Akshay Kothari, an Indian-born entrepreneur, founded Pulse while he was still in his university, pursuing his Master’s degree. The application ended up being acquired by the Microsoft-owned job site LinkedIn. Kothari then went on to become a co-founder of the productivity tool Notion, currently valued at around $10 billion (₹83,981 crore).

In a podcast, Kothari said that Pulse started out as a class project when he was at Stanford University, and was built in seven weeks. It was an award-winning application that allowed users to access their favourite content, from traditional news sources to blogs and social networks, all within a single interface.

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The defining moment for Pulse came when it received a mention by Apple‘s co-founder Steve Jobs during the WWDC conference in 2010, Kothari says. After about three years of running the company, and scaling to amass 3 crore users, Kothari and co-founder Ankit Gupta decided to join hands with LinkedIn and eventually sold it off for $90 million (₹755 crore).

Kothari continued to be associated with the Microsoft-owned firm as their product lead and eventually became the head of the company’s India business in 2016.

While that may sound like an achievement in itself, what followed is even more huge. After working for LinkedIn for over five years, Kothari set out for a new adventure. He invested in Notion, a note-taking app, and came on board as a chief operating officer and eventually was named a co-founder by founder Ivan Zhao.

It was as a tough decision when the company hit a deadlock and did not grow for about five years. But eventually, things picked up and Notion clocked in 100 million users in August this year.

Kothari also spoke about his humble beginnings in Ahmedabad, where he was born and his entrepreneurial skills were highly influenced by the Gujaratis around him. “Gujaratis are among the most enterprising and entrepreneurial people I have come across,” Kothari says. 

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