Arjun Srivastava (MBA ‘24) is a two-time participant in Business+Tech’s +Tech Innovation Jam, two-time winner of the FinTech Challenge and has been awarded the Eugene Applebaum Dare2Dream grant. Prior to coming to Ross School of Business to pursue an MBA, Arjun graduated with a B.Tech. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. In India, students have to declare a major early on and cannot change it, so for Arjun it was important for him to really learn what he wanted to do by securing diverse internships and extra-curricular experiences.
During his second year, he interned at Uber assisting with the launch of a new site in India. This experience was the reason he wanted to pursue entrepreneurship and build his own Edtech startup during his third year of undergrad. Since then, he got his CFA charter, accumulated financial Engineering, Private Credit, and Small and Medium Enterprise lending expertise at Moody’s Corporation, Citi, and Goldman Sachs. He launched a startup in Healthtech while working and was further infatuated by the tech space. He then decided to attend the Ross School of Business. Upon graduation, he’ll move to Boston, MA and work as an Asset Management Consultant at Fidelity Investments.
Arjun presenting during 2024 FinTech Challenge finale.
1 Why did you decide to pursue an MBA?
After working for 5 years, I wanted a breather to relax and recalibrate. I wanted to use my MBA to find my purpose and figure out what I wanted to do. I also wanted to get exposure to different generations of tech mindsets and thinking.
2 Now, let’s fast forward to today where you have about a month or so left of your MBA career. How do you feel about your time at Ross? Did you achieve what you wanted?
By Indian standards, my family is just happy I got a job! But really, the main goal was to relax a bit and upgrade my toolkit, find my purpose, and make great connections. I wanted to learn how to lead without authority and how to lead even when you’re not formally a leader. Through the course Management as a Calling, I really discovered my purpose which is to be a creative builder and learned the right questions to keep on asking myself to hone in on that purpose. Business+Tech provided a great platform for talking with individuals with different lenses and perspectives. I wanted to be plugged into the tech ecosystem, learn from the younger generation about how they think of tech, and work on something myself. At Ross, I got exposed to how different nationalities and parts of the globe think about things.
3 If you could use one word to describe what tech means to you, what would it be?
Tech is like water. It enriches, provides the foundational nutrients needed to grow and thrive. It changes form and color sometimes (😊). Tech is THE ENABLER.
University of Michigan Ross School of Business – Business + Tech FinTech Finale in Robertson Auditorium, Monday, February 19, 2024.
4 You’re a two-time winner of Business+Tech’s FinTech Challenge and a two-time participant in our +Tech Innovation Jam, what about our programs excite you? Why continue to come back?
The Jam is a great place to find a team. You can take the same team from one competition to another like the FinTech Challenge or MBC and polish and define your idea and team with each competition. It’s a funnel that keeps paying you financially and experientially. And you get to keep interacting with people who want to build something.
I pursued a different idea for every competition I participated in. I wasn’t too infatuated with one industry in tech as you can use tech everywhere. Finance is easy for me whereas it takes a bit more thinking to explore an idea in another industry and it is a challenge that I like.
5 Have you continued to work on any of the ideas you pitched during Business+Tech competitions?
One of the ideas we pitched during the FinTech Challenge in February was called The Forge which is an operational organization tool for the financial services industry. Right now, we are building a platform (MVP) and I’m working with my team on hiring three software engineers to work over the summer to build our MVP.
6 You’ve had a lot of experience working on teams and creating them. In your opinion, what makes a good team?
I’ve perfected this over the period and in the last year I have got a team that is great. There are a few types of people I look for: 1) people who are motivated as well as skilled (tough find), 2) not that skilled but hyper-motivated (the momentum keepers), and 3) highly-skilled but moderately motivated (the skilled builders). Lot of times in teams, you’ll have highly motivated individuals driving work, but they need guidance to deliver the right work. I like to set a benchmark that is super high for the team and as long as the highly motivated teammates feel they are learning from the highly skilled individuals the team morale remains and the highly skilled but less motivated fall in line.
7 As an MBA student about to graduate, what advice do you have for a first-year MBA student looking to get into tech?
Classes provided a great place for theoretical concepts, but competitions like the FinTech Challenge or Dare to Dream are where you can actually exercise your muscles and can talk about them in interviews later. I decided to be the co-president of Design+Business because I wanted to find something that was non-traditional and forced me to practice my muscles of being okay with abstractness. I’m a firm believer in design thinking, attended a few workshops through Design+Business, and was sold. It’s not super structured but an avenue for people who don’t want to be put in a box. Try to focus a lot more on opportunities like that where you can flex your thinking and execution muscles all while having structured learning from classes.