Shivakumar Ganesan is the Co-Founder/CEO at Exotel, a business phone system on the cloud targeting SMEs in India.

Prior to Exotel, Shivku (as he is more commonly known) started, built, learnt and abandoned Roopit - a medium agnostic C2C marketplace. As an entrepreneur bootstrapping his start-up, he had only two people taking calls (one of them himself) and in the process he would miss a lot of calls. Each call was an important lead that could make or break his idea and affect customer satisfaction. He wanted a solution that would ensure he never missed a call and could track all phone conversations. Not finding anything in the market that fit his requirements, Shivku decided to build one instead. This led to a pivot and the rest will hopefully be history.

An alumnus of BITS - Pilani, Shivku started his career at Yahoo! as an Intern. He went on to write code for products like Yahoo Hotjobs, Yahoo Maps, Yahoo Communities etc. winning accolades and building long lasting friendships along the way. Shivku was awarded the Yahoo Ratna (Best Employee Yahoo - India) in 2005 and 2007 and the Yahoo Superstar (Best Employee Yahoo - Worldwide) in 2008. He has two patents in web crawling technologies. He then joined Flipkart.com as VP - Products and Technology, and started building their ERP system while helping hire the core engineering team.

At Exotel, Shivku along with his co-founders, Ishwar Sridharan (whom he met at Yahoo), Siddharth Ramesh (who studied computer science with him at BITS Pilani) and Vijay Sharma (whom he met at National Entrepreneurship Network) are looking to solve telephone and SMS related pain points of small & medium enterprises in a scalable & cost efficient manner.