From Classrooms to Clinics: What Raghab Panda's Career Pivots Teach Us About Reinvention
- Dr Sp Mishra
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Part of the Pivoting Series on India Career Centre
Raghab Panda's career doesn't read like one career it reads like three. He started in management education in the late 1990s, helping build India's earliest private business-school infrastructure. He then spent nearly a decade building the unglamorous scaffolding of India's entrepreneurship ecosystem, years before "incubation" and "startup support" were even recognized categories. And for the last decade, he's been building healthcare ventures first an IVF chain, and now Skids, an AI-enabled child health screening platform that has already screened over 180,000 children across Indian schools. What makes the conversation worth sitting with isn't just the range. It's how consistent the underlying instincts are, even as the industries changed completely.
Here's what stood out.
1. Opportunity over blueprint.
Panda is candid that almost none of this was planned: "I have not meticulously planned, I will do five years after this, ten years after this. Something popped up, I saw it, evaluated it, I thought that is making sense, jumped in." Each chapter of his career began with someone else's offer or a chance airport-lounge conversation, not a five-year roadmap. The skill wasn't foresight it was being ready to move once something useful appeared.
2. A deliberate framework for choosing who you build with.
His company Santaan started with his childhood classmate, Dr. Satish, but the partnership wasn't sentimental it passed three explicit checks. Complementary skills: "He's a domain expert, I'm the execution guy." Shared trust built over decades, so mistakes wouldn't break the relationship. And the ability to start small and reverse course if it didn't work: "we can start with small and see if it clicks." A genuinely reusable filter for picking a co-founder, not just a nice childhood-friendship story.
3. Systematic, data-led problem diagnosis.
Panda doesn't argue from intuition he argues from numbers most people never bother to collect. The Skids screening data showed roughly 30% of children have undetected eyesight problems, 18% face obesity, and more carry hearing or skin issues that nobody is tracking. Normalized, invisible problems become visible and fundable the moment you put a number on them.
4. Bet on technology only when the economics work, not just when the tech works.
When asked whether the same screening technology could be extended to adult annual checkups, Panda's answer was telling: "Clinically what you're talking is making absolute sense. Business-wise it will not make sense." A child's condition is often reversible and screening drives long-term value; an adult's is usually just managed, which changes the entire economic case. He waited years for the device technology to mature, then built the business only once the unit economics not just the clinical logic held up.
5. Processing power and execution travel everywhere; domain knowledge doesn't have to.
By his own account, the one constant across education, ecosystem-building, and healthcare wasn't subject-matter expertise it was "manpower pipeline and relentless execution." His advice to young professionals makes this explicit: "Don't go by the industry or the title you carry... it's about building what you have in processing power and execution. These are not going to be agnostic to anything" meaning they transfer to any industry, any level.
6. Always be the student in the room.
Whether it was learning the ropes from his early mentor at IFHE, or absorbing lessons from billionaire-philanthropist Ramesh Waadhwani's energy and 20-year foresight, Panda repeatedly credits access to people further along than him as the thing that gave him the courage to make his next move: "That gave me the courage that I can dive into entrepreneurship. Otherwise, I didn't have any knowledge about entrepreneurship at that time."
7. Calculated risk, not blind risk.
Panda has an explicit personal formula for this: "Plain calculus on all risk and return. I've embedded the risk and return into the career movement... I'm taking high risk, obviously my reward will be higher." Risk, for him, isn't a leap of faith it's a deliberate trade he's willing to name out loud before he makes it.
8. Pick the battlefield where failure is cheap.
His first fertility clinic launched in Baripada, a tier-3 town, not a metro specifically because the downside was small: "Even if we fail, there is no problem. We can fail also and can close the shop and go." Only once the model proved itself there did he scale to Bhubaneswar and beyond. Incremental scaling works best when the first increment genuinely can't hurt you much.
9. Build the category before it has a name.
Long before "incubation centers" existed as a recognized term in India, Panda was building informal city-level entrepreneurship clubs that did the same job. Long before alumni relations was standard practice at young Indian institutions, he built a fully independent alumni governance body from scratch. Twice, he wasn't following an existing playbook he was the playbook.
10. Treat outsider status as an asset.
He says it plainly: "I must accept the medical fraternity, I'm an outsider." Rather than treating that as a credibility gap, he frames the outsider's distance as exactly what let him see the business model differently than someone trained inside the industry would. It's a useful counterpoint to the usual advice to "build deep domain expertise first" sometimes the right kind of naivety is the edge.
11. Find who actually holds the budget.
Panda's school-screening pitch went nowhere with principals: "They're not able to take a decision. They are only education, education, education." It worked once he went straight to trustees and owners and reframed the pitch in their language better learning outcomes, monetizable margins rather than the principal's language of pedagogy. A reminder that the obvious gatekeeper is often not the real decision-maker.
12. Name the real cost of reinvention: ego and reputation, not just risk.
Leaving a senior, settled corporate identity to join an unproven foundation, in his words, "was terrifying" not because the work was hard, but because "you are just risking everything, the reputation, the network, everything is gone." He's unusually candid that pivoting cost him status he'd spent years building, and that he had to consciously "leave that ego" each time, rather than pretend the transitions were painless.
13. Protect the people you love during the uncertain stretch.
Here's a quieter, more personal detail: Panda didn't tell his parents, or even his wife, that he had started his own company for two and a half years. Not out of secrecy for its own sake, but to protect everyone's "mental peace" while he found his footing, choosing to reveal it only once there was real traction to show. Strong relationships mattered enormously to his journey, but so did being deliberate about when to bring people into the uncertainty.
14. Fear stagnation, not failure.
His closing advice doubles as his clearest definition of what a pivot actually is, in contrast to mere adaptability: "Adaptability is reactive... pivot is proactive... it creates disruption and growth, whereas adaptability will not." And the urgency behind it: "Don't fear for pivot, fear for stagnation. Even if you do two or three things and fail, that is still worth it... celebrate failure, then celebrate the success." With AI reshaping every industry, he argues, standing still is now the only genuinely risky option.
This is part of India Career Centre's ongoing Pivoting Series conversations with professionals whose careers reflect multiple moments of reinvention. Listen to the full conversation with Raghab Panda to hear how each of these moments actually unfolded.
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