Indian School of Business

Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani

Calcutta Boys School

Founder & CEO at Farmizen

Farmizen is a source traceable farm-to-fork marketplace, enabling discovery, transactions and fulfilment between organic farmers and consumers looking for clean food. Over 6000 small organic farmers sell on Farmizen.

We had originally started as a platform enabling contract farming arrangements between peri-urban farmers and urban consumers but pivoted to a marketplace model during the COVID lockdowns.


As part of this journey, we had a ton of fun, building boot-loads of technology, including apps for consumers, farmers, delivery personnel, warehouse ops teams etc. , route planning software and even our own CRM and ERP -  which enabled us to operate in an extremely capital-efficient manner with a very very lean team.

We also pioneered social commerce/group buying in fresh produce, in India, and have won much customer love and even some awards! 

We were voted one of the top brands in Bangalore in 2019, and covered by over 30 news outlets, including BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, and many more.

We are operational in two cities -  Bangalore and Hyderabad.

At Farmizen, I lead Product, Design, Marketing, Customer Support & everything else a Founder does :)

Farmizen

Founder & CEO

Artinem

Investor/Advisor

Trimian built over 40,000 community networks, 150 of which had companion apps on iOS and Android. These networks powered regional interest groups, company networking groups, and school alumni groups. 

One of the apps we had quickly hacked up on our infrastructure went viral during the 2016 US Presidential Elections.

Trimian (acquired by Nerdwallet)

Founding Team

Piki Poll was a rapid market survey app. Didn't fly and had to be shut down.

Piki Poll

Built products that help small businesses succeed. 

This included 
* Yahoo Live Web Insights - a real time analytics and insights engine for small businesses 
* Yahoo Commerce Central - a marketplace for small businesses and third-party developers to transact on 
* Marketing apps for various channels for use by small businesses: Dynamic Re-targeting, Facebook Ads, Amazon Product Ads, Google Shopping Ads, Yahoo Gemini Ads etc.

Spent the initial part of the journey helping integrate the acquisition of Lexity into the existing product stack at Yahoo, followed by launching new products such as the Yahoo Gemini app - which was a simple way for small e-commerce merchants to launch and manage their Yahoo Gemini Ads.

Yahoo!

Director - Product Management, Small Business Platform

Lexity Commerce Central was the PaaS cloud platform for e-commerce, especially focussed on SMBs, and came with its own App Store that made it easy for online retailers to add apps that ranged from Analytics to Pinterest management with a single click.

Commerce Central was available to millions of merchants hosted on all major commerce platforms including Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Etsy, Ebay etc. 

Launched in January 2013 with apps for Desk.com, Justuno, Optimizely, Olark and many others, the platform also provided merchants access to a plethora of marketing apps for Pinterest, Google Ads, Amazon Ads, Facebook, theFind, Constant Contact, MailChimp and many more.

Leading product for Lexity Labs, I was responsible for managing every revenue-generating product at Lexity. I also helped set up and run the customer success function. Many sleepless but exciting nights spent pulling MRR and Churn levers.

We were acquired by Yahoo! within a few months of launching the platform.

Lexity (Acquired by Yahoo)

Head of Products, Lexity Labs

Wishberg let users build, manage and track their one wish list for life. Users could put everything that they wanted to buy or own or experience in one beautiful wishlist - or maybe we should call it a shopping cart for life! 

Wishberg was voted among the top 10 early stage startups in India, ranked at #3. 

Wishberg was acquired by Freecharge in June 2014

Wishberg - One Wishlist for Life! (acquired by FreeCharge)

Board of Advisors

Founded the Hyderabad chapter of The Startup Leadership Program. 

SLP is a highly selective, world-class training program for outstanding founders, leaders, and innovators who want to become top startup CEOs. SLP Fellows have founded nearly 2000 successful startups & raised more than $2.4B+ in funding.

Startup Leadership Program

Regional Director and Fellow

This was my first entrepreneurial journey - incredible mix of learning, excitement and challenges. Very proud of having built a profitable bootstrapped startup in the online advertising space.

Our flagship product was OhanaQB, a cross-channel demand side platform for mid-sized companies who wanted to manage their media buys in-house across search, social, and display ad exchanges. We were one of the first companies in India to build our own real-time bidding engine integrated with all the major ad exchanges including App Nexus, RightMedia and Doubleclick as well as supply side platforms like Pubmatic, Contextweb etc.

In addition to automated bid and budget management across multiple channels, OhanaQB also allowed constructing hyper-targeted and personalized marketing messages both on-site and off-site (dynamic re-targeting). 

In addition, OhanaQB also allowed integration of first-party and third-party data to build audience segments for targeting these tailored marketing messages.

Reached a run-rate of $3 million+ , sold my stake to my co-founder and exited the business after a wonderful journey building tons of adtech!

Ohana Media (exited via co-founder stake sale)

Co-founder & Chief Operating Officer

This was my first P&L role managing a startup unit within the established org, with a budget of close to $1.5 million that I needed to manage and produce results with.

Led a team of 25+ members across Sales, Product Management, Operations, and Creative. 

At that time, Rediff was investing heavily in vertical searches, and my charter was to monetize traffic on these vertical search properties with keyword-targeted search ads. In addition, my secondary responsibility was to increase the site-wide eCPM at Rediff.com by 
a. building technology for better targeting of display ads, and  
b. increasing the variety of ads shown on Rediff.com by introducing thousands of long tail advertisers in addition to the ~200 large advertisers that would usually advertise on Rediff.com.

Setup multiple channels for acquisition of SMB advertisers for Rediff Pay4Clicks - an Adwords alternative and Rediff Classifieds, the number 3 Classifieds destination in India by traffic, at that time, including:

* A network of re-sellers - web design agencies, web consultants, print classified depots, web hosting resellers etc.
* An outsourced outbound Telesales operation.
* A network of Direct Selling Agents across six cities.
* A self-service interface for running text ads by bidding on categories and keywords

Built out the entire ad-serving system for text ads on Rediff. Built out both contextual targeting and behavioral targeting systems for display ads on Rediff.com and even for targeting email newsletters on RediffMail.

Rediff.com

Associate Director

Fresh out of business school, I was challenged to figure out how to reinvigorate the long-tail segment of Amazon Associates - one of the world's largest and oldest affiliate marketing programs with millions of small website publishers participating.

I product managed and launched three products specifically for small publishers:

Amazon Context Links: to help monetize user-generated content in forums, blogs, etc with in-text ads. Launched it in a closed beta, this product was decommissioned later - the format was found to be too intrusive by audiences.

Amazon Omakase: behaviorally targeted ads on publisher websites by using the customer's browsing behavior on Amazon to target ads on the publisher's website. This showed a very significant lift in the eCPM of publishers thereby increasing their monthly revenues from the Amazon Associates program.

Amazon Widgets: re-imagined ads as syndicated content from Amazon onto publisher websites. Conceptualized and created several new interesting ad units which we called widgets -  like slideshows, productclouds, my favorites etc, which were designed to be easily embeddable onto blogs, myspace profiles etc. These widgets subsequently drove multi-billion dollar revenues for Amazon before finally being retired in 2022 after a long innings.

After working with a small team of amazing engineers to build these out, I launched these innovative products in 3 markets  - US, Japan and UK. 

I also drove a business development deal with one of the premier blogging platforms at that time - Typepad, to make a set of widgets specially available to users on Typepad.

Amazon.com

Product Manager

My first stint at a wildly successful startup - Neoteris, which pioneered SSL VPNs as a product category.

Saw first-hand the execution cadence of all-star team which created and ruled the market and reached a good outcome in a short period of time.

Neoteris was acquired by Netscreen, which in turn was acquired by Juniper Networks.

Worked on the Javascript re-writing engine. A cool gizmo I worked on, was a mini javascript interpreter built using javascript !

Also worked on Java bytecode re-writing engine. Wrote the telnet and ssh proxies as well.

A very fulfilling part of the experience, involved hacking around to figure out how several non-documented application layer protocols work for some popular client server enterprise applications, and writing code to tunnel all these protocol's traffic through a secure channel to our application gateway.

Juniper Networks (via Neoteris acquisition)

Member of Technical Staff

Strand Genomics was a startup focused on solving tough problems at the intersection of Life Sciences and Informatics. 

Built tools to mine large volumes of biological data. Created a high throughput antibody analysis pipeline which involved scoring and assembling DNA sequences and comparing against sequence databases to arrive at expected properties of various parts of an antibody.

Loved the multi-disciplinary aspect of it - was exciting working with team comprising of PhDs in Computer Science and Life Sciences - a firehose of learning for a young engineer.

Strand Genomics

Associate

Sun ONE Synchronization was a buggy piece of software that had never been released to customers. This was a desktop software for synchronizing Calendar records between Sun ONE Calendar Server, Outlook, Palm devices and Windows CE devices.

I was entrusted with doing the first customer ship release of this product within a very tight deadline since having this available was a prerequisite for a large telco deal for the Sun ONE stack. I played a dual role of a Product Manager+Development Engineer for this assignment and worked with QA, Legal, Sales, and Docs to launch this successfully.

One of the highlights of my stint at SUN was being formally mentored by Ned Freed, co-creator of the ubiquitous MIME Internet standard.

Shameek Chakravarty