Avinash Kaushik Featured in the Book – Pioneers of Digital

Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik is an energetic and passionate evangelist for web analytics and results-oriented digital marketing working at Google as their Digital Marketing Evangelist. He is the bestselling author of Web Analytics an Hour a Day, a prolific blogger and must-see keynote speaker, who has distilled the art of navigating web metrics into an entertaining, engaging and valuable business essential.

Here’s an excerpt from the Avinash Kaushik chapter in the book:

“In 1995 he took a ‘leap of faith’ and travelled to the United States to do an MBA at Ohio State University. He’d got three college acceptances in all, but fancied Ohio as he was ‘sick of the desert’ and was intrigued by the prospect of seeing lots of snow. He had saved enough money for 5 months’ tuition, but, buoyed by the opportunity to work legally for 20 hours a week as a student, he took a job in the university archives driving a forklift truck. Job aside, he still had little money to make ends meet so would only allow himself to eat breakfast and dinner.

Throwing himself into his studies, he took as many different classes as he could in finance, logistics, international law, marketing and sales. Loving the exposure to all this new information, he joined all sorts of related clubs as well. His favourite was an alumni CEO initiative, because he not only got a free lunch but was able to rub shoulders with the types of senior executives he wouldn’t have a hope of meeting in the professional world for some time. Of those precious moments Kaushik says: ‘It turned out to be the single greatest thing I did in MBA School because having access to these CEOs, hearing them talk about their companies and asking them questions about their real challenges was such an incredible learning experience for me.’

His first dalliance with the web had come while in Saudi Arabia, when being introduced to e-mail and the notion that someone on the other side of the world could reply to a message the same day had him reeling in amazement. A class in management information systems (MIS) at Ohio State presented the notion of database design, and this learning, coupled with the burgeoning world wide web, started to really sow the seeds of what was to come for Avinash Kaushik.”

Read more about Avinash Kaushik and his amazing career in Pioneers of Digital.