Mar 2022 – Present · 4 yrs 2 mos · Pleasanton, California, United States · On-site

• Advisor to Venture Capitalists and Startups. Investor in early-stage startups (AI, Generative AI, ML, Data, Developer, Vertical SaaS, Enterprise Software). Advisory practices focus on company building, hiring, PLG, Product Assisted Sales, breaking into enterprises.
• Some investments include
• Singulr AI - Streamline and Secure Enterprise AI Use at Scale
• Vimcal is the calendar for people with too many meetings.
• TheFactual (Acquired by Yahoo): Best Daily News. Determined with Data, not politics.
• Akuity - Advanced Application Delivery for Kubernetes
• Insightly.ai - The continuous engineering improvement system
• Descope.com - Future of passwordless authentication
• Auxia.io - Reimagine how companies drive growth with PLG and AI
• Voxela.ai - Reinventing caregiving by making incident detection intelligent and actionable
• Gan.ai - Studio-quality video personalization software
• Clearfeed.ai - Solving customer issues faster on Slack
• GoKenko - AI business platform for Fitness Studios
• Venture Partner (Matrix India) April 2023-April 2024
• First Round Fast Track Mentor March 2022- October 2023
• Member, Battery Collective, September 2021-April 2022

Apr 2020 – Mar 2022 · 1 yr 11 mos · Pleasanton, California, United States

• As the VP of Product Management, I help lead the GitLab Product Management team (~40 team members) to scale rapidly and realize our product vision to help builders work more efficiently, develop better software faster and reduce risk and cost by providing everyone a complete DevOps platform delivered as a single application.
• Increased MAU by 50%, and more than doubled revenue during that time.
• Set a path for responsible and margin efficient growth by adhering to buyer-based tiering, and introducing compelling offerings at Premium and Ultimate Tier. Invested heavily in reducing cloud operating costs for paid and free users.
• Systematized product strategy and product investment framework, crafted multi-year product vision, helped with S-1 drafts, and interacted with investment bankers and analysts to showcase product vision.
• Infused data informed decision making. Instituted core metrics for each product group to help inform product strategy. Helped Product leaders understand how to manage the business as a combination of revenue, customer acquisition and retention as well as product adoption metrics.
• Influenced and fine-tuned product investments to focus towards SaaS, usage and usability.
• Led a multi-pronged approach to get to healthy margins on SaaS and grow free to paid conversion.
• Successfully acquired and integrated OpsTrace, Unreview, PeachTech and Fuzzit to expand product into observability, machine learning and security use cases and drive higher monetization and TAM.

Nov 2018 – Mar 2020 · 1 yr 4 mos · Menlo Park

• My first program was to be one of two technical program leaders on execution of “Facebook is Communities” initiative (launched May 2019) that pivoted FB towards building communities and bringing the world closer together. 20 million more people found a meaningful connection to a group through this effort within weeks of launch. Communities now used by 1.8B people (From 500 million in late 2018).
• I hired and built a new small but rapidly growing team with a new role in the core News Feed and Stories team (over 2B Monthly active people) at Facebook that works alongside 600+ Engineers.
• Our team worked on privacy, security, reliability, and performance for the product. We synthesized diverse requirements, and solved technical challenges that required the ability to go deep technically and work cross functionally. We worked across 44 core product interactions and introduced systematic metrics, instrumentation and goaling around the primary ones.

Oct 2017 – Oct 2018 · 1 yr

• MapR (now HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric) is a leading data platform for Artificial Intelligence and Analytics. MapR helps customers accelerate time to value as they continue their journey with Artificial Intelligence, Cloud (Lift and Shift, Hybrid, Multi-cloud) and Edge Analytics
• During my tenure, we grew customer base by 300%+, revenues by 300%+, and data under management on MapR platform across all companies to nearly an exabyte.
• Took over product marketing and team revitalized the demand generation engine in 6 months with no extra budget.
• Scaled teams to provide autonomy with a pod structure and aligned it by value delivered to the user.
• Systematized decision making, product reviews, strategy offsites, roadmap roadshows to include diverse perspectives.
• Introduced product line expansions into cloud/hybrid-cloud and container storage that were crucial factors for acquisition by HPE.
• Built deep customer empathy tool kits by visiting and meeting hundreds of customers. Synthesized the requirements into a MapR customer blueprint to help engineering, customer success and marketing teams understand customer business goals, technical architecture, product/feature requirements as well as partner ecosystem.
• Collaborated with sales to identify and drive sales plays and created product & marketing content for sales kick-offs. Established deal desk policies and partnership agreements. Organized campaigns and trade-shows. First product person to receive a Sales Club award in the history of the company.
• Created and Led the pricing forum at MapR. Built out and aligned the executive team on the pricing principles. We transitioned from multi-year license, to annual subscriptions, to hourly pricing for both on-prem and cloud customers.
• Formulated “influence-the-influencers” strategy and established relationships with industry research houses like Gartner and placed favorably in the top-right quadrant.

Oct 2016 – Oct 2017 · 1 yr

Jan 2015 – Oct 2016 · 1 yr 9 mos

Sep 2013 – Jan 2015 · 1 yr 4 mos

• My role: Big Data Infrastructure. Responsible for product strategy and management for MapR, Hadoop, Spark, Open Source, Pricing, Freemium/Growth Hacking, "Right size" Processes for scaling the company

Jan 2011 – Jan 2013 · 2 yrs

• Aerohive (IPO:2014:HIVE) transforms legacy networks into cloud-enabled mobility optimized networks.
• Responsible for Platforms Product Strategy
• Transitioned Product Management function from inbound to whole-product ownership. Built and grew a team of Product Managers. Crafted an expansion strategy for Aerohive that fueled growth.
• Formulated “influence-the-influencers” strategy and established relationships with industry research houses like Gartner and placed favorably in the top-right quadrant.
• Drastically transformed the industrial design of the product. Design is now part of Aerohive identity.
• Responsible for product projections. Product projections drove manufacturing targets, and inventory.
• Collaborated with Operations on supply chain optimizations and with sales on value articulation and holding to pricing/discounts too to improve margins.
• Initiated, managed and completed product transitions. Improved product margin from 51% to 66%.

Jan 2008 – Jan 2011 · 3 yrs

• Responsible for software portfolio for a $3B+ Billion Catalyst 6500 product line during its most challenging period.
• Built and Led a team of 5 product line managers to converge on a set of right investments from hundreds of projects.