Well into my teenage years, all I knew was farming, crops and the land my father and brothers tilled in a small village in India. I was destined to follow in their footsteps and become a farmer. My father, however, saw something in me, that I was eager to learn, explore and that my restless energy could only be truly cultivated through proper education. Every day, I walked a dusty three-mile path to the only English-teaching school in the region. That road, much hard work and emerging from the rough neighborhoods of Compton led me to a bachelor’s degree from U. C. Berkeley and an MBA from the Wharton School. I held a progressive career in the sciences, including clinical research on vaccine development, assembly of the Drosophila genome, completion of the human transcriptome, and development of metrology tools and processes. I was living each day behind the scenes, confined to the lab, with the awareness that my work would have a trickle effect from the university walls to the actual patients who would benefit from my research. I wanted more. I wanted to see results firsthand and be the person directly involved in making this transformative change. What I wanted was incredibly different yet so similar to what I had always known and seen in my father, a farmer who saw his work from the ground up, saw it flourish in front of him, led his workers, sold his product himself and personally stood behind its quality.Accordingly, I have looked for every opportunity to create value directly. I transformed a run-down motel in Berkeley into a boutique hotel. I saw what customers would value, negotiated a $3 million loan – post 9/11 events, with no collateral or experience in construction – and made the vision come true. I wanted to go further and lead the product from initial concept and design through to sales and customer satisfaction. As the President at Aquaneering, I am doing just that.