Manish Pahwa

Bachelor of Engineering (with Honours) in the field of Electrical and Computer Systems Bachelor of Commerce

Are there any other notable experiences from your time at Monash you’d like to share?

There were so many, but probably having to build a walking robot that could climb stairs in under 12 weeks was definitely a standout. During my time at Monash, there were many memorable eureka feelings in the labs, having spent hours on projects such as detecting a water bottle through computer vision to making your own programming language compilers.

If you could tell your graduate self one piece of career advice what would it be and why?

Take a really thorough assessment of your skills and motivations to find the best work for yourself. Test out a bunch of different roles early in your career to see what really grabs your imagination, and know that your university experiences have prepared you to solve complex problems no matter the domain. Develop the confidence to take calculated risks, and put yourself out there to gain valuable experience.

Tell us about your experience since leaving Monash: how has your career progressed to date? Any professional achievements you’d like to share?

In my corporate career, I was able to climb the engineering ladder from a Graduate Engineer to being an Engineering Manager at Telstra and work on everything from Government networks and SMB SaaS solutions. Now I am a founder and CTO of a funded technology startup called StackGo, where we are accelerating the ecosystem SaaS tools to make it easier to have integrated experiences.

What are some of your passions and interests?

I love learning via reading books, my kindle has over 30 books I have not yet started reading. I'm also on a quest to find the best gelato in Melbourne.

I understand you came through the Accelerator program last year (2021) with your startup StackGo - how did the program support scaling up your business?

The Monash Generator team run an amazing program, my co-founder Matt and I were so fortunate to have been a part of the cohort. You meet some amazing people and every week there is a deep dive with an expert into an aspect of the business. Through the program, we were able to leverage the team's focus on creating a compelling narrative for sales and demonstrating them in a reworked pitch that we are using for fundraising.

What is your ultimate goal for StackGo?

StackGo will unleash business productivity with our contextual B2B SaaS tools. We want to create a space where our team can find meaningful work and relationships while building a rocketship!