When this fall's first students at Ohio State University's Center for Software Innovation get to graduation, Shereen Agrawal wants their toughest choice to be whether to take a choice job or found their own company.
Agrawal is the inaugural executive director of the software center, established with a record $110 million donation. She's responsible for daily operations as well as building the curriculum and overseeing the mission of preparing a future tech workforce that makes a lasting impact on societal problems.
“I want to be part of making a tech hub that is already very much in formation,” Agrawal said. “This is an opportunity to create more of a center of gravity around Columbus, around the university, to define what technology and innovation mean here."
The Timashev Family Foundation, led by serial entrepreneur and OSU graduate Ratmir Timashev, donated $110 million in February to establish the center. The funding covers a future building, faculty, curriculum and Techstars accelerator, which has applications open for its first cohort of startups.
The software center also is hosting the Startup Midwest tech conference Oct. 24-25.
Timashev is a speaker, along with Carl Eschenbach, co-CEO at Workday; Lt. Gov. Jon Husted; and Andrew Lang, global CTO of JPMorgan Chase and an Ohio State alum. The New York City banking giant has a large tech office in Columbus.
Besides finalizing the conference planning, Agrawal is spending the fall building relationships. She's focused on opening up hands-on learning, internships and eventual career paths for the students just getting started this semester. The universal reaction she’s heard is curiosity and eagerness to get involved.
“My mandate is to make that very accessible and create a lot more of those opportunities,” Agrawal said.
The center’s focus fits Agrawal's experience, including her most recent Columbus consulting firm. In past roles at Columbus-based Root Inc. and Twitter in Silicon Valley, she was in charge of bringing new technologies to market.
Broadly, a go-to-market approach means starting with customer needs in mind at the earliest design for a product, well before any sales and marketing stage.
"It’s everything around defining what you’re building, for whom, and how you are making it relevant to them and getting it in front of them," Agrawal said.
“How do you get in front of people whose eyeballs are saturated?" she said. "Getting your share of attention is increasingly an art. You have to be super thoughtful agile and strategic."
What worked for the fastest-growing startups a decade ago might not work today, so the center needs to prepare students adept at pivoting.
“As the industry changes fast, we’ll be able to change and adapt to create the most agile skillset,” Agrawal said.
A former Root Inc. executive, most recently Agrawal was co-founder of Columbus consulting firm Embedded Services, a group of startup veterans serving as "fractional operators" to help tech startups with business development and bringing products to market.
She worked a decade in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, according to her LinkedIn profile, starting her career as an analyst at Intel Corp., then at startups and four years at Twitter, now called X.
Agrawal, 38, is from Warren in Northeast Ohio. She and her husband, Columbus entrepreneur Saket Agrawal, met while working at Intel in California, first bonding over their Buckeye backgrounds.
Since moving back six years ago, Agrawal said, she’s noticed a true community-building spirit in Ohio.
“You talk to one person, and they say, ‘Let me introduce you to these five people.’ Everyone knows we can be greater as a whole,” she said. “It sounds like it should be simple, but it’s something I found is very prevalent here, something a lot of people feel.
“There’s a lot of grit. A willingness to do the hard work, learn the hard things, and get your hands into it.”
