Sunnyvale, California, United States
I've spent two decades building growth engines for companies trying to do something genuinely new. Not incremental improvements, but category-defining moves. At Nutanix, that meant pioneering product-led growth inside an enterprise infrastructure company that had never operated that way. At SingleStore, it meant helping a database company find its footing in the Gen AI moment before most companies had a coherent strategy for it. At the Linux Foundation, it meant scaling a global open-source ecosystem as an actual business. Each of those required the same underlying thing: helping a market believe in something before it had a name. That's the work I'm doing now as SVP of Growth & Strategy at Kognitos, where I operate with full CMO scope across marketing, strategy, and operations. Kognitos is a neurosymbolic agentic AI platform backed by Khosla Ventures, in production at PepsiCo and Wipro, top-ranked in the 2026 ISG Research Buyers Guide, and named to Gartner's Hype Cycle for AI in Finance. My mandate covers category creation, demand generation, enterprise GTM, board and investor communications, and building the kind of growth infrastructure that actually compounds over time. Something I've come to believe strongly: the companies that win in emerging categories aren't always the ones with the best product. They're the ones that build conviction in the market early, through sharp positioning, disciplined execution, and a GTM motion that matches how enterprise buyers actually make decisions. That's the intersection I've always found most interesting, and most consequential. I think in systems. I build for the long arc. And I'm at best when narrative and operations have to work together.
Kognitos is a neurosymbolic agentic AI platform backed by Khosla Ventures, Prosperity7, and Engineering Capital, co-founded by Binny Gill, who was previously CTO at Nutanix. The company is in enterprise production at PepsiCo and Wipro, top-ranked in the 2026 ISG Research Buyers Guide, named to Gartner's Hype Cycle for AI in Finance, and recognized as Most Innovative AI Product by theCUBE. As SVP of Growth & Strategy, I lead with full CMO scope, owning marketing, growth strategy, and operations for a company that is actively defining the agentic AI category. The work covers category creation and market development, demand generation, enterprise GTM, board and investor communications, sales enablement, and the marketing infrastructure that needs to scale alongside the business. A meaningful part of the role is also shaping how Kognitos shows up in analyst frameworks and AI answer engines as the category itself matures. In a lot of ways this role brings together everything I've built across the last two decades. The PLG instincts from Nutanix, the Gen AI repositioning experience from SingleStore, the ecosystem thinking from the Linux Foundation, applied now to a company working at the frontier of what AI can actually do inside an enterprise.
The Linux Foundation is the world's largest open-source nonprofit, home to projects like the Linux kernel, Kubernetes, and Node.js, with a global community spanning millions of developers and hundreds of enterprise members. As VP of Growth, I led global marketing strategy with a mandate that was genuinely unusual: grow community participation, enterprise membership, event attendance, and training and certification revenue all at once. The complexity is that the buyer, the user, and the community member are often three completely different people. That requires a more nuanced GTM motion than most software companies ever have to think about. The role deepened my understanding of ecosystem-led growth and how brand authority, content, and community build on each other in ways that are slow to start but hard to replicate once they compound. That model turns out to be increasingly relevant as AI platforms compete to become infrastructure. My scope covered demand generation, marketing operations, content and social, performance marketing, digital experience, and full-funnel analytics. I built and aligned a global marketing organization around measurable business outcomes while preserving the mission-driven brand credibility that gives the Linux Foundation its authority.
SingleStore is a real-time distributed SQL database company that found itself at an interesting crossroads when generative AI arrived. The category was being rewritten faster than most companies could respond, and I came in to lead global growth marketing and help reposition the company for that moment. I led all growth marketing across digital, field, partner, and marketing operations channels, while navigating a fundamental GTM pivot. We grew webinar-based demand generation by 600%, lifted sales pipeline from event and field programs by 40%, and launched SingleStore's first Developer Conference as a deliberate statement of category intent in the Gen AI space. I introduced influencer marketing as a channel, which meaningfully reduced CAC. We rebuilt the marketing technology stack around Segment CDP, 6sense, and Mixpanel, which improved both funnel conversion and our ability to see what was actually working. I also built marketing teams in Portugal, India, and Singapore to give us real global execution capability. This role accelerated my fluency in AI-era GTM. Specifically, how infrastructure and data companies need to reframe their value when AI becomes the primary use case and not just a feature roadmap item.
I joined Nutanix after the Minjar acquisition with a mandate to build a product-led growth function from scratch inside a multi-billion dollar enterprise infrastructure company. That sounds straightforward. It wasn't. I built a cross-functional team and stood up a complete PLG marketing engine. The flagship initiative, Nutanix Test Drive, became the highest-converting asset company-wide, generating over 100,000 test drives in the first 18 months. It shifted how Nutanix thought about pipeline, from purely outbound and field-dependent to a scalable self-serve motion that worked at enterprise scale. I oversaw product marketing, demand generation, community enablement, sales enablement, and PR across multiple product transitions as Nutanix moved from hardware-defined to software-defined to cloud-native infrastructure. I maintained the marketing calendar, budget, and positioning through all of that. What this chapter taught me was what PLG actually requires inside a company that wasn't built for it. Not just the technical and tactical pieces, but the organizational and cultural work that most PLG playbooks never address.
I joined Minjar as its first senior marketing hire. The mandate was to build the function from zero. Within 12 months, Botmetric had become the highest-rated cloud management platform on the AWS Marketplace. That positioning outcome was a meaningful contributor to Nutanix's decision to acquire the company. I built teams across product marketing, digital, demand generation, brand, marketing operations, and customer success. I also established the customer success function, implemented NPS and CSAT tracking, and created the feedback loops between customer health and product and marketing decisions. This was my first first-marketing-hire role, which is a different kind of accountability than leading marketing inside an established organization. You own the full scope, you build the team, you set the strategy, and you report to investors. The acquisition by Nutanix was the validation.