In the ‘Hot seat’ with Chandini Jain

This week, we have interviewed Chandini Jain the CEO of one of our exciting fund 2 investments Auquan.

Find out what makes her tick…

1.What’s your name and where do you come from?

Chandini Jain, Auquan

2.Give us a quick overview of your company and what it does.

Auquan is a data science platform for financial services. It allows portfolio managers to discover machine learning solutions to the investment problems quickly and effectively, without needing an in-house data science team. We are supported by our active community of over 10,000 data scientists, who come from some of the most prestigious universities and biggest companies around the world.

3.What’s the next big idea that nobody is thinking about yet? Why is this so important?

Crowdsourcing ideas and intelligence. The best people to do a very specific job may not be the ones in your organisation.

4. Looking back to the day you founded the company, what is the one thing you wish you had known before starting off?

The difference between a brilliant idea and a good company. I wish we had spent a lot more time on customer discovery/ development. A good idea doesn’t mean much if there isn’t much demand for it and or it isn’t backed by excellent execution.

5.How do you define success for you / your company?

We want to cause a fundamental shift in the way decisions are made in investment management. We’ll be successful if majority of funds/asset managers are making investment and trading decisions based on and backed by data and all of this data analysis and modeling is powered by Auquan’s technology.

6. What behaviour or personality trait do you most attribute to your ability to achieve what you have achieved so far?

I am very ambitious and I get really involved in what I’m doing if it excites me.

7. What’s your top idea to improve diversity in the workplace?

We make sure we have adequate representation of men/women in all the applications we see. Sometimes that means working extra hard to source female candidates. After that, obviously it’s all merit based and there is no differentiation between candidates

8.What is the best advice you have ever been given and by whom?

Imagine if you had the bank account and the resources to live the rest of your life the way you wanted, what would you be doing with your time then? Go do that now!

9. What was the most useful resource (networks/books/websites/blogs) you used when starting out?

Network, speaking to current and ex-founders. I found lot of value in learning from experiences of people who had done (successfully or unsuccessfully) what I was trying to figure out.

10.What is the single most important thing you’ve done to increase the value of your business?

Decide to join the Techstars cohort.

11.What has been the hardest decision you’ve had to make in your entrepreneurial journey?

The initial leap of faith to quit a very well paying trading job to start something of my own – without a team and only very basic formations of an idea.

12. If you could be offline for 3 days -where would you go and what would you do?

Go on a beach, snorkel and swim for a few hours everyday and work on random logic puzzles.