@spotlight

Swell Spotlight: Vikas Gupta

Hello and welcome to the Swell Spotlight. It's Deborah. Here's a chance for us to invite luminaries, inventors, entrepreneurs, innovators interesting people with experiences that make us curious. And there are people with whom we can ask direct questions. And that's the power of Swell because Gupta is here with us today. He's an example of someone who believes deeply in weaving imagination into vocation at every step of one's development. You see. Vegas is the co founder and CEO of Wunder Workshop

Co-founder & CEO of Wonder Workshop #coding #robotics #innovation

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@Vikas
Vikas Gupta
@Vikas · 4:32
I'm thinking about robotics and coding and kids and the story of Wonder Workshop that I founded eight years ago, how it came to be and what took us to build a global brand with close to a million robots in the hands of children, with a community of tens of thousands of teachers, including public school teachers in the US, in more than 25,000 elementary schools
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@DBPardes
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 0:30

#family #kids #productroadmap

Because thank you so much. I have to jump in with another question because you are so in depth with about the sound, and it made me smile so much. But then you also talked about being a dad. Can you tell us a time when being a father directly impacted the product? Roadmap of the work with Dot and Dash? Like if something happened with one of your kids that informed a decision you made with the product, if that happened
@Swell
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15

Welcome to Swell!

@Vikas
Vikas Gupta
@Vikas · 4:44
But if I was to trade these moments and wanted to work on something, I wanted my work to have an impact, and I wanted my work to truly excite me. And that's what I think set me on the path of eventually founding Wonder Workshop with the intent that I wanted my work to make a positive impact on the lives of all children
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@Phil
phil spade
@Phil · 1:06

#immigration

And I think that message would be so great to hear, especially right now where I feel immigration is almost being used as a political tool these days, and it's oftentimes vilified if I can say that, and I've been waiting for the business community to kind of speak out against that because I've just seen so much working for immigrants working with immigrants and having immigrants report to me. And that's been almost my entire professional career
@Vikas
Vikas Gupta
@Vikas · 4:33

https://qz.com/890943/the-us-has-more-immigrant-inventors-than-every-other-

I was a part of the team that created the Amazon Web Services. Since having worked at Amazon, I have founded two companies, the first of which return capital back to investors and employees handsomely. The second company has created the market for educational robotics and has created the best platform for children in elementary schools to learn to code
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@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 0:56

Remaining challenges for wonder workshop

And there is a lot more room to grow and cover. And I wanted to know what it's remaining. And could you share what sort of plans does Wonder Workshop have to address those
@Vikas
Vikas Gupta
@Vikas · 4:24
So those I think, are some of the yet to be solved problems on computer science, and I think it should be said at the same time that there is a much larger awareness now on computer science than it has been in the past. But what I think has often surprised me and has made me, I would say disillusioned with this unhappy
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@arish
Arish Ali
@arish · 0:25

#Startup lessons from early days of #Amazon

Hi, Vikas, I would love to hear about your early days at Amazon. How was it like working there, working for Jeff Bezos in those very early days and especially were there any less that you can have took from that experience, that you could not have gotten anywhere else. And that has really helped you become successful as an entrepreneur
@Vikas
Vikas Gupta
@Vikas · 4:10

#leadership

And I think it's something that I've tried to emulate and anything that I've done since then, which is that as a leader, my job is to remove roadblocks from what people are trying to achieve and everything else follows from there. One other incident that I like sharing is I remember in one meeting I was with Jeff Peasles and a few other executives
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@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 0:35
Hey, because thank you very much for sharing your experiences in Amazon. I was fortunate enough to have known you in those days. And if I recall, after some time you left Amazon and founded Jamboo doing social media apps. And a few years later, I heard that January had morphed into Social Gold and was acquired by Google. So could you tell us a little more about your endeavor with Jamboo and how it became Social Gold and what happened there? Thank you
@Vikas
Vikas Gupta
@Vikas · 4:44
I think I should have spent more time first figuring out and analyzing what the business of the company was going to be about. Having said that started Jambu and eventually I started prototyping many different ideas and eventually fixated on one, which was around collaboration among people online. And the notion was that people spend a lot of time online doing research for their everyday tasks, whether it's finding a house to buy or travel, and so on
@Vikas
Vikas Gupta
@Vikas · 4:34
And we believed our differentiation compared to other. And there were plethora of companies in the space doing the same thing that we were doing. So there's no differentiation per se on the product side. And I think what our differentiation was having, we could actually create and launch an app nearly at one new as such app a day
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@Vikas
Vikas Gupta
@Vikas · 4:38
So I think you've said in other places, too, as an entrepreneur, you bring hard work to the table. But in the end, what you're looking for is luck. This is one of those pieces which we couldn't have influenced. It was sheer luck that we managed to close the term sheet when we did
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@spotlight

Thank you Vikas for participating in this Swell Spotlight !

But because you have certainly given us a lot of your time, and I hope to hear your voice here on Swell again, and even in this conversation again. But just I wanted to make sure at this point we thanked you, and I know you're a busy man, so spending time with us is really a value, and we just wanted to thank you
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@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 1:21

Kudos

Because I just wanted to say hats off. Just hearing this conversation made me realize that you are part of, you know, the Amazon Payments founding Teams, one of the members of the original origination teams of AWS, part of the Emoticon founding teams in the industry because it's the hugs and kisses of Facebook that led to emojis and emoticons everywhere, although there were definitely in chat. But it is the Facebook emojis that really made emoticons take off in such a big way
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@Howie
Howie Rubin
@Howie · 0:18
Hi, Vegas. I saw something on the news yesterday about baseball teams using robots to fill the stands. Who knows? It could be a new line for you anyway. Enjoy. Bye
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Swell user mugshot
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