Vishal Chandawarkar, BBA ’13/MBA ’20: Translating Ideas into Opportunities

Creating Verbalista

During his time working at LinkedIn, Chandawarkar became interested in international labor markets, particularly Brazil, which accounts for roughly half of the South American workforce. As a country where English is not commonly spoken, Chandawarkar wanted to know more about the international job opportunities available to corporate professionals who speak only Portuguese.

“I spent a lot of my time thinking about these new users. Like, you join LinkedIn, and you have no connections, you have nothing. No recommendations, no one speaks your language,” Chandawarkar said.

The more he explored this topic, the more Chandawarkar uncovered. The 3% of English-speaking Brazilians made 65% more income than their peers who spoke only Portuguese. The language barrier prevented thousands of highly talented professionals from taking advantage of the opportunities their peers were getting and also kept companies from accessing a large pool of highly qualified talent.

Those who spoke Portuguese and English often had access to resources not necessarily available to everyone else, like private schooling, travel, and exchange programs. Seeing an opportunity to level the playing field, Chandawarkar began developing a product to help employees work together across languages fluidly and without confusion or mistranslation: Verbalista.

“We started building a language-learning app. It was our first concept, a pre-pivot of what we do today. We wanted to hire our first engineer and posted a job with no language requirement for a software developer,” Chandawarkar said. “We got 330 applications in one day, which was another validating point — there are so many people here in Brazil qualified to do the work.”

Inspired by his experience hiring and working with a talented developer he may not have found otherwise, Chandawarkar and his small team realized there was an opportunity to make Verbalista more than just a language-learning app. 

“Instead of language learning, we wanted Verbalista to be what I call ‘language doing,’ which is essentially making all of your applications multilingual. We wanted to make it so you can just do your work in peace in the language you’re most comfortable with, and Verbalista helps you express your ideas in your stakeholders’ languages,” Chandawarkar explained.

Since that revelation, Verbalista has evolved into a full-fledged desktop application that smoothly integrates into whatever applications users work in, from Slack messages to emails, effortlessly translating across English, Spanish, and Portuguese without context switching.

Making the most of Michigan Ross resources

To build Verbalista into what it has become today, Chandawarkar leaned on his multidisciplinary education from the Ross School of Business, where he earned his BBA and MBA. 

“The MBA is flexible — you can kind of do whatever you want as long as you meet the requirements. I did product management for Michigan Online, audited undergraduate classes on game development in Unity, and took an Android class with Sanjeev Kumar,” Chandawarkar said. “I did all these different things just to round out my technical toolkit.”

This tech background, combined with work experience in different business areas, from advertising to brand management, helped Chandawarkar confidently tackle the challenge of starting a company and creating a product from scratch.

Chandawarkar also utilized connections from his time at Michigan Ross when rolling out his product, including someone he met during his Multidisciplinary Action Project as an MBA student.

“Our client for MAP was a software house in Peru called Tekton Labs. I reached out to our MAP sponsor, Kenneth Lopez from Tekton Labs, years after, and he actually became one of our mentors for Verbalista,” Chandawarkar said. “We also brought on a fractional CFO I knew from undergrad, Andrew Cohen; he's also a Ross BBA and has his Master’s of Accounting. That's kind of another interesting Michigan link that has helped the company quite a bit.”

In addition to collaborating with talent from across the Ross network, Chandawarkar utilized university resources like the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurship’s Desai Accelerator start-up program. 

“It's an insane program. The university invests in you, you get free interns all summer, and you get access to awesome mentors. We even made a connection with a development shop, Code Éxitos, in Honduras that’s really aligned with what we want to do,” Chandawarkar said. “Building a company is lonely, and it’s nice to meet with other people who are also going through it.”

“[The advising program] is an incredible resource that I think is under-utilized or could use more awareness in the alumni community. No other university gives this kind of support.”

Looking to the future

Chandawarkar hopes to continue growing Verbalista into a highly successful business and an innovative resource for people worldwide.

“For me, my brain is just thinking, can we turn this into a thing that is lucrative and helps a lot of people at the same time? That's why I worked at LinkedIn — that's their business. I want to be able to say that I've created something that does that, too,” he said.

To other alums and current Ross students interested in launching their own start-ups, Chandawarkar offered this advice:

“The first step is to just do it. Yes, creating a start-up is hard; it’s a lot. For me, it was a huge investment, I quit my tech job to do it. You definitely need a supportive community around you to make it happen,” Chandawarkar said. “I think that there's literally nothing holding you back. It's so easy to be like, ‘Oh, I don't know if my idea is good enough.’ It's easier than ever to spin up a product and get it into the market. AI has reached a point where there are a lot of tools where you can make a production-ready product just using plain English.”