RAVI VEDULA: AUTHOR BIO

LONG BIO (191 words)

Ravi Vedula is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft and a lifelong engineer who has spent much of his career building large-scale systems and guiding teams through major shifts in technology—from the move of Exchange and Office to the cloud to today’s generative AI era.

He leads IDEAS (Insights, Data, Engineering, Analytics, and Systems), the organization behind the unified data and insights platform for Microsoft’s Experiences + Devices division. IDEAS’ charter spans telemetry, experimentation, personalization, product growth infrastructure, and analytics, all built on an Azure-based platform that manages more than 400 petabytes of data and supports key experiences across Microsoft 365, Office 365, Security, and Copilot.

Ravi’s debut book, Hyderabad Days, revisits his childhood in Panjagutta, Hyderabad—a middle-class colony filled with gully cricket, festival sweets shared across balconies, and late-night conversations under streetlamps. Through a series of vignettes and stories, the memoir captures the friendships, mischief, and everyday experiences that shaped an engineer and a leader long before he wrote a line of code.

A heart-transplant survivor, Ravi now lives in Seattle with his wife. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling, cooking, and following sports, especially cricket.

SHORT BIO (104 words)

Ravi Vedula is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft and a lifelong engineer who has spent much of his career building large-scale systems and leading teams through major shifts—from the move of Exchange and Office to the cloud to today’s generative AI era. He leads IDEAS, the unified data and insights organization for Microsoft’s Experiences + Devices division. His debut book, Hyderabad Days, revisits his childhood in Panjagutta—a middle-class colony filled with gully cricket, shared festival sweets, and late-night conversations under streetlamps. A heart-transplant survivor, Ravi lives in Seattle with his wife. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling, cooking, and following sports, especially cricket.

MICRO BIO (27 words)

Ravi Vedula is a Microsoft Corporate Vice President and author of Hyderabad Days. A heart-transplant survivor, he lives in Seattle and enjoys traveling, cooking, and following cricket.

ABOUT HYDERABAD DAYS

Hyderabad Days is a tender, humorous, and deeply nostalgic memoir of childhood in 1980s–90s middle-class India, told through the eyes of a boy growing up in a Panjagutta colony. With vivid storytelling and a cast of unforgettable characters — from cricketing legends of the lane to sari-clad sisters who led in silence — this collection of slice-of-life chapters paints a world of shared TVs, Gold Spot bottles, kirana-store diplomacy, and friendships that defied caste, class, and religion.

But this is more than just a return to dusty lanes and colony cricket. It is also the story of how those chaotic, joy-soaked years forged the instincts of an engineer and, later, the perspective of a leader. The resourcefulness of stretching ten rupees for a cricket ball became the foundation for innovation. The diplomacy of settling gully cricket disputes became a lesson in mediation. The solidarity of colony life became the bedrock of resilience and humanity that guided a career spanning global teams and glass-walled conference rooms.

Written by a senior technology executive looking back on the roots that shaped both his childhood and his leadership, Hyderabad Days is a heartfelt tribute to a way of life that has all but vanished — a time when childhood was local, laughter was communal, and every setback or success carried the quiet lessons of character.

Published by 8080 Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster, with a foreword by Greg Shaw (co-author of Satya Nadella’s Hit Refresh). Preorder links are available now. All author proceeds go to charity.

One line description: A nostalgic, big-hearted memoir of a Hyderabad colony in the 80s–90s—and the unwritten code of community that became a foundation for a life of software engineering and leadership.

Formats: Paperback/Ebook/Hardcover

Release date: 03/31/2026

For fans of: R.K. Narayan, Ruskin Bond, Sudha Murty — and, in its own way, The Soul of a New Machine — blending nostalgia with the blueprint of how engineers and leaders are made.

Publisher page with preorder links for major websites

if you’d like to receive a complimentary advance review copy of the book, please use the contact form at Ravivedula.com. Review copies are limited and intended for media and early reviewers.

PHOTOS

Hyderabad Days: High resolution Book Cover Image (jpg)

Ravi Vedula: Image (jpg)

Pull quotes from the Preface by Ravi Vedula

“The book initially began as a tribute to a time and place—to Panjagutta in Hyderabad, where I spent my childhood in the 1980s and 90s. But as the stories poured out, it became much more. It became a tapestry of the universal experiences that shape us all—friendship, mischief, heartbreak, discovery, and the quiet lessons we carry forward into adulthood.”

“Whether you grew up in Delhi or Detroit, Mumbai or Manila, there is something familiar here: the feeling of being part of a close-knit community, of being raised by more than just your parents, of first crushes and collective laughter, and of the small tragedies that shook our little worlds.”

“My journey has always been powered by AI—not Artificial Intelligence, but the quiet synergy of America and India. One gave me roots. The other gave me wings. That is true for so many in the software industry, a place I’ve called home for the past twenty-five years.”

“The dusty lanes of Hyderabad taught me resilience, the value of five rupees and jugaad, Hindi for resourcefulness or frugal innovation. The conference rooms of corporate America demanded clarity, vision, and scale. Together, these two worlds shaped how I saw problems, people, and possibilities—long before the other kind of AI became fashionable.”

“Before I was an executive, I was an engineer. Before I was an engineer, I was simply a boy in a Hyderabad colony, learning the code of community: share your snacks, play fair in cricket, stretch every rupee, and respect your elders. Those lessons became my first algorithms. Street cricket was our operating system. Jugaad was our debugging tool. Friendship was the best program we ever wrote. This book is about that code—the one we lived long before we ever typed a line of software. It is a return to the gullies and games that shaped me, and perhaps shaped many of us, in ways we only realize much later.”

Ravi Vedula, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft
Author, Hyderabad Days

Pull Quotes from the Foreword by Greg Shaw

“In this book, you will find little or no mention of computers, software, business process, or leadership values. This book is completely nontechnical. But like me, I hope you find something even more valuable, even more insightful. I hope you learn more about the inner lives, the families of people who code.”

“Ravi Vedula’s Hyderabad Days is an elegantly written memoir about the “code” that he—like many other Indian-American software developers—learned in their colonies, or neighborhoods, as kids before they learned to code for computers.”

“As a writer and editor with no technical abilities whatsoever, I am envious of those few who are both brilliant engineers and extraordinary writers. It’s just not fair! But we all benefit when the computer scientist is also a lyrical writer. This is a book that is at once literary and illuminating lecture. It is verse meets meta-verse.”

“Shades of Jhumpa Lahiri and Arundhati Roy, even V.S. Naipaul.”

Greg Shaw, Editor, 8080 Books;
Co-author of Satya Nadella’s Hit Refresh and Kevin Scott’s Reprogramming the American Dream

Early praise for Hyderabad Days

“Ravi took me down nostalgia lane, pleasantly reminding me of all the little things we’d forgotten in our busy lives—the very things that shaped who we are today. His humor and storytelling, wrapped around such vivid details, are as engaging now as they were on our walks to high school four decades ago.”
- Madhukar Reddy, VP Central Engineering, Maxlinear

“Ravi always had a gift for articulation. His stories are our stories too. In reading this book, we got to live our childhood again. Precious!”
- Vamsi Mohan Thati, President, Barry Callebaut Chocolates
Former President - China, The Coca Cola Company

“As someone who works closely with Ravi, I immediately recognized the values in this memoir—empathy, grit, humor—because they’re the same qualities he brings to his leadership every day. Hyderabad Days is as moving as it is inspiring.”
- Chris Harig, Senior Director of Program Management, Microsoft Corporation

“My younger brother Ravi resurrected the memories that comprised our childhood in the chapters of Hyderabad Days so vividly.  He writes with heart, humor and honesty, as he tells us of the things that became part of our inner core as children and later evolved into a durable foundation for facing life. The book made me laugh, cry, hope, smile, and re-live all the elements that made our family.”
-Nagender Vedula, Senior Vice President of Engineering, ScienceLogic,
Ex Microsoft and GoDaddy

SPEAKING AND MEDIA INQUIRIES
Reference information only, not intended for publication

Ravi Vedula is available for interviews, podcasts, panel discussions, book-club conversations, keynote talks, and other speaking engagements. His blend of engineering experience, leadership insight, and storytelling allows him to speak comfortably to both literary audiences and professional communities.

Over more than twenty-five years at Microsoft, Ravi has led major organizational and technical transformations, including cloud modernization, data platforms, and AI-driven innovation. In his role at Microsoft, he leads a large global engineering organization and regularly speaks to audiences of all sizes, giving him extensive experience with keynotes, panels, and leadership conversations. His perspective links the human side of leadership—how people collaborate, adapt, and learn—with the technologies reshaping work and culture.

Ravi often speaks about the themes explored in Hyderabad Days—childhood, community, memory, and resilience—as well as topics central to his career: engineering leadership, organizational change, and the evolving landscape of AI. He brings a unique voice that blends technical clarity with personal storytelling, offering an accessible and relatable style that resonates across both narrative and professional settings. Because he moves easily between these worlds, he connects naturally with audiences interested in how personal history informs the way we build, lead, and live.

He is based in Seattle and is available for both in-person and remote engagements and is available to travel when needed. For appearance or interview requests or if you’d like to receive a complimentary advance review copy of the book, please use the contact form at Ravivedula.com. For urgent inquiries, kindly note this in your message.