Anudit Vikram, Chief Product Officer for MediaMath
Anudit is a business and technology leader in the advertising and marketing technologies space. His deep experience in data centric product innovation and design and innate understanding of the ad-tech space make him a frequent contributor to industry publications, conferences, and round-tables. As the Chief Product Officer for MediaMath, Anudit is responsible for the strategy and roadmap of the entire suite of MediaMath’s product capabilities. He drives the evolution, positioning, and launch of new features and programs across all regions and brings MediaMath’s product vision to life.
Prior to MediaMath, Anudit has worked at Dun & Bradstreet, Merkle, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other noteworthy organizations leading teams and – in his words – “building cool stuff … changing the world one release at a time!” A past board member of the IAB Data Center of Excellence and co-chair of the B2B Committee, Anudit is also active in helping shape the industry as it shape-shifts through its maturation. Anudit holds a Masters in Technology Management from Columbia University and a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Pune (India). He lives in NYC with his wife and is an avid photographer and optimistic golfer in his spare time.
Q: Why do you choose to spend your time mentoring others?
A: One simple reason is that I have personally experienced the benefits of being mentored by somebody. My wife and I often look back and think if we had somebody mentoring us when we were in our early twenties, and we went and made some different decisions then, it would have helped us a lot more today. Given that, I want to give back and make sure that anybody who can gain from my experiences has the chance.
Q: What do you personally gain from mentoring?
A: It's amazing how much you can learn from people who are much younger than you are. They see the world from a very different lens. My mentorship through Ceresa is a very professional focused mentorship and my mentee is in the telecom business. I'm in a completely different business, yet I learn from him and see a worldview that I wouldn't otherwise see. So as much as I hope I'm helping him, I know that I’m benefitting from learning something new.
Q: To what do you attribute your success?
A: The single biggest thing responsible for anyone’s success, not just mine, is showing up. It's being there and persevering through things when they're not going in the right direction and you feel that everything is going against you. But very often, the difference between someone who manages to succeed and other people who don't get to that level of success is the fact that the person kept showing up. It doesn't matter whether it was working or not. You keep showing up and doing what you have to do. That, I think, is the single biggest factor in my success.
“The single biggest thing responsible for anyone’s success, not just mine, is showing up.”
Secondly, having a strong sense of integrity. Being transparent about what you are doing, what you are looking for, and having a strong moral compass is required for sustained success. You could take shortcuts to success by doing things that are not right, but I believe that you won’t be able to sustain the success.
Finally, identify what success means to you and then go after that, because if you are going after something that is not truly making you happy, then that success is useless. So, you have to decide what success is for you and then go after that. That’s what’s worked for me.
Q: What does good mentoring look like to you?
A: Good mentorship is putting yourself in the shoes of the person that you're mentoring. It is being vulnerable and walking them through how you arrive at a decision, not just telling them what the decision should be. You can't apply your rules to their world.
Q: What advice would you give to someone interested in mentoring?
A: To be a good mentor, you have to put yourself in the mind and the shoes of the person you are mentoring; you need to draw on your experience and then translate it into a way that the person can take action on.
I look forward to my conversations with my current Ceresa mentee. I know for that one hour when I'm talking to him, I'm going to be in a different world. I'm going to be in his world. I'm almost living in the Netherlands. I'm talking about how his prime minister takes a bicycle to work, and his king flies a plane as a commercial pilot. I'm learning about things that I would have never known otherwise. It's beautiful.
Q: How has mentoring impacted your own journey?
A: There was an inflection point in my career, when I was making the move from an individual contributor to a manager. I had a mentor who introduced me to the concept of servant leadership: you don't assume that something is given to you. You need to give so that you will get. Which means that just because you are a manager of a team, doesn't mean that they will respect you. You respect them in order to get their respect.
He also explained the difference between a manager and a leader. A leader leads from the front when times are problematic. If you're walking into a storm, as a true leader, you want to be the first person walking into the storm, so you protect the people behind you. But that very same leader will move to the back of the pack when the storm has passed, and it is now sunny and bright because a leader wants his/her team to experience what is best for them while guiding from the back.
Another mentor taught me a reframing of a Buddhist quote which says between every action and reaction is an infinite gap, and in that gap is infinite wisdom. You may have no control over the action that happened to you, but you have full control over how you react to it. I take that to heart. And these two things are small, but they guide my life in many ways. And I wouldn't have known of them if it hadn't been for these mentors in my life.
Q: Why do you choose to mentor with Ceresa?
A: I chose to mentor with Ceresa because what Ceresa does completely resonates with how I believe the world will become a better place. I'm thankful that I have this opportunity to work with the Ceresa team and help people. I would say anybody who has the opportunity should take it.
Mentorship: integral to the Ceresa whole-person approach
At Ceresa, mentorship is an integral part of our leadership development process. The mentor-mentee relationship is a key component in providing the structure, and at the same time fluidity, necessary to facilitate pointed leadership and career growth for both the participant and the mentor.