By Sanjiv Goyal Featuring Ranbir (Ron) Gupta
In this article you will learn about:
- Tech Entrepreneurship
- The Futurist Mindset
- Critical thinking
- The IIT System
Humble Beginnings
Ranbir (Ron) Gupta is an architect turned futurist and entrepreneur. He is a distinguished alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Currently, he is serving as President of the IIT Kharagpur Foundation of USA and he was a Conference Chair for the PanIIT 2020 Global Virtual Summit.
His journey started in a village in Haryana India. The school there had two grades. His father completed both and his mother never went to school. Ron took classes under a tree. For high school he traveled to a neighboring town.
One day his father saw a newspaper announcement for IIT entrance exams. Despite having never heard of IIT, Ron passed all the rounds and made it to the interview portion in Delhi. The school representative told him, ‘Son, you only have one choice, to go to IIT Kharagpur for architecture.”
He didn’t know what architecture was, but he was eager to find out.
Architecture and Critical Thinking
Traditionally architecture is about physically building the environment around us, Gupta breaks architecture down to the elements of problem-solving.
This is the critical-thinking mindset all students who attend an IIT leave with. IITs are critical thinking incubators. No matter which major their alumni chose, the graduates all have highly developed critical thinking capacities and relish challenges.
This is what makes an IIT education so valuable. It teaches students to question, to stay with problems, and gives them problem-solving skills they then go on to use in every area of their lives. Ron’s story is a prime example.
Curious about Computers
Ron excelled at IIT Kharagpur, earning himself a President’s Silver Medal in Architecture. He went on to do his master’s at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.
While studying there, he decided he needed to learn something new about architecture so he enrolled in computer classes. His thesis at the end of the second year was on computer-aided design. The year was 1971.
Ron became fascinated with programming. Back then computer programming looked very different. Ron explains.
“You would write a program and you would go to a punching machine and you would punch your program on a bunch of IBM cards, Then you would take that stack and go to the computer room and let them run it…One hour later you come back and get an output that there were 25 syntactical errors. So you go back, fix those, rerun it. In those days I would be there pretty much all night until I got the computer program correct at the end of the night.”
Ron created a computer program that drew 3D perspectives. At the time this was something that could only be done by hand. The program took two years and used well over 1000 IBM cards.
He got a job straight out of graduate school that allowed him to further indulge his fascination with computers working at an architecture firm using standard and computer-aided design.
An Entrepreneur is Born
Having mastered computer-aided design, Ron was hungry for a new frontier. His focus shifted from computer science to business.
He set his sights on selling technology based on computers to clients. In 1982 he founded Singh Associates which he sold in 1989 to a company that built power plants.
He was made head of the facilities group, which meant he was the only architect overseeing 999 engineers. He spent the next decade designing nuclear power plants.
In 2003 Ron adapted again. The internet had come into play and there was a demand for data processing centers. His next entrepreneurial venture was Sigma 7, a company that designed data centers for the financial industry to facilitate processing transactions.
An Entrepreneurial Spirit
Ron allowed himself to discover who he was through his experiences. He followed his passions, took risks, and remained flexible.
The recipe for his success breaks down into four parts:
- Try new things.
- Focus on what you can change.
- Be resilient to failure.
- Be the best version of yourself.
Ron has never shied away from novelty because he identifies as a person who thrives on variety. “You have to learn to adapt, to learn to learn new things, and keep on changing as the world around you changes.”
He wasn’t afraid to travel to a new city and major in a field he knew nothing about. To him, that was an adventure. His love of personal growth is evidenced by his journey.
“Every day I get out of bed and say wow there is something new for me to learn and solve and I think this is the mindset of most critical thinkers that come out of IIT.”
His story shows us that with curiosity and perseverance, a person can reinvent himself ad infinitum. Not giving up is most of the battle. Ron shared with me the following encouraging quote.
“There is a saying from the Talmud, ‘If there is no solution, there is no problem.’ Meaning every problem is solvable, and if it isn’t solvable, then it’s not a problem. I don’t get worried about problems. We’ll solve it and if we can’t solve it then it’s not a problem.”
Another principle he lives by is focusing on what he can change, working hard to affect change in that area, and not worrying about the rest. Some people think at a global level some at a personal level some at a regional level and we all need to work together to change the world.
One person can’t solve all of the world’s problems, but by becoming the best at what we do we can have a global impact. Specialize and serve.
Entrepreneurs must ask the challenging questions: How can we help society and how can we build a global community through entrepreneurship?
Conclusion
Even after all he has experienced, learned, and achieved, Ron is still learning he still approaches the world with a child’s mind. With just the right mix of curiosity, innovative thinking, and resilience, he is an exemplary architect of the future.
Like Ron, we are all architects of our personal and collective future. The more we can lean into critical thinking skills, open to new possibilities, and rise to the unforeseen challenges of tomorrow, the better off our world will be.
