Shailaja "Shai" Venkatsubramanyan grew up in Mumbai, India in a middle-class household. She started keeping a diary in her teens. One fun entry in the diary made its way to India's national newspaper - The Times of India - when she was 18 years old. After getting her Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of Arizona, she taught at Tulane University and San Jose State University and worked for three years at a Knowledge Management startup. During this time, most of her writing involved research papers related to information systems. More recently, she has started maintaining a blog on Linkedin. Having taught for many years and been a mother to two children, she tries to extract lessons from her life journey and pass them on to those who may benefit from it via writing. She has presented on KQED's Perspective segment a couple of times and has also published in online magazines such as India Currents. Shai considers herself to be a lifelong learner. She is passionate about writing, yoga, cooking, animal rights, and being a mother to her two children.