the world. In my first semester, I worked on the world’s most famous supercomputer IBM Watson which completely mesmerized me. The subsequent semesters were spent getting deeper into computer science and brainstorming useful applications that artificial intelligence could have to help broader society.

After graduating from my dream university - CMU

After working post-graduation in India, I received the opportunity of my lifetime to travel to the U.S. and take on a new challenge in my career. I was able to move to Santa Monica, California to serve as CTO to Science accelerator which was able to incubate startups such as DogVacay, Dollar Shave Club, etc.

As I went from an engineering function to helping portfolio companies at Science recruit, I realized that I was probably missing out on top talent that were not part of my network in India or Santa Monica for key technical lead positions. After all, growing up, I had not been interested in networking at all. Being a nerd — I was not eager to network but preferred to find opportunities through digital networking.

Me and Mike Jones (Founder of Science Accalaortor in Santa Monica) at a hackathon in India with winning participants.

I realized then, that just as I had built the Facebook birthday application in college, I could also build something that could teach the world how to become successful using professional networking and also reward those on digital platforms that had superior skills to their peers.

My favourite movie has always been Shawshank Redemption and my favourite scene is when Andy sends letters to the government for more funds to buy books. I forget how many letters Andy wrote but he wrote an insane number of letters to make this happen — one letter a week for six years. This scene showed me that if you really want to get something done — you can accomplish it through persistence.

The first time I tried to raise money on Sand Hill Road for my online networking idea, I was reminded of Andy’s dogged persistence. Most firms told us no and many days I felt like giving up on my grand idea. Yet, I refused to give up, especially since this startup was so related to issues that I had faced first-hand growing up. As a result, top Silicon Valley VC’s and Angels agreed to give us a check and now my company SpringRole is still operational and profitable and helping talented technical recruits to stand out from their peers.

The SpringRole team celebrating a major milestone over drinks.

I’ve since built a team here at SpringRole that I consider my own family. We as technical professionals in India understand the market behind hiring people with real skills. Most of us have the relevant experiences, the technical expertise and the startup experience, having worked at a number of different companies.

We have accomplished a major milestone by becoming one of the first non-fintech blockchain platform to actually have a live product on the Ethereum mainnet before going out to the market to talk with potential token buyers. This is a huge step! No one else has been able to execute on this, not even companies who have raised $50M+. We already have paying customers and several customer testimonials on our AngelList page. We are actually one of the only non-U.S. private offerings that has real revenue and real U.S. customers.

Customer Testimonials from clients that have used SpringRole to scale their business in Angel List.

One thing is for sure. I know that just like Andy in Shawshank Redemption, I will persist everyday to lead my team to create a product that achieves 100% market penetration in India using the inherent network effects that blockchain technology offers. In a market such as India that is rife with LinkedIn profiles with fake information, I seek to provide a fresh solution. I seek to raise SpringRole’s brand awareness to surpass the level of LinkedIn in India in two years, and I would be honored for you (my reader) to join my ambitious journey and become one of my early supporters by joining my Telegram channel here.