A longer than expected career story
When asked for my professional background, I’m never sure how much detail the other person is looking for. There is a long answer answer though, and here it is - 🙂
Law School, and University
For university, I first went law school in Calcutta but a year in I switched to the University of Toronto, where I studied economics and business.
Ashram, India, and odd jobs
After University, I went to an ashram in India in 2012 and spent about two and a half years there. I spent 2 years of that time working at the boarding school, first working in the office - answering phones and emails, dealing with parents and other departments, organizing events, and everything else that they couldn’t find anyone else to do.
Later, I taught English, History, and Political Science, to middle and high school students. I also become a house parent ( primary caregiver ) to about 20 middle school boys.
During school leave, I also did two other short-term jobs.
The first was possibly the most enjoyable job I’ve ever had - I worked at the Dharamshala Film Festival in 2014, starting off as a volunteer but eventually doing just about everything - cash management and accounting, food and beverage, volunteer coordination, and everything else that comes with event management. It was a 4-day festival, and I worked every day from about 6 am to 3-4 am. It was the most fun I’ve ever had, which I attribute to the pace of work, the unbelievably rapid growth of my area of responsibility, and an outstanding and super-talented manager.
The second was working on a conference that aimed to bring Japanese investment to India. We invited the Prime Ministers of both India and Japan, and every single Indian MP - I fact I know because I printed and sent the official letters. However, my stint there was short-lived - the conference was canceled because of scheduling issues.
Canada - First “Real” Job
In 2015, I headed back to Canada. I went back to university to take advanced courses in Statistics and see if I wanted to go to graduate school. I also looked for work and eventually started working for Accenture in Toronto as a financial analyst, my first “real” job.
I was working on managing financials for Accenture Client engagements. Accenture is a consulting company, and various executives would sign contracts to do some kind of work for clients. We would price prospective engagements, model the costs and income, and make sure that internal financial benchmarks for revenue and profit were being met. We would monitor engagements through their lifecycles, calculating burn rates, sending invoices, and monitoring variance between projections and actuals. It was all to make sure that Accenture earned the amount they had been promised and to report exactly how much money each engagement was making.
I had a really great manager there, and while I was good with the numbers, my presentation and task management were subpar when I got there. I learned from Accenture how to make your presentations look good, and how to make sure every single piece of work got done.
I did this for a while, but the hours and lifestyle were challenging. I’d leave for work around 7:15, and rarely get home before 8 pm. Once home, I’d only have time to prepare dinner and lunch for the next day, and watch a tv show before it was time for bed.
I was good at the work - I became very familiar with Excel during this time and started programming. My work became more polished, more complete. I struggled with the hierarchical enterprise culture though.
The decision to quit that job came gradually - the hours were long - in the winter, it was dark by the time I left the office, and not fully light before I got into the subway on the way there. There was little reward for doing your work faster or more accurately, and I didn’t want to live the life people who’d been doing the work 5-10 years more than me were. I also longed for adventure - I remember looking at the sunset from our office cafeteria and being sad and disappointed that I should spend all my days sitting in front of a screen.
British Columbia - Outdoors, Computers, and Econometric Forecasting
I started looking for alternatives and eventually settled on a course that trained you to be an outdoor guide. In the summer of 2016 I went to the West Coast of Canada and spent a season taking students on outdoor adventures - hiking, sea kayaking, and camping.
Fairly quickly I figured out that guiding wasn’t a long-term career and started started programming again. Shortly after, I applied to grad schools for computer science, and spent the next few months teaching myself how to code.
In Feb 2017, I enrolled in a programming bootcamp while I waited for grad school application decisions, and after the 3-month bootcamp, started applying for jobs.
My first gig came with an e-commerce company after my capstone presentation of a natural language programming model built on sci-kit learn.
At the e-commerce company , the founders had a theory that the weather, amongst other external factors ( holidays, sporting events ) influenced demand for their products, and wanted to change AdWords bids to increase the yield on advertising revenue in response to such events.
I did some analysis, found correlations, and created a model to increase bids in certain demographics in certain cities in response to weather events. We were still testing and tweaking the model when I was offered a job at a fintech company in Toronto.
Toronto - Engineering, Product
I wanted to be a proper engineer and felt I needed to learn in a team, so I went to Toronto and joined nanopay as a software engineer. We were building a payments platform, using a modeling framework written in Javascript. Our server code was Java. I worked on the platform, which we were also building, and also spent some months on the security team, and wrote the design doc for multi-key signing.
I eventually became a team lead there and worked on a consumer-facing app we were launching. As I started spending more and more time with stakeholders, I was asked to join the product team and was tasked with managing the platform roadmap, the common underpinning to the many payment products the company was working on.
Founding - EasyReviews, Supervenn, Nokaroshi
In the pandemic, I launched my first online business, a way for users to have handwritten letters delivered to their loved ones. I made my first revenue online, and loved it. I then joined the OnDeck Founders program and started looking for cofounders and ideas. I eventually quit my job, explored a bunch of ideas, and moved to San Francisco, starting a company called easyreviews.
I had some customers and a reasonable product, but I struggled to reconcile myself to doing the sales part of the job, something I’d never done before, and something I didn’t yet understand was a huge part of founding a company. Solo founding in SF for rough for me - I didn’t have a visa, an income, or a bed - I was crashing on a friend’s couch.
While this was happening, I met a cofounder, Tim Wagner and we worked for a time on a consumer application that he eventually built into Sevenn.
I stayed on in the the Bay Area and started consulting for startups. I advised them primarily on products, but also on decks, fundraising and sales. The most significant of these companies were zendesk and the swarm.
I started doing talks, including one at IBM.
I also coached PMs and other early career professionals at this time and really enjoyed it. Those few months in SF were in some ways the highlight of my life.
By march of 2022 though, without the stability of a visa, it became necessary to leave the United States. Rather than return to Canada though, I decided to move to India where I saw more opportunity.
Since then I’ve been working on my venture studio as a solo founder, with plenty of stops and setbacks along the way.
In 2023, after almost 2 years of full time founding, I got a product role at 7-11 in the US. I spent a little more than a year doing this remotely, while still working on my venture studio.
As of March 2024, I’m continuing to build Human Insight Ventures, now with a team of 5.
We are building a product called kitaabnama - a personalized reading coach, doing some consulting work to pay the bills, organizing some events, and offer an early career bootcamp for college aged-students.
There are other jobs that I skipped for brevity -
Bike messenger (Toronto, 2015)
Farm hand ( Vancouver Island, 2016)
Political campaigner ( Toronto, 2015 )
Baker (Vancouver 2016).
Call Centre ( Toronto, 2009 - during university)
There are some other courses I took as well -
Creative Writing, Vancouver Community College ( 2017 )
Baking Fundamentals, George Brown University ( 2018 )
Sailing Canada - Keel Boat ( 2018 )
Improv - Vancouver Improv Center ( 2018 )