Punit Thakkar

ESMT Berlin

“Engineer, marketer, AI consultant, and aspiring entrepreneur who challenges himself across disciplines and geographies.”

Hometown: Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

Fun fact about yourself: For 258 weeks, every Tuesday, I have been writing an entertaining, thought-provoking poem for over 1,000 readers worldwide on my blog.

Undergraduate School and Degree:

Bachelor of Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunication, Gujarat Technological University

Master of Business Administration, Marketing and Sales, Symbiosis International University

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Director, Business Head at Nobroker.com (India’s only Proptech Unicorn)

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? At ESMT, we get the opportunity to complete an internship or take an intensive German course in the summer. I chose the intensive German program and learned the language at the B1 level.

As part of the degree, we also work on a consulting project for a company, and I worked with the frontier AI lab Fraunhofer HHI in Berlin on commercializing their explainable AI research.

Where will you be working after graduation? Hopefully building my own business! I am building two products right now, one in the architecture and construction industry, and one for investor relations teams in large public companies. Both products draw on my past experiences and the capabilities I’ve built during the MBA. I aspire to convert at least one of these products into a viable business over the next year and scale it globally.

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

Student Services Coordinator – I created the “Bergfest,” a new monthly event series, where students from across the university gather to hang out and enjoy fun conversations. We even went hiking, canoeing, and clubbing as part of the Bergfest, and students now highlight the Bergfest as an essential monthly ritual to connect and bond with others across the campus.

Research Assistant to Professor Linus Dahlander – I collaborated with Professor Linus Dahlander (Lufthansa Group Chair in Innovation) at ESMT Berlin to develop session content for the course AI for Managers, which was delivered to Executive MBAs.

ESMT Impact Scholarship – I received a scholarship for the impact I created in my professional career by developing the product and business case for 1000 affordable homes and leading the sales and marketing activities for the same.

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? I spent the year developing several AI-assisted tools to reduce administrative overload both for myself and for professors at ESMT, and helped train several students on using advanced AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Antigravity.

Towards the end of 2025, I made a new friend, Joscha, who studies in the Executive MBA program. In a casual session, I taught him how to use Antigravity. He expressed interest in seeing the products I was developing. I showed him one such product, and he told me, “I know someone who might be interested in this.”

A couple of weeks later, I got looped into an email chain with the Founder and Chairman of a $550M annual revenue company, and 2 months later. I presented my product to him on a 1:1 call, and he gave me valuable insights into pricing and distribution. Thanks to the collaborative environment at ESMT and the selfless mindset of my colleagues, I had a life-changing experience that I feel proud of.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? I led the brand strategy for India’s largest real estate developer, Godrej Properties, and was responsible for developing the company’s corporate purpose. Over a period of two years, I worked with senior stakeholders like the Chairman, CEO, CMO, and Marketing Head, and led the launch of the purpose across the organization and its integration into the day-to-day work of 2500+ employees through a carefully designed plan. This purpose is still well-integrated into the company’s identity and forms the basis of all decision-making, helping stakeholders put customers first. This was a significant achievement that left a strong impression on the organization and is a professional initiative I feel the most proud.

Why did you choose this business school? I have spent my life aiming to learn excellence from leaders. ESMT is located at the heart of Europe’s transformation into an integrated and modern economy. The leaders of the university even influence decision-making in Germany and Brussels, as events like the Berlin Global Dialogue demonstrate. Senior decision-makers come regularly to talk to students at the university. The university’s building is steeped in history, too, as it used to be the headquarters of the DDR Government.

This makes it a center of power like no other. By being here, I get to learn excellence from world leaders who steer the future. That is why I chose ESMT, and I am glad to share that it has proven me right.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? My favorite MBA professor was Professor Hanna Setterberg, who taught us the subject Doing Business Sustainably. What had the biggest impact on me was how she bridged the concepts of being sustainable and good for the world into something that can be measured tangibly through accounting. She also brought to CXOs from leading European companies to class, who gave us a high-level view of how they practice sustainability within their companies, especially in a challenging regulatory environment.

Studying with Professor Setterberg helped me learn that doing good and making money don’t have to be opposite objectives; one can combine them, and that is why she was my favorite MBA professor.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? My favorite course was Operations and Supply Chain Management with Professor Tamer Boyaci. His depth and breadth of knowledge on the subject were awe-inspiring, and he made the complex concepts of the subject accessible in a way I had never seen. He also crafted the syllabus in a way to expose us to the most impactful operations concepts and kept us engaged throughout.

During my last stint as a business head, I had a hard time figuring out how to make my business cashflow positive. When I learned the concept of cash-to-cash cycles in this course, it showed me a structured way of using time as a dimension to solve this problem. This inspired me so much that I even wrote a poem about it on my blog!

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? Each year in February, ESMT organizes a Career Fair. Come December, there is the MBA Talent Forum. These events provide prospective employers with an opportunity to engage with the amazing talent at ESMT and provide us students with a window into the amazing companies that are actively hiring in and around Germany. Because of how these events were staged throughout the year, it gave me an opportunity to share how I was settling into Germany and growing as a professional with the recruiters who were attending. The events are also set up in a low-pressure, fun manner, allowing both students and recruiters to engage meaningfully and at depth.

The fact that several smart recruiters attend these events every time and then end up recruiting several students from the university eventually reflects to me how highly the HR community around Germany regards the talent at ESMT. Meeting these repeat visitors first in February 2025, then December 2025, and finally in February 2026 made me feel like I was meeting recurring characters in different seasons of the show of my life.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? I lost my beloved mother during my MBA program. I wish I had spent more time talking to her each day.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? As part of the first lecture in the course Managerial Analytics and Decision Making, Professor Francis de Véricourt gave us a case study about making a crucial decision. This case helped us understand a core lesson: don’t judge your decisions by their outcomes but by the process you use to decide. This case study is one that left the biggest impact on me and almost all my classmates, and we still talk about it to this date.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? Berlin’s history – right from the pre-historic times when it used to be known as Cölln, to when it became the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, to the united German empire, to the Weimar Republic, to the horrific Third Reich – has made it a canvas on which history has been painted.

Especially after World War II, the only continent in the world to be divided along Western and Soviet lines was Europe, the only country to be divided similarly was Germany, and the only city to be divided in that way was Berlin. It is a city that wears the lessons of this history proudly, through several memorials and through its architecture.

It is also here in Berlin that one finds great art, great music, great public spaces, and beautiful winters and summers. I spent most of my days hanging out at a park or by the canals. It really is a city worth pouring yourself into.

What business leader do you admire most? Pirojsha Godrej is a current-generation leader at the Godrej Group, a 129-year-old conglomerate. He once told me that he knows the value of the privilege he has and wants to build on the legacy of his family and the generations that have preceded him – to stand on the shoulders of giants rather than be crushed by their weight.

In the eight years I spent at the Godrej Group, I saw him fulfil that vision by scaling the real estate business 12x in ten years, leading the IPO of another business, and launching three new businesses, all while enabling several employees to build successful careers and positively impacting the lives of millions of customers.

Because of this humility, optimism, and ability to create impact, I admire his leadership the most.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? At ESMT, we had several courses exposing us to the history and development of AI, and the professors here encouraged us to use AI tools as brainstorming partners to deliver high-quality output.

Using AI with such regularity allowed me to see both its shortcomings and improvements over time. At the start of the degree, if I wanted an AI tool to work with me on an Excel file, I had to convert it first to a CSV and then ask the tool to write the formulas as plain text inside the CSV. Now we have Claude and ChatGPT as plugins in Excel. Before, I had to ask AI to create a presentation in HTML format and then save it as a PDF, but now the tools are quite capable of making PPTX files. Even now, the tools often hallucinate, cite wrong sources, and generally commit errors in several fields, but they are so much better than where we were in 2025. The frontier of AI keeps moving forward at breath-taking speeds.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? The biggest strength of ESMT is the magic of the admissions team in assembling a class of peers that magically fit together and complement each other. There is tremendous diversity, even with the selective class size of 31 people, and I got to study with peers who inspired me daily.

That said, if I had to pick one classmate that I admire the most, I would choose Gabriela Goelzar Bacelar. Gabi was previously an architect and spent 8+ years designing and curating spaces, and she brought the same sensibility to the MBA. Everyone who worked with her admired her ability to structure a perfect workplan and deliver high-quality, well-designed output. She was fully committed, dependable, and would keep the team motivated and together even when the going got tough. In parties and events, she was fun to talk to and often had a nice recommendation for cool places in Berlin. Finally, like many others in the class, Gabi showed a tremendous ability to adapt, reoriented her professional capabilities, and completed a successful stint as a marketer at one of Berlin’s biggest startups.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

• Create and grow a successful global business
• Build a library to give forward the gift of reading that my parents gave me, to the next generation

What made Punit such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“Among a strong cohort in the Class of 2026, Punit stands out for the way he engages with both ideas and the people around him. In our discussions around sustainable business, he has a remarkable ability to step back and see the broader picture while also unpacking the analytical details that matter. He frequently connects theoretical perspectives to his own professional experience in the startup scene and the real estate sector in India, bringing abstract concepts to life and making them more relevant to the class.

What I particularly appreciate about Punit is the breadth of his curiosity and the way it shapes his contributions. He is deeply engaged with emerging technologies such as AI, and he also writes poetry. This unusual combination reflects both analytical rigor and creative thinking. It is also visible in the classroom. He listens carefully, builds on others’ ideas, and explains complex topics with clarity. Students like Punit make a real difference in the learning environment, and his combination of curiosity, analytical strength, and creativity suggests that he will continue to bring thoughtful and original perspectives to the challenges he engages with in the future.”

Professor Hanna Setterberg
Affiliated Researcher
ESMT Berlin

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