I grew up in Mumbai in the 90s. My mom was an educator, my dad ran a small business. I was alright at studies, especially math and science, so engineering felt like the obvious bet. I picked chemical engineering thinking I liked chemistry, only to realise it largely revolves around physics. Business school, thankfully, was more fulfilling.

While in college, I started working with Pricebaba. Startups weren't mainstream then, neither was the internet, but I was already quite obsessed with both. My time there shaped me a lot, it was drinking from the firehose of the Indian startup ecosystem. I became one of the first users of CleverTap (then WizRocket), loved the product, and eventually joined the team.

After CleverTap, I spent a year in Europe building predictive models for e-commerce merchants. I returned to India in 2018 and stumbled into venture capital at Peak XV (then Sequoia India). I was part of the team that launched Surge, and spent the next few years learning from exceptional founders and investors.

In 2021, driven by a problem I couldn't stop thinking about, I co-founded Toplyne, an AI startup trying to build a data scientist for marketing teams. This was pre-GPT, we were too early to market. We built, shipped, and partnered with companies like Canva, Cloudflare, Notion, and Dropbox, but eventually realised it wasn't a venture-scale business. We chose to wind it down and return capital.

Through my career I've come to value a few things:

1/ Doing the right thing matters a lot to me. I optimize my entire life to sleep peacefully at night.

2/ Luck matters. We complain plenty when we're unlucky, we should be just as grateful when we're lucky.