San Francisco, California, United States
I fell in love with programming in sixth grade in Chennai. By the end of high school, it was clear: I wanted to build things. Whether it was algorithms, software, or music, creation was what I cared about most. After finishing school in 2001, right after the dot-com bust, everyone told me not to study computer science. The conventional wisdom was to pick something more "evergreen" - mechanical engineering, electronics, something safer. I went into CS anyway. It was love, not a calculated bet. Then, I surprised everyone by going to business school, which taught me one thing: I wanted to build products, not just write code. The problem: no one wanted to hire a product manager with zero work experience. I had to push hard outside the normal process to break in, eventually landing my first PM role at Verizon with help from people who took a bet on me. In 2012, I co-founded Konotor with Vignesh Girishankar and Deepak Bala. Konotor was acquired by Freshworks in 2015. I spent the next several years there during hypergrowth. Eventually FRSH became the first SaaS company from India to list on NASDAQ. It was a privilege to learn and contribute. In 2020, we started Rocketlane with the same team. This time, the approach was different. Where Konotor had been built cautiously - playing not to lose - Rocketlane was built to win. Less fear. More ambition. Today, Rocketlane helps professional services and customer onboarding teams move customers to value faster and prove ROI. We're focused on AI transformation in services - not just incremental automation, but rethinking how work gets executed. I write and speak regularly about outcome-based delivery, the three levels of AI transformation, and what it takes to build world-class teams that challenge the status quo. When I'm not working, I'm probably on a plane between San Francisco and India, seeing a movie, playing pickleball or hiking with friends in the Bay, or spending Sunday afternoons building AI agents that can save me hours during the week.
Rocketlane is a purpose-built customer onboarding platform that shortens your time to value, and eliminates hit-or-miss experiences for your customers. Rocketlane helps you deliver a collaborative, transparent, and delightful onboarding experience for every customer. Want to see how our unique experience can help you wow your customers? Message me for a demo
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Freshchat is a modern messaging product for sales and support. Freshchat replaces legacy live chat products with an experience that customers & businesses find intuitive and familiar - across websites, web-apps, and native mobile apps.
Hotline.io is a mobile-first customer support and engagement offering from Freshdesk. Hotline.io powers a modern, convenient, and highly scalable support experience inside mobile apps. It offers in-app chat, FAQs, and pro-active engagement tools for these apps.
Konotor (www.konotor.com) is a mobile-first user engagement platform that helps businesses engage, retain, and sell more to their mobile app users. Konotor enables a persistent 2-way rich messaging inbox for your app - its like a iMessage or Whatsapp within your app, connecting a business with its app users, and providing tools for the business to engage users in a personalized and contextual manner. Konotor won the Qualcomm QPrize India leg in 2014. Konotor lets you: * Segment users and send targeted promotions/announcements to specific cohorts * Re-engage inactive users and also find why they are lapsing * Converse with users through an in-app chat experience (for support/feedback) * Send automated messages triggered by server events using our API (transactional messages, pro-active offers on cart abandonment, etc) * Send users rich messages including picture messages and deep links Prior to Konotor, we built PhonOn - a mobile social app enabling new rich communication experiences.
At Jigsee, we built a mobile video solution that enabled users to consume long form video content in low bandwidth 2G networks, and on low resource feature phones. Applications powered by Jigsee have been downloaded over 20 million times, and the technology has been acquired by VuClip. I juggled various roles as part of the management team. Other than my core activities as owner of the product and platform we built, my big focus areas included partnerships, content operations, app marketing, hiring and managing the product team.