Being inherently curious, quite a few ideas flutter across in my head, some inspired by everyday  issues while other seem to have appeared out of the blue. Once in a while an idea takes root and pretty soon the idea owns me rather than the other way round. The only effective way I found to deal the constant churning of the mind is to actually do something about it by working on it to make it manifest in some way or form.

So invariably I spend most of my time building new products and services that connect people, in an authentic way by leveraging shareable ecosystem. I typically pursue a chosen few, even it means starting small. Like taking up projects that enable optimisation of resources through sharing, reuse and redistribution.

Here are a few

WetCard: A personalised gift card solution wherein customers can choose to have their corporate logo and message on popular gift cards such as Amazon, Starbucks etc. Was lucky enough to partner with Amazon in my first pitch, and receive seed funding from Perkins Coie for patent related work.

HR Cache: This startup focused on bringing together passionate people and consulting opportunities that challenged and pushed the envelope on innovation. Was acquired in 2008 when were grew to a size of 20 plus consultants and over 2 million in revenue.

FlyingCurry: Since I love to cook, I banded together with fellow enthusiasts and started cooking and delivering food on weekends as a hobby.  Soon took a life of its own and turned into a small business, with multiple chefs cooking up wholesome home-style food and delivering it to half a dozen cities in Virginia.

LobbyHop: LobbyHop was a Hyper-Local e-commerce service that was designed to serve high density cities, wherein a lot of folks are packed into high-rise buildings. The intension was to start with food and then move onto other essential services like, grocery delivery, laundry service, healthcare camps etc.

Most of these amazing startup journeys were experienced in United Sates, wherein I spent majority of my professional life, 18 years to be precise. In those years, I have worked mostly as a IT consultant large and small organisations and experimenting on ideas through funded as well as organic startups. My professional journey started after I graduated from University of Memphis in year 2000.

Recently I have relocated back to Bangalore, India and working for Red Hat as a Principal Technical Project Manager or rather Agile Coach for the newly formed team that focuses on building amazing open source products and tools for the developer community.

I am a practitioner of mindfulness, believe in establishing priorities that contribute to team’s well-being and create a supportive environment for professional and personal growth. What better way to achieve this than helping the team to grow and thrive using the scrum framework?

My Myers-Briggs Type Personality Indicator: INFJ (THE ADVOCATE). I am guessing, the advocate characteristic has been pushing me to spread the word.  I truly believe in adoption of Scrum can help companies and teams to build better products, faster and all the while preserving harmony within the team. 

I want to transfer all this learning gathered from actively working with the team to create a framework that suits a globally distributed team working in different timezones. At the same time limit it to one-pager articles that address specific problems and issues. 

– Ranjith Reddy Varakantam

PS: INFJs are gentle, caring, complex and highly intuitive individuals. Artistic and creative, they live in a world of hidden meanings and possibilities. Only one percent of the population has an INFJ Personality Type, making it the most rare of all the types (wonder if that qualifies me as a freak! 🙂 but again there are these famous INFJ Personalities: Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr.