Vikram Somaya, Senior Vice President, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, PepsiCo

Vikram Somaya’s path to power

Interesting people and compelling problems have been my guiding light. Starting out in a creative advertising agency, the most consistent theme in my journey has been the combination of human behavior and the use of information to enable a variety of activities. I spent the next decade in a variety of technology startups learning that innovation can come from many sources and that courage, discipline and persistence are the necessary ingredients to building out businesses from scratch. I also learned that listening to those around you can be the most powerful way to get things done.

I then spent the next decade of my career in large media companies like Reuters, the Weather Channel and ESPN/Disney. Learning how to re-organize my startup street fighting skills to a more corporate environment with significantly more resources but also significantly more bureaucracy was a powerful catalyst to allowing me to think differently. Again, as with the advertising world and the technology world, media was full of amazing, talented and giving people who were happy to share their time and experience.

I found a home at PepsiCo, a virtual world within a company, with leaders that are focused on changing the way the company operates using the currency of data and analytics as a foundation. That was a rare and wondrous thing and has allowed me to envision and execute at a scale that I could only have imagined earlier in my career.