Greater Purpose Growth Mindset

Making the Leap to Entrepreneur

Manish Chandra

05.13.22

Manish Chandra started his career as an engineer. He worked at startups with a few dozen people and larger companies with thousands of employees. Learn how he made the leap from engineer to entrepreneur.

Summary:

Manish Chandra started his career as an engineer. He worked at startups with a few dozen people and larger companies with thousands of employees. Learn how he made the leap from engineer to entrepreneur.

Thuy

When you went to study in college, you actually chose engineering. You have an engineering background. Your first job was as a software programmer at Intel. What made you want to become an entrepreneur?
Manish_Chandra

Manish Chandra

So, it’s been an interesting journey. I mean, I grew up seeing my grandfather as an entrepreneur, and certainly being in Silicon Valley, you are surrounded with entrepreneurship. And my career journey started with Intel, which at that time was actually a smaller company, but still a big company, from my perspective, there were 8,000 people.
And from there, I went to a small startup called Sybase, which had 80 people at that time. And then we saw it grow to 6,000 people. The company went public, became one of the largest database provider. From there, I went to a company with about eight people, joined them as an early startup employee. And we took that company public in 2000. And from there, I think the only thing left was to actually start my own company. And then the journey started. And my first company was Kaboodle, which I started back in 2005. And the second company, which I’m still building is Poshmark, which we started in 2011.