The arc does not make sense on paper. That is the point.
Engineering & Product — 2001-2012
I started in engineering — SSL-VPN internals at Juniper, computational biology at Strand Genomics, enterprise tools at Sun Microsystems. Then product management at Amazon, where I shipped Omakase and Amazon Widgets — the latter became a multi-billion-dollar revenue driver. Then Yahoo, where I ran the SMB platform and integrated the Lexity acquisition.
I could have stayed on that trajectory. I did not.
In 2008, I co-founded Ohana Media — one of India's earliest real-time bidding platforms. We bootstrapped it to a $3M+ annual run-rate before anyone in India knew what a DSP was. Exited via stake sale.
The Hard Left — 2017-Present
In 2017, I founded Farmizen — a farm-to-fork marketplace that scaled to over ₹10 crore in annual run-rate, connected 7,000+ farmers across two cities, and built the entire stack from scratch. We pivoted the model during COVID and kept moving. BBC covered us. CNBC covered us. Bloomberg covered us. Bengaluru voted us a Top Brand in 2019. Today, Farmizen is the largest organic farming community in India — and I am still building it.
I spent nearly a decade in agriculture — not as a side project, but as the central work of my life. I learned what it means to build for users who have never opened a laptop, in markets where connectivity is a luxury and trust is earned in person, over chai, in Kannada.
That decade changed how I think about technology. It is why I do not believe AI should belong only to engineers.
AI & What Comes Next — 2025-Present
I also run Mantid AI — agentic AI for manufacturing. Computer vision agents for safety, security, and logistics. Real systems for real factories.
And thecrux.ai — intensive weekend bootcamps that teach non-technical professionals to build with AI, without writing a single line of code. Not theory. Not prompt-engineering slides. Hands-on, cohort-based, two days, you walk out building.
Alongside these, I consult with companies on GTM Engineering and AI Adoption — helping leadership teams build the systems and strategies that turn AI from a slide deck into shipped product.
The credentials matter less than the pattern. I keep choosing the harder problem over the bigger paycheque — and the users everyone else ignores.
