Sramana Mitra

Early life and family

Sramana was born in Calcutta, India, in an old family with roots in entrepreneurship, as well as education and public service. Her father Probir Mitra, founded Himalaya Shipping, one of the first container shipping lines in India. Her great grandfather, Sir P.C. Mitter was an Advocate of the Calcutta High Court, a Minister in pre-independence Bengal. He was also a member of the delegation to the Roundtable Conference in 1930-32. Sir Ramesh Chandra Mitra, his father, was Judge of the High Court, Calcutta, who was also for some time the first Officiating Indian Chief Justice.

Education

Sramana attended the Gokhale Memorial Girls' school in Calcutta. In 1989, she left India for college in the United States. She has a B.S. in Computer Science and Economics from Smith College and a Masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Career

Sramana Mitra has been pursuing entrepreneurship since 1994, having started 4 different companies including One Million by One Million, her current company. She started her first company DAIS while still a student at MIT. Later, she moved to the Silicon Valley and is now based in Menlo Park, CA.

Prior to founding One Million by One Million, Sramana founded three companies. Her first company was an off-shore services ventures using an India operation in Calcutta. Her second company Intarka was spun out of DAIS and offered a sales lead generation and qualification software using Artificial Intelligence technologies. Intarka's product, ProspectMiner was 100% engineered in India and the company was one of the first India product companies to raise funding from the Silicon Valley VCs. NEA funded the company.

Her third company, Uuma was an online personalized store for selling clothes using Expert Systems software. DAIS and Intarka were acquired. Uuma received an acquisition offer from Ralph Lauren which the company did not accept.

As a strategy consultant, Sramana has consulted with over 80 companies between the years 2000 and 2010, including public companies such as SAP, Cadence Design Systems, Webex, KLA-Tencor, Best Buy, MercadoLibre and Tessera. Her work has also included numerous startups and VCs. She was interim VP of Marketing for seven such ventures.

Her fields of experience span from hard core technology disciplines like semiconductors and EDA, drawing upon her MIT EECS background, to sophisticated consumer marketing industries including fashion and education.

In 2010, Sramana founded One Million by One Million (1M/1M), a global virtual accelerator that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million and beyond in annual revenue. 1M/1M is her fourth venture and is based out of the Silicon Valley and operates as a virtual company with team spread all over the world, including different parts of the USA, India, Philippines, Malaysia, Turkey and Israel.

Blog

Sramana Mitra has been blogging at "Sramana Mitra on Strategy" since 2005, extensively covering technology businesses from startups to Fortune 500 companies with a special emphasis on technology entrepreneurship.

Journalism

She is/has been a contributing writer for LinkedIn, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, Small Business Trends, Business Insider, ReadWriteWeb, The Economic Times, Xconomy and Women 2.0. Some of her most famous commentaries are : Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw, Talented Women: Please DO NOT Quit, Web 3.0 = (4C+P+VS).

Feminism

Sramana takes a unique position on feminism and has written extensively about the subject both as a woman and also an entrepreneur. She does not believe that there is a bias against women entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley or the technology industry in general. Her philosophy of feminism is individualism, being true to one's own authentic self.

Capitalism

This is another topic that Sramana writes frequently on. She is a strong believer in Capitalism and argues that it has been hijacked by speculators and that the value creators are no longer at the center of the system. Her Forbes column, Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw speaks to the speculator vs value creator debate. Her vision, Capitalism 2.0 is a distributed, democratic capitalism that will reset the power structure and build fortune in the middle of the pyramid.

The arts

Sramana has written about the next decade of Silicon Valley being based on the Renaissance Mind - at the intersection of science, technology and the liberal arts. She pursues various arts including dance, poetry, painting and theater.

She studied watercolor painting under the renowned Indian water colorist Sri Ramananda Bandopadhyay. She also collaborated with photographer William Carter on Golder Raft, a digital juxtaposition of Carter's black and white photography with Sramana's translations of Rabindranath Tagore's poetry.

Sramana studied Kathak under Rubi Bandopadhyay in Calcutta and is an avid dancer. Later, she studied the Argentine Tango in Boston, San Francisco and Buenos Aires.

Trivia

Sramana was in Buenos Aires when she got fired from Intarka in 1999. She spent her time dancing 12 hours a day to absorb the blow.

In the LinkedIn Top Influencer 2015 interview, Sramana said, "Not being greedy is a competitive advantage."