Sridhar Poduri
Product Leader Turned AI Founder | Coaching Early-Stage Founders
Studied at Stanford University
Hiring Manager at Fluxonix
Available Monday at 2:00 PM UTC
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Sridhar's Offerings
Custom hourly · $100/hr
Sridhar’s Startup Founders Qualifications
Experience level: Director
Over the last 25+ years, I’ve built my career across engineering, enterprise consulting, product management, and startup entrepreneurship. I began as a software engineer, spent several years helping enterprise customers solve complex business and technology problems as a consultant, and then spent more than 15 years leading products and product strategy in the technology industry. Today, I’m the founder of an AI startup building agentic software for enterprise customers. I coach aspiring and early-stage founders who are navigating the realities of turning an idea into a business. Whether you’re evaluating a startup idea, conducting customer discovery, building an MVP, thinking through product strategy, exploring AI opportunities, or deciding whether to leave a stable career to pursue entrepreneurship, I can help you think through the tradeoffs and avoid common mistakes. What makes my perspective different is that I’m not teaching entrepreneurship from a textbook or from a startup exit that happened years ago. I’m actively building a company today while balancing the same challenges many founders face: product development, customer acquisition, fundraising decisions, personal finances, family responsibilities, and long-term career risk. My goal is to provide practical, honest guidance grounded in real-world experience rather than startup mythology. If you’re considering a startup journey, building an AI-enabled product, or simply trying to determine whether entrepreneurship is the right next step for you, I’d be happy to help.
About Sridhar
My career has been shaped by solving complex problems at the intersection of technology, business, and people. I started as a software engineer, spent several years in enterprise consulting helping organizations solve large-scale business challenges, and then spent more than 15 years in product management and product strategy, building enterprise software used by customers around the world. Today, I’m the founder of an AI startup focused on helping organizations capture operational knowledge and make better decisions through AI. Throughout my career, I’ve learned that great products and great companies are rarely built by following frameworks alone. They emerge from deeply understanding customer problems, asking better questions, validating assumptions, and making thoughtful tradeoffs. That’s the perspective I bring to every coaching engagement. Whether you’re navigating a transition into product management, building an AI-powered product, or launching your first startup, my goal is to help you think more clearly, make better strategic decisions, and avoid costly mistakes. I won’t promise easy answers, but I will challenge your assumptions, share practical insights from decades of experience, and work with you to develop a path forward that’s grounded in both customer value and business reality. Outside of coaching, I’m passionate about entrepreneurship, AI, and the future of enterprise software. I’m actively building my own company, which means the challenges we discuss aren’t theoretical. They are problems I am working through every day alongside founders and product leaders around the world. I believe better questions lead to better products, better businesses, and ultimately better careers.
Why do I coach?
I coach because I have benefited tremendously from mentors, colleagues, customers, and advisors who challenged my thinking at pivotal moments in my career. The best advice I ever received wasn’t a solution, it was a better question. Those conversations changed the way I approached technology, products, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Today, I enjoy paying that forward. I find genuine satisfaction in helping people step back from the day-to-day noise, think more clearly about the problem they’re trying to solve, and make better strategic decisions. Whether you’re building a product, starting a company, or navigating a career transition, my goal isn’t to tell you what to do. It’s to help you develop the clarity and confidence to make the right decisions for your own situation. Some of the most rewarding moments in my career have come from seeing someone leave a conversation with a new perspective, a concrete plan, and renewed confidence. If I can help you get there a little faster or avoid a few expensive mistakes along the way, then I have done my job.
Work Experience
Founder
Fluxonix
May 2025 - Present
Hiring Manager
Head of Platform
Microsoft
August 2019 - May 2025
Interviewer
Conduct customer interviews to ascertain requirements, building strong enterprise-wide relationships with distributed teams. Analyze challenges, prioritize action according to business alignment and timeline, and create business requirements and scope for engineering team to execute. Guide and mentor staff. Manage stakeholder expectations and provide regular program status updates to leaders. Proactively analyze security processes and create solutions to preemptively mitigate identified risks. Specifications, User Experience (UX) and +14 skills
Senior Technical Program Manager
amazonwebservicesaws.com
May 2016 - July 2019
Interviewer
Gained comprehensive understanding of competitive landscape and user needs, created product roadmaps, and held teams accountable to execution of strategic vision. Cultivated and maintained strong client relationships. Ensured that new feature releases did not adversely impact existing government programs and businesses. Influenced leadership to enact 3-year strategic plan built to address long-term issues, modernize technology stack, and align feature sets to business need. Reduced employee churn, increased responsiveness to customer needs, and transformed team into nimble organization ready to respond to modern-day dynamics. Specifications, Product Adoption and +9 skills
Lead Product Owner
Smartron LLC
May 2015 - May 2016
Joined start-up developing, producing, and launching Windows-based 2-in-1 mobile devices in India markets. Formed partnerships with vendors including Realtek, Microsoft, and Intel, as well as device manufacturers. Traveled to multiple original device manufacturers (ODMs) in China, overcoming culture and language barriers to create successful partnerships. Gained comprehensive knowledge of hardware development and delivery through research and experience. Led product development from industrial design phase to prototype phase to launch within 9 months. Facilitated factory review of first-off production units to validate designs. Collaborated with credit card companies and other financial institutions to create customer financing options, increasing opportunities for customer engagement and expanding purchasing power. Specifications, User Experience (UX) and +7 skills
Chief Technology Officer
3x3conect
July 2014 - July 2015
Hiring Manager
Provided stable technology leadership in volatile start-up environment. Established company objectives and goals to develop software platform that would disrupt and modernize communication between teachers and parents in India. Recruited, hired, and coached strong team of 20 developers. Devised, designed, and developed flexible education platform, MyCampus365, and overcame minimal brand recognition to grow platform to 250 schools and colleges throughout India. Specifications, Planning and +6 skills
Education
Stanford University
Engineering and business management
Activities and societies: Stanford Venture Studio (SVS) Member Analytics, Entrepreneurship and +6 skills
Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University
Bachelor of Technology (BTech), Mechanical Engineering
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