Meet Pulak Sinha, CEO of Pepper

Pulak Sinha is the quintessence of an Entrepreneur.  In 1999, he came to New York City to handle US Operations for an Indian company he was helping build. In the Big Apple, he saw the opportunity to work for incredible firms and to extend his world-class education (he is an IIT graduate). He then combined the two with his zeal for building and started Pepper, an end-to-end platform for Asset Managers.  When you speak to him, you can feel his experience and passion and detect enormous humility as he builds his organization while maintaining a busy family and charitable schedule.

Pulak gets animated when he talks about Pepper.  He says that the joy he gets when realizing that the motivation behind the company – to bring simplicity and value to a very complex space – is the same factor that his customers tell him they get from the platform he built.  The alignment between a product’s intent and the payload it delivers is rarer than one might think in the technology world.

But for Sinha, there is a lot more to life than Pepper.  Family first, followed closely by non-profit work; these keep Sinha balanced and working just as hard “after hours” as he does for what he calls his “Day Passion” – Pepper.

What struck me the most about Sinha was not his innovative ideas or business success; instead, it was his humility.  He doesn’t use the “me-first” language so common in business.  He suggests in humility that complacence is the only result of arrogance and that he will never call his product “great” unless his customers say it first. It’s a refreshing change from the hyperbole that reigns supreme in Silicon Valley and other tech centers.