Jyoti Pandey
Kellogg School of Management
Venture name: UrbanIQ Systems
Date of founding: 2025
Program: Kellogg Executive MBA
Tell us about your career background: I’ve spent 27 years in technology, 23 of them at Oracle in Silicon Valley. I started my career at Oracle in an entry-level role and grew professionally, moving through different product roles and eventually becoming Director of Product Management.
Most of my career was in enterprise technology, building products for large, complex organizations and working closely with customers to understand their requirements and solve their business problems. Oracle gave me the opportunity to work with some very smart people, large global customers, and complex products. For most of those 23 years, I assumed I would continue building my career in big tech.
What is your business/venture? I’m the Founder and CEO of UrbanIQ Systems Private Limited in India. We build ready-to-use software solutions for government departments.
We started with waste management for cities, helping city municipal officers monitor waste collection, processing, and daily field operations. We have since expanded into work management for district administrations overseeing work across Panchayats (villages), helping officers monitor development works across departments and schemes.
One thing I have learned from working closely with government is that the problem isn’t always a lack of data. A lot of data already exists. The challenge is making it available to officers in a form that can be quickly understood and acted upon. Technology doesn’t collect waste or build roads. People do. If we can help them make proactive, better, and faster decisions, we are doing something useful.
What inspired you to found this business? I never thought I would become an entrepreneur.
What I did know was that I wanted to build something for India. During my EMBA, I took Professor Mohanbir Sawhney’s Tech Venture India course, and that pushed me to explore the idea more seriously. I started looking at areas where technology could make a difference, and waste management caught my attention.
The more I learned about it, the more interested I became. India was investing significantly in programs like Swachh Bharat (Clean India Mission); cities were doing important work on the ground, but I also saw an opportunity to use technology to improve how daily operations were monitored and managed.
Eventually, I felt strongly enough about the opportunity to do something I had never imagined doing.
I left Oracle after 23 years, moved from California to India, opened the company, hired a team, and started building. My husband and daughters remained in California, so this decision also meant being away from my family. There wasn’t a laid-out plan to become an entrepreneur. I found something I really wanted to build and decided to give it a serious shot.
Why did you enrol on the EMBA? After about 25 years in technology, I found myself asking, “What’s next?”
I wasn’t unhappy at Oracle. I had a career I was proud of and assumed the next step would probably be a larger leadership role. I joined Kellogg with an open mind, hoping the experience would help me figure out what I wanted the next phase of my career to look like.
I wanted to learn, but I also wanted to understand myself better. What were my values? What drives me? What would make me happy and fulfilled in my 50s? I wanted to meet people outside my world in Silicon Valley and explore possibilities I may not have considered otherwise.
I certainly didn’t enroll thinking I would leave Oracle and start a company in India. That came later.
How has the EMBA helped you/your business? The biggest thing for me has been confidence and a broader sense of what is possible.
I started a company in a country where I had never worked before, after spending 23 years at one company in the US. I don’t think I would have had the confidence to do that before my EMBA. I came out of Kellogg feeling that I knew enough to start, and whatever I didn’t know, I could figure out.
And there was plenty I didn’t know. I have had to learn Indian tax laws, HR, finance, compliance, and how government bodies, who are our end customers, operate. I am still learning.
But I also know I have a much larger toolset in my arsenal now. And when I can’t figure something out on my own, I have this incredible network of classmates, professors, and friends with experience across almost every area of business whom I can reach out to.
What’s the one thing about the EMBA that you think is undervalued? For me, it’s something intangible and difficult to quantify—you get to know yourself better.
When you have been working for 25 years, it is easy to define yourself by your career, your role and what you have been doing successfully for a long time. The EMBA gave me an opportunity to step outside of that and ask myself some harder questions. What do I really want to do? What matters to me now? What am I capable of doing that I haven’t tried yet?
And somewhere in that process comes confidence. Not the confidence that you know everything, but the confidence that you know enough about yourself to make a different choice, take a risk and figure things out along the way.
That is difficult to put a value on, but for me it has probably been one of the most valuable parts of the experience.
What’s next for your business? Scaling the business. And that has been harder than I expected.
Building the product was the easier and more enjoyable part for me. It is close to what I have done for most of my career. I know how to understand a problem, work with customers, build a product, get feedback, and keep improving it.
Now I am at a very different juncture: how do I go from one customer to five, and then beyond?
Selling to government in India takes time. There are long cycles, many stakeholders to meet and convince, and a lot of uncertainty. Sometimes just getting the right meeting to show what we have built is difficult.
I am also building this business in a country where I have never worked before. I don’t have an established professional network in India, and I don’t have many mentors or advisors who understand this space and can help me navigate it. I am building those relationships from scratch.
The challenge is that as a startup, time and resources are finite. Government adoption cycles can be long, and I must figure out how to create enough traction while we still have the runway to do it. That is the part I think about a lot.
I know how to build the product. I am now learning how to build and scale the business around it.
Would you recommend the EMBA to other entrepreneurs? If yes, why? Absolutely. For me, the value comes down to three things: clarity of thought, a broader toolset for execution, and the conviction to act.
Kellogg didn’t give me the idea for UrbanIQ or teach me how to run it. But the experience helped me think differently, gave me the confidence to explore something completely new in a different country, and connected me with people who inspired me and encouraged me to take the idea further.
Entrepreneurship requires making decisions with incomplete information and doing things you have never done before. You are never going to know everything you need to know before you start. The EMBA gave me the confidence to believe that I could figure things out as I went.
I entered Kellogg thinking about the next step in my corporate career. I certainly didn’t expect that a few years later I would be sitting in India, building a company and working with city and district governments on urban and rural infrastructure issues.
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