Akhilesh Vyas

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

“A curious mind fascinated by the physics of Nature, who enjoys writing poetry to inspire.”

Hometown: Jodhpur, Rajasthan

Fun Fact About Yourself: My path to engineering started with a childhood obsession with the Indian monsoon; to this day, I permanently keep a live weather radar tab open on my screen, with latest updates on how the monsoon is progressing.

Undergraduate School and Major: Dual Degree (B.Tech + M.Tech) in Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science, IIT Bombay

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Startup India, Invest India (Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India), Manager

Aside from your classmates, what was the key part of IIM Bangalore’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? Having worked across completely different domains from management consulting and early-stage startups to government policy making. My experiences sometimes felt like separate puzzle pieces. I chose IIM Bangalore because its case-study learning methodology, led by world-class professors, is exactly what I needed to connect the dots between these diverse fields.

Analyzing real business scenarios every day helps me tie my background together, giving me a broader perspective and equipping me with the practical, real world ready skills and knowledge I need for the next step in my career.

What has been your favorite course or extracurricular activity at IIM Bangalore? What has been the most important lesson that you have learned from it? Entrepreneurship Management. This course was driven by brilliant real-world case studies, diverse perspectives from my classmates, and the masterful guidance of Prof. Srivardhini K. Jha.

The biggest lesson I took away is that successful entrepreneurship isn’t just about a spark of inspiration; it is about the deliberate processes, hard trade-offs, and daily actions that build a startup’s longevity.

The highlight was a live project where we worked directly with startup founders to solve their immediate business bottlenecks. Having previously designed state level and national level programs and frameworks, stepping into the trenches to help individual founders solve their immediate business needs, deciding which customer segment to operate and scale, was a deeply rewarding, full-circle moment for me.

What makes Bengaluru such a great place to earn your MBA? Bengaluru is a live business case study. You can sit in a cafe down the street from campus and literally hear a founder pitching to a venture capitalist at the next table. It’s an incredibly high-energy city, where the tech and business frameworks we talk about in class are actively being built and broken outside our gates every day.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: My biggest accomplishment is simply having the curiosity and adaptability to jump into completely different worlds, even when it felt uncomfortable.

I went from the highly-structured, numbers-driven environment of Management consulting at L.E.K. Consulting to the dynamic, fast-paced execution of a young startup, and then into the massive machinery of national ecosystem enablement at Startup India.

It wasn’t a straight line, but the real achievement has been learning and adapting quickly in very different unfamiliar domains. Proving to myself that I could thrive in all three environments, while keeping up the academic rigor from IIT Bombay to IIM Bangalore, is what I’m proudest of doing.

IIMB feels like the perfect place to finally tie all these different experiences together.

Describe your biggest accomplishment as an MBA student so far: Honestly, just surviving the transition back to intense academic life after over six years of working was the first major hurdle.

My proudest moments have included balancing the intensity and pace of the EPGP program, managing the expectations of a highly sharp cohort, attending networking sessions, participating in sports and cultural events, and delivering actual, usable value to a real startup as a part of a project. It proved to me that my past experiences weren’t just scattered lines on a resume, they actually translate into real-world business problem-solving.

What is your class’s favourite hangout away from school? Why do you gather there? Our cohort usually gravitates toward the lively cafes, restaurants, and movie theaters around JP Nagar and Bannerghatta Road. After a brutal week of quantitative exams, case deadlines, and relative grading, we gather there to completely drop the business jargon. There are no discussions about “synergy” or “market entry frameworks” allowed. We go there to grab a good meal, catch the latest movies, and laugh through the shared intensity of the MBA timeline. It’s the perfect, low-stakes environment where we transition from being intense classmates to real, lifelong friends.

What do you hope to do after graduation? After graduation, I want to step into a leadership role where high-level strategy meets actual, everyday execution. Specifically, I aim to work within fast-scaling technology ecosystems driving growth and business strategy. Having worked both in the trenches with early-stage founders and at the ministerial level on national policy frameworks, I want to be in the room where complex technical innovations are scaled into sustainable, real-world businesses.

What advice would you give to help potential applicants gain admission into IIM Bangalore? I think IIM Bangalore really values who you are as a whole person. If you have unique hobbies or a non-traditional background – whether it’s student leadership, theatre, or archiving old literature – talk about it honestly. It shows your real personality and curiosity outside of work.

The key is to balance your personality attributes with honest examples of what you actually achieved at your job. Don’t just list your daily responsibilities; explain how you adapted to tough challenges, solved real problems, irrespective of the problem being big or small, what actions did you take and how it impacted your team or organization. Putting together these aspects of one’s journey can really make you stand out.

 

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