I am passionate about startups (Zero to One) and a firm believer in the Growth Mindset. I love running, hiking & getting to know other startups/makers/artists.
My not-so-secret superpowers include spending all-nighters coding and at the same time, I enjoy knocking on the doors of the #5AMclub every now and then. If you are comfortable with such contrasts – it would be fun knowing you too!
Highlights over the years – in reverse chronological order.
DeltaX (2012 – Present)
I co-founded DeltaX in 2012 and successfully bootstrapped it over the years. In the last 10 years, I’ve been involved in all facets of what it takes to run an enterprise B2B product-focused startup.
We are at the forefront of high-scalability, machine-learning/statistics to complement our platform which integrates with over 30+ marketing platforms including Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook, et. all via their APIs. I lead product delivery, architecture, technology, and data science. What started from a whiteboard, moved to a single-table home-office, then to a live-in office bungalow, then a dedicated bungalow and now into our own office building – gives me immense satisfaction of being able to manifest some of my startup dreams. As a team, while we grew from 0 – 40+ in the engineering org, I focussed on putting form and structure to our engineering org including setting up organizational best practices around product delivery, engineering practices, and culture. The most exciting aspect of the journey has been around shipping the whiteboard discussions to the real world and creating a small dent into the ad-tech ecosystem where we have large enterprises rely on our product for their day to day and strategic operations. The most gratifying feeling has been to build a high-performance engineering culture.
I must admit that it’s taken an unreasonable amount of time and energy – but that’s probably what I crave even today, every day.
I’ve made some notes about the journey in tech, design, scalability, and war stories on our engineering blog here.
EXPloring ProductHunt / Independent maker movement (2019 – Present)
I’ve always been curious about the indie developer movement. I stumbled upon ProductHunt (PH) around this time. Started interacting with the community of indie makers and also following product launches on PH. I released a fun browser extension on PH in July 2019 – it was featured on the first page for most of the day and ended up with close to 4000 Weekly Active Installs in months from the release. Here is my PH profile.
Various Hackathons (2006 – 2015)
I used to love participating in hackathons while the spirit of the hackathon was intact. More recently, they have become hiring events for companies. Good for them – but not for me anymore – here are my thoughts on what it means to take part in a hackathon.
Side note: We conducted an internal hackathon at DeltaX in Jan 2020. Did my best to keep it true to its spirit.
Match.AI – Winner at XHackNight powered by IBM Bluemix and Xamarin (Sep 2015 )
Online reviews are broken – each person’s likings and preferences are different. The app uses Facebook and builds a personality profile for the user (using IBM Bluemix’s PI service). We then use our Match.AI API endpoints to show a PMI (Personality Match Index) rating of the reviewer along with the reviews so that the reader can make a better-informed choice. Read more here.
India Hackday Bangalore 2014 by LinkedIn (Mar 2014)
Built a chrome extension to make browsing more productive by discovering web accessibility shortcuts and defining custom shortcuts –
Internal: ideeli Hackathon – Most Creative Hack (May 2012) & Most Ready for Release Hack (Dec 2011)
Zwingmo – Winner at #Pi Hackathon – by Zomato (Oct 2011)
Yahoo Open Hack Day – Best Socially Mobile, Kiva Mobile (Feb 2009)
Silver Hacker – Pune Ruby Hackathon (Jul 2006)
Mars: A planetplanet.org like feed reader with multi-user multi-planet support. Also features easy configuration, themes, caching, and Ajax UI.
BlackBox Ventures (2015)
DeltaX was chosen to be part of the 10th Edition of Blackbox Connect Winter 2015 program. This was a very unique experience to be hosted in the heart of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto in the Blackbox mansion with 15 other founders from 14 different countries. For 2 weeks we lived and worked together, attended workshops, met distinguished executives, accomplished investors, and other successful founders from Silicon Valley. Here is a sneak peek of the experience.
Microsoft Ventures (2014)
DeltaX was selected to be part of the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Bangalore. This was a transformational experience for us as a team and learning the traits for running and scaling a B2B business from experienced folks. Microsoft Ventures had pooled together an exceptionally smart team of advisors, mentors and industry connect who was deeply involved in helping us win.
Technical Reviewer (2013 – 2014)
I love writing. Having deep expertise and internet-scale exposure to Ruby on Rails and NoSQL I took up helping Packt with technical reviews for few titles – Learning Devise for Rails & DynamoDB Applied Design Patterns.
“I am an artist, I create artwork”
I wrote this around December 2012. Hence I believe it accurately defines my frame of mind around that time compared to me paraphrasing it with the benefit of hindsight.
DeltaX (mid-2012)
I took the plunge – started working full-time on DeltaX from 2nd July 2012. Experienced the same curiosity and jitters while I had left my first job to go independent.
DeltaX (EARLY-2012)
Started working part-time on getting the pieces together for laying down a solid foundation for DeltaX. This involved crazy long whiteboard sessions with Ravi. We were still in Mumbai – working out of the home/office setup.
Ideeli Inc. Full-time Remote / Ruby on Rails (2008 – 2012)
I was fairly active in the Ruby / Ruby on Rails community around 2006-2008. It was then I saw a posting from Mark (CTO of Ideeli) around an opening for working on a challenging Rails app. I reached out to him and after a couple of discussions, I was thrilled to join the rocketship.
I started working remotely with Ideeli. It was a flash-sales e-commerce website headquartered in NYC. Ideeli was one of my first in the ring experiences of working in a hyper-growth environment. We started as a small extremely agile team of ~6 developers spread across the globe (Canada, Spain, US, and India) which in 4 years was 60+ full-time engineers and supporting revenue of well over $100 MM revenue, and more than 6 MM members. In all honesty, during this time – I solely focussed on writing scalable and performant code.
Independent / Changemaker / FIRST STARTUP (2007 – 2009)
Around mid-2007 I was overflowing with ideas. It was also the time I started participating in #hackathons, reading books, and attending experimental conferences (read BarCamps and CodeCamps).
SocialSync + UnLtd India
I started SocialSync.org as an initiative to help non-profits leverage social media to reach a wider audience and help spread their message and story with their supporters. We were supported by UnLtd India – an accelerator for social enterprises. During this time I worked closely with 30+ non-profits across India and helped them with their web presence. I wasn’t able to scale this and make it viable personally and professionally but while it lasted it was one of the most fulfilling projects I worked on. Every single day I was inspired to wake up and help these amazing organizations spread their message.
Ads4Good + GoodCompany Ventures
Bootstrapped Ads4Good.org – as a community platform for bloggers to help raise funds for a social cause of their choice. Ads4Good won the ISB iDiya National Social Ideas Challenge in Dec 2009 and was the City Winner (Mumbai) at the Think Big Challenge Jan 2010. Got incubated at GoodCompany Ventures in Philadelphia. I was in Philly for close to 4 months and then 2 months in the valley. Looking back at that time, I can attest that it was probably the most exciting phase in my life – loads of learning, growth, and challenging experiences.
Misc adventures: Kickstarted – OpenCivic.in / Open Data movement India. Mentions [1] & [2]. OpenCivic – used CouchDB as a backend and we release a 0.1 API which exposed India General Election data from 1998 to 2010 as a REST API.
Pinstorm / First Job / Startup bug (2006)
I joined Pinstorm fresh out of college. The story of me joining is nothing less than legendary – happened because of my talk at the BarCampMumbai in 2006 (while I was still in college).
Pinstorm was ~20 folks when and a really small tech/science team working out of a flat in the suburbs of Bandra. We had a ‘science team‘ in-house which I was part of even before Data-Science was cool! I got exposure to Digital Marketing while it was at its infancy in India.
I also met Ravi at Pinstorm, the future co-founder of DeltaX. We used to continuously discuss ideas and plans around starting up. Little did we know that things will finally materialize in 2012.
Education / Opensource (2003-2006)
I’ve deep gratitude for having gone through formal education in computer science. A lot of this is also attributed to me starting to enjoy and explore academic interests while in college.
Key themes around this period were around my exploration were – GNU/Linux, Opensource, FOSS, Sourceforge, Web 2.0, HTML, Blogging, RSS, and WordPress.
In college I was fairly active in promoting and using free and opensource software. I also happened to release an opensource blogging engine for communities.
QuickBlogger – Website | Blog | Project Page