To,
Admissions Committee
Cornell Tech MBA
New York City
Letter of Recommendation
Nikhil is a bright, young entrepreneur, who I had the pleasure of working with at #fame, the digital video start-up
floated by ToTheNew Ventures. He is one of the most outstanding individual of his age group I have worked with. His
knowledge and understanding on the overall technology, media business eco-system is superlative, he has the
unique ability to spot problems before they arise and the vision to build products & businesses which are far more
advanced and superior.
Nikhil was everyone’s favourite on the shop floor and interacted regularly with everyone across teams on the
challenges they are facing, a habit which I believe is utmost important for product managers and future CEO’s. In a
high growth company there’s always resistance between different parties involved- team leaders, vendors etc and
Nikhil’s ability to navigate through those differences keeping the long-term vision in mind is exemplary especially
given his young age. This reflects his ability to lead and work keeping the teams together. He regularly organized
focused group discussions to understand the target audience and draw better insights for our product and business.
Being in the tech media business we often had business deals closed at the very last moment, Nikhil’s performance
with the product aspects for the projects always helped us execute fast and with great results. For instance, within
one month of launching the app we signed up to live stream the biggest Indian movie awards which were scheduled
to happen within 4 days of signing and Nikhil had to shuttle between multiple cities to make sure the engineering
pieces are in place, the system is able to handle the load and there are enough users on the app watching the live
streams to justify the worthiness of the project. We targeted one million users on the mobile app for this project,
inspite of joining the company recently, Nikhil came up with the entire user acquisition plan, convinced us that it was
executable within a span of one week, got the budgets approved and on-boarded multiple ad networks across the
globe to make sure it happens.
Our business was spread across South-East Asia- upper management in Singapore, Engineering team in Delhi and
marketing/content teams in Mumbai, Jakarta and Thailand but coordination among all these stakeholders was a
piece of cake for Nikhil. I was impressed with his ability to communicate effectively with multiple teams without any
loss of information. With this much pressure, most of the people in his age group usually become nervous, panic and
start committing errors in execution, but Nikhil’s ability to keep calm, cut the noise and sharp focus on the end goal
astonishes me and that’s one reason of many I put him in the top 1% candidates of his peer group. He has the
mental maturity of much senior executives. He is very well aware of the dynamics of a corporate environment,
knows which information to disseminate and which to not, ability to ask the right types of questions to draw proper
insights. Given our dynamic business across the globe, needless to say Nikhil’s oral and written English
communication skills are excellent.
Sometimes he gets overly emotional about the work assigned to him and over pressurises himself and his team
members to meet deadlines and agreed standard of work. During these time, he ends pushing everyone a lot harder
than one would normally and this I believe is one of his weaknesses. He needs to improve a bit on the same and
understand not every deadline can be met considering so many external factors. We faced this problem with him a
couple of times where his team members ended up complaining of the pressure put by him to execute.
Since the day I interviewed him, I have always strongly recommended Nikhil to do an MBA from an IVY league
college and I am proud of him for finally getting to it. He has the right skillset to transform into a C-level executive
and I believe he will benefit greatly from the tech-MBA at Cornell since he has always wanted to disrupt traditional
businesses using technology. I strongly support his application and assert that he will add great value to the Cornell
alumni once he graduates. I am happy to take up any further questions or concerns you may have regarding his
candidature for the program.
Saket Saurabh
Business Head
Bloomberg Quint
HKUST 2003