Born and raised in Hyderabad, Sameera Inapakutika did her Masters in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. “I always aspired to pursue my education at a reputed university. My father pushed me to achieve my goals. I worked hard to get to Stanford,” reveals Sameera who was a BITS grad.
The 32-year-old feels her education at Stanford gave her the required global exposure. “Stanford is a great learning place and that experience gave me a global exposure. Since it is in the middle of Silicon Valley, it is surrounded by intellectuals poised for entrepreneurship. I realised ambition is universal and that students across countries are similar in their thought-process,” she adds.
“I always knew I will be an entrepreneur at some point in my career, but I needed to work in the industry to gain business experience. As a woman and as an immigrant, you don’t enjoy the same liberties as a man. The common challenge for Indian women is freedom to be who we want to be. So, I built my professional circles and continued to learn and upgrade my skills.”
Her Artificial Intelligence (AI) programme at Stanford, coupled with her experience at Netflix and Quora helped her land a job at Instagram. In three years, she was instrumental in driving the growth of Instagram ahead of Facebook revenues
“I was on the founding team of Instagram advertising. We first needed to understand what works for the advertisers well on such a platform. It took a while to build the critical technological infrastructure, but we sailed through. I am glad that we eventually tasted success. But technology is changing even as you bat an eyelid, so you always have to stay on top of your skills,” she says.
Sameera confesses that her parents’ have been very supportive. “There’s no known path to success. People in the Silicon Valley are too busy to mentor, so the key is just to keep working harder and continue learning new things. Initially, when our plans for Instagram didn’t do well, and I felt dejected. Since it was our pet project, it was difficult to convince the management for redesigning the app. As a woman, you are raised to be soft spoken and agreeable, but I had to show grit and determination. I am glad I could mould myself,” she says.
