Work

Partnered with my old friend from university and co-founder from Housing.com: Abhishek Anand. Wanted to help engineering leaders with their scale-up journey. Realised pretty soon they wanted a lot of help with application security work thrown their way.

Experimented and built open source tools: BOLT & PINNY. Then pivoted to building probably the most ambitious project of my life: 0-deb — a Linux OS designed for a container-first world — and built out KoalaLab: Secure base container images.

We built a name for ourselves in the open source community:

Unfortunately, we didn't succeed commercially. But this has bolstered me to try for even more ambitious things in life. We all, in the end, have only 1 life :)

Went to create monetization products for a company I had angel invested in. Built a whole playbook for financial services entry, built & scaled payments infra to $600M GTV, set the infra & partnerships for the lending business unit.

Failed at building a separate GST billing and formal accounting app, launched a digital gold savings feature which was a misfit.

Had a blast, built a great team & more than occasionally got a chance to rub shoulders with industry leaders, public policy peeps and regulators.

Some very unoriginal thought leadership here:

First ever experience of venture. Developed a market thesis, got together a team of co-founders & founding team members, raised money (thanks to Z47 fka Matrix India), built product + scaled revenue.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, some might say), life for me has been a series of decisions about taking on even more ambitious projects. Hence, after 4.5 years, I left this venture in good hands (~$2MM revenue) and over time, gave an exit to all my investors. First real big boy moment and I think I did okay.

Joined a few friends as an early team member on a very happening journey. Turned into a Shakespearean comedy with lots of lessons.

Proud of: One of the first internet companies in India to use data to create new products for users — and we were well-lauded back then. The Data Sciences Lab was something genuinely new for Indian internet.

Built a great team who've been wildly successful in their careers. (Was unofficial CHRO for a long time.)

Oh, also had a B-school case published about our work:

Unfortunately, the venture fizzled soon after I left (even after raising $100M+) & went through multiple mergers to still remain traffic leader in online real estate space.

One of the places which taught me that optimising for joy is a good decision-making barometer.

Did a derivative pricing course in college and watched a few too many Wall Street movies — so naturally wanted to work in quant markets. The place offered great learning: price modelling for complex RMBS bonds, a chance to see how a billion-dollar balance sheet trading desk works, and a chance to see how money really moves.

It wasn't one of the best times on that desk. Citi's CEO got changed during that time, the desk wasn't making a lot of profit — but much more than that, it was a very pessimistic work environment and people hardly seemed to love their work. Spent a few months too many.