The Ironman triathlete who will save you from criminals on the web

Ironman triathlete, cybercrime sleuth, tech entrepreneur: Manjula Sridhar is a lady of many hats. Photo credit: Peevee.

It was 8 a.m., which is early by event standards, when I walked into an IT firm’s hall in Pune, where Manjula Sridhar, founder of ArgByte Technologies, which tackles cybercrime, like online harassment, hacking, and spamming, was scheduled to give her talk.

She stood, all 5’3” or so of her, her curling hair cropped short, barely hiding her impatience, as people trickled in. She had a smile on her face, but there was also steel on her sharply cut features, as she said, “All late comers must pay hundred rupees (US$1.50) as fine.” And when people didn’t respond at first, thinking she was joking, the steel crept into her voice, “No, I’m serious!” And she grinned mischievously as grown-up attendees meekly deposited their fine on the table in front of her. After the talk, she returned the money to some of the young, college age, folks who had paid up.

The steel in Manjula’s persona was not surprising, neither was her sense of humor. She is an endurance sports enthusiast. She has cycled 600 km non-stop from Pune to Kolhapur and back in 30 hours. She is one of the few Indian women who took part and completed an Ironman 70.3 triathlon event, which includes 1.9 km swimming in the ocean, 90 km cycling, 21.09 km running, to be done in 8.5 hours. And she didn’t even know swimming when she registered for it!

But even before that, Manjula earned a black belt in karate during her school days. She’s also a mountaineer. Anyone who does an endurance sport knows it takes steely grit, or should I say Ironman grit, laced with liberal doses of humor, to pursue it – all traits that come handy when one dons the entrepreneur hat.

Her work in tech has won multiple awards – the Lucent Innovator Award, Bell Labs President’s Gold Award, and so on – and she has filed for several patents in wireless and network management.

Currently, a Fellow at Indian tech think tank iSPIRT and a mentor at Microsoft Ventures accelerator, Manjula is bootstrapping ArgByte. Her talk in Pune was to kick off iSPIRT’s ProductNation bootcamp for early stage startups.

See: Here seasoned founders make bulbs flash in the heads of newbies

The explorer in her

So who was Manjula Sridhar? An athlete? An entrepreneur? A cybercrime super sleuth? With such a multi-faceted personality, telling Manjula’s story becomes an exercise in, ‘where do I begin’.

She grew up in small towns of Karnataka, where her father, a government officer in the irrigation department, used to be posted. “There is a village called Mallat, in Raichur district of Karnataka, which is one of the most backward areas, where I studied up to class 7 in a government school,” she recalls.

I come from an academic background. From there to jumping into entrepreneurship, and creating a company, was itself a very big deal.

Science and technology had fascinated her since her childhood.

Cashing out: the first startup exit

From the frying pan to the fire

Then the penny dropped

The web of crime

Where cops aren’t enough

Google’s on it too