Made in Humane Club
Resume
This page is a Factsheet about my professional journey.
Quick jumps:
- Product: Sr. Director, Product at the Times of India
- Business: 2x Entrepreneur, 2x Angel Investor
- 2x Fellowships: JournalismAI Fellow, Knight Fellow
One-minute Resume
9 years of Operator Experience
Led the cost and profit modeling of Times Internet’s rollout of artificial intelligence, focusing on personalization and Language Learning Models at Times Internet. Spearheaded the fourth attempt to introduce personalization at Times Internet, resulting in a 350% increase in click-through rate on 2 million daily impressions.
- Drove editorial product discovery for TOI+, resulting in 120k subscribers in the year 1
- At PROTO, successfully pitched, negotiated, and closed contracting of multi-crore orders with high-profile clients such as WhatsApp, Gates Foundation, etc.
- At Pykih, sold information design services to 90+ brands across 7 countries
- At Amdocs US, at the age of 25, handled consultative sales worth a couple of USD million
- At my business, I did a 0-1 journey and now at Times Internet I’m doing a 10-100 journey.
Entry/Exit Judgment
Strategically folded two businesses at peak cash position. Angel invested in a LLM-based analytics firm (YC W23) prior to the LLM revolution.
High Stakes Communication
I can articulate the company’s vision, represent the company’s interests and responsibly handle scrutiny.
- Times Internet gave me freedom to blog and give talks on behalf of the company or personally on national or international platforms.
- I’ve participated in sense-making and problem-solving brainstorming with CXOs and company owners on strategic aspects.
11 years of People Management Experience
I’ve built and run teams thrice in my career. At peak, I’ve managed up to 20 direct reports. I report to the CEO or Business Head.
- At Times Internet, led and delivered outcomes from cross-functional teams — editorial and Artificial Intelligence. My boss says that the “people cost” of running mandates drops with me. I attribute this to my bias for designing teams for independence.
- Can attract talent and insights from the national and international networks that I maintain
———— Below this point is my detailed resume ————
Product Leadership at Times Internet
As of 2023, Times Internet (TIL) is ranked number one and has a 74% lead over the number two in Comscore. During my time at TIL, I was tasked with discovering and scaling interventions, major and minor, in an attempt to help deepen the company’s competitive edge. I ran a direct report team of cross-functional experts: Data Scientists, Backend Engineers, Front-end Developers, Product Managers, Designers, and Journalists.
Here are the designations I’ve held at Times Internet:
- Sr. Director, Product — Business Ops using Artificial Intelligence (Dec 2022 — Present)
- Director, Product — Business Ops using Artificial Intelligence (Dec 2021 — Nov 2022)
- Associate Director, Product — Editorial Lead For Subscription Product (Dec 2020 — Nov 2021)
I will document my time with the two big cross-functional projects I’ve led.
Product Management for artificial Intelligence
May 2022 — Present
I was asked exit Editorial Product and instead hire and run a cross-functional team to augment, if not automate business operations using Artificial Intelligence.
Scaling Personalization on a 180 million MAU Internet Product
The hypothesis is simple: Increase in on-platform recirculation will result in earnings from programmatic indirect advertisements. However, we had to get the unit economics of personalization right, which meant scaling personalization in a 180 million MAU website in a low ARPU industry should not be cash negative. With this:
- Assess: In April 2022, We developed a basic data science model and increased the Click-Through Rate (CTR) in the recirculation widget by 90% on TOI+. Eventually, we achieved an 8-9% CTR among subscribers.
- Trial: In March 2023, we deployed a sophisticated collaborative filtering model and scaled it 42 times. This increased the CTR another 85%, taking the overall CTR gain to 3.5x over the editorial feed. From March 1 to October 25, we sustained this CTR growth — a notable achievement since CTRs typically decline over time.
- Adopt: On October 25, we expanded the model’s usage from 1 to 3 widgets.
Testing out Propensity Models to Conversation Rate and Manage Trade-offs
Media is essentially a real-estate business. If you are showcasing a subscription product to a user who isn’t going to purchase it, then you are better off showing an advertisement in that area. We developed and tested a model that predicted with 87% accuracy that the subscription product could be hidden for 97% of the users.
Testing out Chat-Based Interfaces on ChatGPT
I worked with the CTO and company owner to launch Times Assist — a chat-based product on top of OpenAI APIs to test out how Indian audiences use it.
Customer Data Platform
Initiated work on The Times of India’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) by establishing a clean data dictionary and setting up data collection, validation, and transformation layers. Instead of using Clevertap or Mixpanel, we setup our own internal clickstream collection system and warehoused the data in a Clickhouse. This was a significant challenge because data accuracy — something that’s a granted in Telecom and FinTech — is not innate to the media industry. In Sep 2023, I transitioned the leadership of this initiative to the newly established Central Warehouse Team.
Company-wide, month-long Hackathon
Served as one of the lead mentors in running a company-wide hackathon to drive the adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) among engineers and product managers.
Editorial Product For Subscriptions Business
Dec 2020 — Apr 2022
I reported to the Business Head of Times of India with the aim of discovering the value proposition of our subscription service, TOI+. By December 23, 2021, we had secured 120,000 annual paying subscribers.
- Conducting user research in collaboration with Think Design and participated in a five-month-long consulting project with FT Strategies.
Short form and Immersive Content
Launched and tested mix-media immersive stories (CardHDs) and short- form content (Newscards). The technology was handed over to the Central CMS team.
Inculcating A Data Culture
Built Signals — an editorial analytics platform to evaluate conversion and retention efficacy of content published. Ran regular data meets with the Edit team to drive a culture of being data-informed during Edit meetings.
Redo Infrastructure
There were multiple gaps in our editorial infrastructure. I worked very closely with our Editor-in-Chief to fix our data journalism content strategy and taxonomy.
Angel Investor, Evangelist
November 2020 — Present
- defog.ai: LLM based AI assistant on enterprise data (YC23)
- humane.club: Web Agency as a Subscription Service for Think Tanks, Academia, Small Business.
2x Entrepreneur (Co-Founder)
Bootstrapped two profitable consulting businesses.
PROTO
Sep 2018 — Sep 2020
We bootstrapped a profitable media development agency in India. Our services included qualitative research, product discovery consulting, and training (events), which we provided to clients like WhatsApp, the Gates Foundation and ICFJ. After the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to sell my 50% equity in the firm to my co-founder and exited the business.
- WhatsApp commissioned us to launch a nationwide verification tip line for the India General Elections 2019. This project received coverage from both national and international media. In less than two months, we successfully crowdsourced 80,000 unique pieces of misinformation.
- The Gates Foundation commissioned us to study the health of business models in news. I conducted 39 interviews with media owners and editors from five mainstream print companies, as well as seven digital startups. In both projects, I utilized media ethnography research (and grounded theory) to understand the state of the news business.
- We designed, sold, and executed a year-long editorial calendar of events and newsletters aimed at training journalists.
- Last I was writing a 20,000-word digest on BigTech is creatively destroying the business models of the news industry and how what is considered innovation in media isn’t really.
- I conducted research to understand how cognition affects the persuasiveness of misinformation on WhatsApp, which we presented at Poynter Institute’s Global FactCheck7 conference’s academic track in 2020.
Pykih Information Design Studio
September 2013 — August 2018
We bootstrapped a profitable Information Design Studio. We served over
90 clients across seven countries, helping organizations such as ICICI Lombard, Network 18, The Hindu, UNDP India, Oxfam India, Huffington Post, FusionCharts, and NarendraModi.in, among others.
Eventually, we decided to fold the firm while it was at its peak financial position due to price inelasticity — an increase in skill did not correspond to an increase in the billing rate.
In our product discovery consulting, we specialized in the following:
- For FusionCharts: We developed a visual analytics Javascript SDK for time series data.
- For ICICI Lombard: We created a product similar to Trip Advisor, but focused on hospital visits.
- For a multinational soft drink company: We designed a map-based analytics solution to enhance their sales and distribution processes.
- For Pulse Infoframe: We built a visual analytics solution that catered to the needs of cancer doctors in Canada.
- For the International Center for Journalists: We developed a CMS tailored for single-topic websites.
For self:
- We built Rumi, a ‘GitHub for Data’ solution for the open-data community.
- We developed Pivot.js — a visual SQL solution for SMEs.
2x Fellowships
JournalismAI Fellow | POLIS, London School of Economics
(Jun 2022 — Nov 2022)
While at The Times of India, we were selected for the JournalismAI Fellowship run by the POLIS team at the London School of Economics. In collaboration with Code for Africa, we worked on using both small and large language models to automate the creation of context cards from our archives.
Knight Fellow | International Center For Journalists
(Feb 2017 — Nov 2020)
I conducted data, product, and technology training and consulting with various media organizations —IndiaSpend, MoneyControl, Jagran, Indian Express, Naidunia, Prajavani, Deccan Herald, Code For Tanzania, News Laundry, and TheWire.
Other
Bereavement Leave (Mar 2011 — Aug 2013): Took time off and traveled across India.
- Attended a 10-day entrepreneurship training at IIM-A.
Various roles, Amdocs (Jun 2006 — Feb 2011): I started my career at an Israeli telecom software company.
- Saint Louis, US: Building on my solution architecting experience, I joined the Amdocs sales team in the US for the AT&T account. Our team did sales in a multimillion- dollar range.
- Raanana, Israel: Solution architected the integration between Amdocs Ordering and Billing for Release 4 of Amdocs OMS Product. As part of this, I wrote the grandfathering algorithm for AT&T that got incorporated into the core Amdocs product.
- Pune, India: Started my career as a Java Developer in the Amdocs OMS team. Along with my formal work, I innovated and developed ‘Ritzzz’, a tool designed to streamline job efficiency by automating the detection of cross-database inconsistencies and facilitating swift reconciliation investigations—reducing a week’s worth of manual labor to a mere 6 minutes. Ritzzz won me the prestigious Amdocs Innovation Award.
Education:
- I completed my Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science in 2006.
- In 2010, I scored 740 in GMAT. However, I opted not to join B-school due to a family emergency (Mom’s unexpected diagnosis with a terminal condition).