Kannan Helps Fellow Students Through Business Acumen

Vinesh Kannan (CS ’19) took full advantage of the opportunities available to him at Illinois Institute of Technology, steering his course of study beyond the classroom and into the world of entrepreneurship.

During his first year at Illinois Tech, Kannan and classmate Brendan Batliner (CS ’19) were talking about ways to improve communications between students and professors working on team projects. After conducting their own research, Kannan and Batliner built their own company, Omnipointment.

“Both of us were really frustrated with team projects in college. We wanted to learn more about that challenge and find ways to address it with the skills we were learning,” Kannan says. “The first tool we created was a simple meeting schedule tool, but it was addressing a problem we heard from university students all across the country.”

Omnipointment evolved to provide analytics to professors and to give students access to free software, which allow teams to function better. Kannan and Batliner spent months talking to students from 60 universities about their needs before building Omnipointment. By the end of the year, Omnipointment was accepted into a startup accelerator program. The two spent that summer in Omaha, Nebraska, studying customer needs and generating revenue. During the second year they learned about the needs of professors.

“In particular, we worked on problems for designing effective team activities and projects for computer science students,” Kannan says. “That work allowed us to intersect with Mimir, a company that builds software for universities that teach computer science. In the fall 2017 we agreed to sell Omnipointment to Mimir, and I agreed to join Mimir to help run their curriculum operations.”

Kannan says selling Omnipointment was an easy decision, as it gave him the opportunity to learn business skills with experienced business people.

“It was an opportunity to keep learning and growing with the company, and we were lucky to have that opportunity,” he says. “It’s an amazing way to learn how technology is taken to the world and how businesses can be designed to better understand their customers’ actual needs.”

Kannan left Mimir in December, and after graduating this spring will begin working at Google as a software engineer in Pittsburgh, specifically on machine learning projects. Before going to Pittsburgh, Kannan will head to Washington, D.C., to work for the Bureau of Labor Statistics through the Civic Digital Fellowship, a program in which college recruits work with a federal agency for a summer. Kannan says he will be the only computer scientist on a team that includes psychologists, economists, and statisticians. The opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary team excites him, he says, as well working within the civics field.

“If technology is your job or profession, you may not have the agency or personal and financial freedom to dig into systems that are unethical,” he says. “Some of the most influential things have not just been what I learned in the classes, but also what I’ve learned from journalists, policymakers, activists, and other researchers in disciplines outside of computer science who are tackling difficult problems as they relate to technology. I think it’s important to be part of the solution more than the problem, but it’s still unclear to me how to do that.”