Finding a Problem You are Passionate to Solve with Vijay Ragavan

Vijay Ragavan came to the US to get his masters in CS at the University of Georgia. He became an intern at Motorola in the Bay Area (California) and fell in love with it. From there (late-90s) he worked as an engineer for a startup (cellmania.com). After the .com bubble burst in 2001, Vijay was laid off and had to hunt for a new job. He was contacted by Yahoo! to be an engineer and had to return to India to get his visa in order, so he could return to work. Within Yahoo!, Vijay started in Yahoo! Autos, and eventually wound up as the head of Yahoo! Finance. After that, he had the notion to claim financial and personal freedom by creating a startup, MoneyChakra. With MoneyChakra, Vijay learned a lot about running a startup, but he was losing enthusiasm with the project. Vijay took a break to join Bloomspot, which he ended up being acquired by J.P. Morgan-Chase. Vijay then started getting into podcasts, where he realized the power of audio, but was becoming frustrated with finding additional information and related links for individual shows. He then embraced that need and developed Jabbercast, which gives visual information, as well as related materials and integrated data. Vijay joined me for this episode of Breaking The Borders, where our conversation ranged from such topics as:

The importance of being surrounded by good people within an organization
How meditation helped him to focus, relax, and become more productive
His experience transitioning from a great position at Yahoo! to taking a risk and starting his own company
Developing relationships and partnerships for a startup to be successful
How believing in yourself brings natural success, but chasing success will always turn into a struggle 
The necessity of having a creative outlet and the importance of having strong convictions about your startup

Resources Jabbercast Pranic Healing Tim Ferris Show Adam Carolla Vijay's Photography vijay [dot] ragavan [a] gmail [dot]com vijay [a] jabbercast [dot] com