Sowjanya journeys from chip design to podcasts

Sowjanya Shetty began her career as a chip designer, but now does podcasts. The transition from pure tech to media did not take the techie out of her. She continues to write Python codes to refine her research, which is used in making her podcasts.
Her journey with tech began as a young girl sitting in her mother’s office. After the demise of her father, Sowjanya’s mother got a job in HR at Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL). Being in the learning and development team, her mother worked with top researchers at the firm. Sowjanya would talk to these researchers when she visited the office.
Without even realising it, she says she picked up a lot of the basic concepts of engineering. She had access to books and journals on microprocessors, monthly newsletters, and magazines at BEL. She would make notes just to remember what she had read. Those science notes went viral in her network. Many started buying them. Even in college, all her juniors were fans of her notes for the systematic way they were arranged. Sowjanya started making money by selling these notes.
She also spent some time assembling computers, and that is how Sowjanya learnt about RAM cards. She was curious to know anything and everything about tech.
Soon, she finished her engineering from M Visvesvaraya Institute of Technology in Bengaluru and joined BEL as a chip designer. Real learning began only much later. In the late 90s, Sowjanya moved to the US with her husband. She got a job at a startup, which shut down overnight, leaving her with 60 days to find a new job to save her H-1B status. Sowjanya took up a job as a sales personnel, which involved talking a lot. This was completely opposite to her personality.
“Like all techies, I was an introvert. We tend to talk a lot about technologies we know. Conversations end with that. We are unable to embrace what we do not know. Being on the sales side meant talking to people about everything. This experience helped me as I took on a manager’s role later on, after returning to India,” Sowjanya says. She learnt to be a good communicator.
Working in sales also taught her that enhancing general knowledge by reading up on geopolitical events and other issues is important to do well in life. “When you know what is happening around the world, it becomes easy to plan ahead,” she says.
Life had other plans for her once she returned to India. Sowjanya joined HP and was in charge of HP’s network card, which goes into printers. Soon, they offered her a role as a program coordinator, a role that was in the US, but which the company wanted to transition to India. “For that role, they told me to think like a CEO,” she says. To understand what that entails, she started a gifting venture called Bubblewrap, even as she continued in her existing role at HP. “I wanted to experience and understand what it meant to be a CEO,” she recalls. She succeeded eventually in getting the program coordinator role.
Bubblewrap did not last long, and Sowjanya went on to have stints as CRM leader at GE Digital and sales director at Microsoft. She quit Microsoft three years ago, and since then has been doing podcasts focused on building careers and changing mindsets.