#32 Emerging Markets Leader's Talk -Episode&Guest #3-, Arvind Jha, Founder of Mithila Angel Network & MithilaStack Pvt Ltd(India)
If we humans put our mind and soul into anything, we can change our circumstances
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About Essence of Global Businesses
Concept and Purpose of "Emerging Markets Leader's Talk" featured in the “Essence of Global Businesses” newsletter
This series is dedicated to highlighting exceptional business and social leaders from emerging markets—individuals who are not only driving impact in their local communities and countries, but also contributing meaningfully to the global stage with a strong mission and vision.
Through in-depth features, we aim to share the essence of their journeys—including their actions, challenges, achievements, visions, and personal stories—with our global audience of curious and passionate learners.
By doing so, we hope to offer our readers meaningful inspiration, ideas, and insights that can add value to their own paths, especially as they navigate and shape the future of their own emerging frontiers.
Our prime 3rd Guest is Mr.Arvind Jha, Founder of Mithila Angel Network and MithilaStack Pvt Ltd, India.
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jalajboy/
X(Twitter) - https://x.com/jalajboy
Blog - https://medium.com/@jalajboy
Let’s talk with him !
Episode & Guest #1: Mr.Sleem Hasan, Founder and CEO of Privity FZ LLE(UAE)
Episode & Guest #2: Ms.Ha Dau, Co-Founder and Chairwoman of OMT Vietnam
1. About your individual career and activities in India and Global so far?
I studied Computer Science & Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and graduated in 1986. Since graduation, I wanted to build new products using the new technologies that were coming up in Computer Science domain – file systems, databases, user-interfaces, image processing, AI etc.
While many of my classmates went to US for higher studies, I had to stay back in India due to family needs. India preferred “services” route rather than “product” business and built large global companies employing hundreds of thousands of engineers over past 30 years. I stayed focused on R&D, product development and worked at leading US companies such as Polaroid, Adobe and some startups in my career journey.
With 20+ years of experience, I became a founder in 2008 and designed a video management system with clip catalogue and library management for mobile and internet video use-cases. However, we could not scale the business, and it had to be shut down.
I joined an Indian company who had a global product and ambition as Chief Product Officer and helped to re-position the thought leadership and direction of the product roadmap and technical upgradation. This led to the company becoming a “leader” in its category on global rankings within 2 years.
Since 2008, I have been working with startups, as a mentor/advisor/investor and helping startups, especially product based startups with product roadmap, GTM, team building and business guidance.
Since 2019, I began to focus on the startup and IT ecosystem in Bihar, one of the poorest states in India which had virtually zero jobs in software engineering or mentoring for startups. In the last 5 years, we have created some early momentum towards both.
2. About your Company/Organization
Currently we have two organisations.
First is Mithila Angel Network, which is an informal community of about 1000 professionals from the Mithila region of Bihar (Darbhanga, Madhubani, Sitamarhi, Saharsa etc) and works with 20+ startups in the region to help them mature their business models, offerings, GTM, partnerships and capital access challenges.
The other is MithilaStack, which is an IT products and services initiative with a view to create capability/capacity for IT jobs in a remote location and build a prototype that will inspire other companies to setup IT units at Darbhanga leading to change in economic status of the region, reversal of migration and revival of local culture, language, literature and traditions.
3. About your business and services at the organization/company?
The key advantage of Mithilastack is access to very talented local young people, who are eager to learn and show their skills at fairly low cost and participate in the global digital economy.
As software become more pervasive, the big cities have become very expensive and large parts of rural/Tier-3 cities have no young people left as there are no jobs locally. MithilaStack is an initiative to build local IT jobs in Darbhanga and train the local youth in state of the art software engineering, cloud technologies, GenAI tools etc and offer competence at attractive pricing to the world customers. As remote work grows, this will be a natural trend.
MithilaStack serves global customers looking for skilled engineering teams to work on web and mobile applications, cloud automation, use of GenAI to accelerate software development etc. Local startups use MithilaStack to quickly launch their products and services at low cost.
4. The market and industry landscape in your marketing nation including their emerging markets?
The software services industry is going through some major change as GenAI based code generation is making inroads. Customers are looking for engineers who understand GenAI and can use the fast emerging tools to both speed up development and productivity and also make their own products AI ready and capable.
On the other hand, the adoption of cloud is growing significantly and customers are looking to engineers to help build automation systems such that they can optimize cloud usage and costs and have production ready cloud infrastructure on demand.
MithilaStack offers both capabilities to global customers.
5. Point of the Business risks and difficulties(hard points)?
The biggest risk is our location, a Tier-3 city in India. This challenges us to scale number of engineers with required skills and we often need to train in-house.
Also, once trained, they may leave for other cities. If this happens before we reach critical mass, we could fail.
Another risk is that the location is relatively unknown for many. Though it has good connections, it poses an unfamiliarity risk for some customers.
6. The reason and background to start the business and seek for the values growth and expansion?
We started Mithilastack as a social objective to try to create jobs in a location that has a thousand plus years of history of learning and academic tradition; a strong culture of mathematics, language and logic skills but due to environmental factors that had missed the IT wave.
We wanted to show that we could hire, train and deliver world class software from such a location and inspire others to consider the local talent such that over 10-15 years, there could be reversal of migration and vibrant local IT ecosystem.
I belong to this region (I was born in a small village in the region) and I often felt that I owe a “debt” to the region. Since I had background in software engineering, some experience and some financial resources, we decided to do this as an experiment.
7. The mission and vision?
The mission is to build 50 engineers at Darbhanga by 2027 and 100 by 2030. This will hopefully inspire others to copy our initiative and by 2035, we could see 2000 engineers working out of Darbhanga, which would change the economic conditions and job expectations significantly.
8. Your individual plans in next 3 years, 5 years, 10 years in/with India and Global?
We want to build a stable team of 50 engineers at Darbhanga in 3 years and 100 by 5 years. If we are able to serve global customers and make this financially stable and profitable, we can look at build a 500 man team by 10 years.
We are also interested in inspiring and urging others to setup similar units so that the region can have 2000 engineers by 2030 and 5000 by 2035.
9. Challenges, difficulties, concerns, and matters you have been facing with for the plans achivement? The ways to solve and overcome such?
The biggest challenge has been lack of skilled local talent for which we are doing in-house training, internships and hands-on project work. This challenge is across all type of jobs – engineering, marketing, sales, finance etc.
We are also trying hybrid models where we hire remote workers from other parts of the country and have locals in Darbhanga collaborate with them. This teaches the local talent about processes, tools, communication etc which are vital skills.
10. Type of business partners you are seriously looking for now?
We are looking for partners with long-term relationship in mind and those whose goals are aligned to our social goals – creating jobs in a deficient area over 3-5 years by internal training, collaboration and hands-on project work.
Our partnerships could be outsourcing based on project based or both. Or could be in marketing / promotion of our capabilities.
The potential partner will have access to stable, high quality talent at significantly lower costs than similar opportunities in Bengaluru, Noida, Pune, Chennai etc.
11. Tips from your uniquely challenging career and life journey?
The reason for the Darbhanga campus is social objective to give back to native place and region where I was born.
The plan is to grow slowly and deliver software capabilities from basic web and mobile applications to AI based high class solutions over time. The strategy is to hire young graduates, train them and challenge them to learn new skills and processes.
In future, by 2027, we will start promoting Darbhanga as a preferred low cost destination for high quality work. This will help establish the location as an option for other companies to consider.
12. Essence of success of your global business and career
In the beginning, I was successful because I was good at detailed study of technologies, protocols, code review, programming language constructs and abstractions and also understanding of key business trends and needs.
I could align engineering to customer needs. As I grew in leadership, I was able to handle large teams due to my high communication skills, team building and mentoring skills.
The journey taught me that you can achieve great results with strong teams if you mentor the team, inspire them, challenge them and give them space to innovate. You cannot do everything yourself and micromanaging just ensures poor outcomes.I also learnt that you can also achieve great results with average team but exceptional team work.
The most important insight from my experience is that if we humans put our mind and soul into anything, we can change our circumstances. In 2019, no one was supportive of the idea that we can have a software team at Darbhanga that could do world class software delivery. In 2025, this is very much real and by 2030 we will have 100 people team for sure.
13. Any message and advice to corporates(or individuals) who are willing to collaborate with companies in emerging markets, India, and global? Any message and advise to corporates who are willing to collaborate with foreign companies like Japanese companies?
Companies or individuals looking to collaborate with companies in emerging markets must assess the objectives / long-term goals of the founders / leaders. If the goals are short-term, the collaboration may fail if there are any missed steps, unexpected challenges, any wrong decisions etc. But if there is deep resolve and long-term belief, then the two teams can overcome challenges and deliver strong results.
Owner’s View
Our friend Arvind-san is an authentic business leader who has worked at the forefront of his industry through trial and error, choosing to remain based in India while many others moved to the US.
Interestingly, with his years of experience, he has started working with startups as a mentor, advisor, and investor—especially supporting product-based startups with product roadmaps, go-to-market strategies, team building, and business guidance.
Recently, he has begun to focus on the startup and IT ecosystem in Bihar, one of the poorest states in India, which until recently had virtually no jobs in software engineering or support for startup mentoring.
Naturally, this is a tough challenge, especially in their Tier-3 city location. Scaling the number of engineers with the required skills is difficult, and they often have to train people in-house. And once trained, many may leave for opportunities in other cities.
The location also presents a challenge in terms of visibility. Though it has decent connectivity, it remains relatively unknown to many, posing a risk of unfamiliarity for some customers.
Still, I remain positive and deeply respectful of Arvind-san’s broader mission—not just economic, but social. He’s trying to create jobs and opportunities in a place with a thousand-year tradition of learning and academic excellence.
His mission, vision, and future plans are all clearly defined.
At MithilaStack, the young talents are developing strong foundations in technology, protocols, code review, programming abstractions, and business understanding. As they grow, I believe they’ll also excel in leadership—thanks to their communication skills, team spirit, and mentoring abilities. In many ways, they’re walking the same path that Arvind-san has walked throughout his own life.
I fully expect his goals to be realized in the near future. I’m confident of this simply because he understands a core truth: great results come from strong teams that are mentored, inspired, challenged, and given the freedom to innovate. He knows he can’t—and shouldn’t—do everything himself. Micromanagement only leads to poor outcomes.
And in the end, if we humans put our hearts and minds into something, we truly can change our circumstances.
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About Essence of Global Businesses
Stay tuned for Episode #4 of the “Emerging Markets Leader’s Talk”—featuring our next guest and another inspiring story coming soon!
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