Origin and arc
I was born in Calicut, Kerala, which is a tier-two city in the south of India. My dad was a mid-managerial level government servant. Nothing very fancy. My mom was a teacher at one of the private colleges, and later she decided to leave her job so she could focus on bringing us up. We had a better education that way, and she could focus on taking care of us.
We were brought up the way any typical middle-class Indian family of that era was. Going out to see the waves at a beach on a Sunday was an attraction. A monthly outing where we could just go and have a dosa was something that brought joy to me and my family, because that was what we could afford.
It was made clear to me even when I was very young that if I had to hustle through in life, I would get the outcome. Nothing was going to be given to me. So a lot of my early days, whether in my education or my career, were hustled through. Typical Asian parenting where you are always asked to be the top or the number one, and that was the point of the hustle. Losing, or even falling behind number one, was considered losing. That is the ethos that got embedded inside me.
How I ended up in data
I was not destined to be in data. For that matter, I was quite lost as any other kid would be, coming from India where the only acceptable routes were engineering or doctor. If you did not get into one of those, society more or less branded you as not studious enough.
Based on the limited knowledge and exposure I had at the time, everybody, including my parents and relatives, said mechanical engineering was the thing to do because it was “evergreen”. And so I ended up doing mechanical engineering. In my heart I always wanted to do computer science, but I did not, because family and the people around me thought I was naive enough that I should go for mechanical engineering instead.
The idea, as part of this hustling culture, was to get campus placed. My engineering college, LBS College of Engineering, Kasaragod, had campus placement, but not to the extent of the tier-one colleges. Three or four companies came to recruit, and one of them was Amara Raja. It fitted into the profile of a mechanical engineering kid, and I managed to crack it. That is how I ended up there.
Although I thought I would be doing something more mechanical in nature, that never happened. The guys who recruited me thought my English was good, so they decided I should go into sales, because sales is about talking. Honestly, I hated sales. It was not the hatred for sales itself; it was more about the place I was in and the people around me. There was hardly anybody my age. Everybody was beyond 35 or 40, and I was the youngest in the group. I was in Chennai, not exactly in a great spot. All I had on my mind were two things. One was that I needed the money, because my sister was also studying, and going back to the hustling work style, I wanted to support my family. The other was that I wanted to get out of what I was doing and get into something a little more intellectual, working behind a computer, working with mathematics. That is what my natural inclination had always been.
The move from Chennai through different sales roles was ironically a kind of escapism, I think. I just wanted to leave the city and the people, go somewhere I could be a little happier. That was the naivety of it.
I was in the sales role for less than a couple of months. Through a friend, I got a referral at Goldman Sachs and started as an analyst. The work was reconciliations, financial analysis on various products, identifying the risk of our books and records against the market. That is where I started to pick up Excel, and my affinity for numbers started getting fulfilled. I really enjoyed it and wanted to get much better at it. I was around a bunch of Excel pros and gurus, and I had a massive insecurity that I did not know enough to move ahead in that career. That is when I decided I needed to make a switch.
I was already studying for GMAT, thinking I might go for higher studies, maybe an MBA into M&A. But then business analytics and big data were catching up. This was in early 2011 and 2012. The word at the time was big data, because of the proliferation of digital devices and the explosion of data. Through a lot of relatives and my circle, I came to know that a career in big data would be quite lucrative, and at the same time I could continue with that passion for numbers and math, including machine learning. So I used my GMAT score and applied to NUS, which had just started its first course in business analytics. That is how I landed in Singapore in 2013.
Singapore, and home
Singapore is home now. In my mind, home is not a place. It is an imaginary entity you build out of the experiences and the people that have shaped you. I have been here since 2013. A good part of my adult life has been spent here. I made friends, connected, got married. Although I got married in India, I moved back here after marriage. So it is very much home for me today.
The career, told as a story
After my master’s, I wanted to find a job desperately, because I still had my education loan to finish. It was very hard to find a job exactly in business analytics because of my lack of direct experience in the field. And Singapore, let us be clear, is a cutthroat market. I made something like 70 or 80 applications and landed two offers. One of them was a consulting role, and I took it. It was not the best of experiences, but it was a good learning ground for how a good manager should be, and how a good manager should not be. Apart from that, I learned a lot about how to communicate, how to build decks, and how to manage stakeholders. A lot of the proper learning for me happened in that time.
Throughout the career, there have been a lot of learnings. One of them is the immigration mindset, where nobody and nothing is going to take care of you. You need to hustle through yourself. At the core, especially from corporate, what I believe is that there are a lot of people who just talk, and very few people who actually create anything. Creation is what generates value. That is something I hold to the core as a value, which is why I want to create something tangible enough that adds value to the existing world. It is not about me consuming, but giving back to the world and the community in ways that I can.
Why Lumen
Lumen was a natural progression from the semantic search we built as part of Uplyft. Clearly what we saw was that while we were building the semantic search, Shopify was doing a lot of the things we were trying to do. That sort of uprooted the way we were working. One of the naturally coherent shifts was to look at generative engine optimization, related to agent e-commerce, because I strongly believe that as humans we are going to communicate with the web and with each other, while agents and developers will do the work.
One of the core challenges any organization faces is setting up the data to be ready for this agent e-commerce world. Lumen↗ as such is only the start of the product, where you talk about visibility. Analogically, it is the doctor and what the disease is. The solution is the treatment that comes after that, and that is the core proposition Lumen will get to over time.
Outside work
I am married, no kids, and live on the west side of Singapore.
I am a huge fan of Lewis Hamilton, primarily because I can relate to him. He did not come with a lot of pedigree, nor did he have the legacy. He came to where he is today because of what he is and the kind of work that he does. While I support Ferrari, I am also a huge fan of the lineup from Mercedes. So these are the teams I support.
I also do a little bit of investing in stocks and options, primarily out of interest.
I love travelling and clicking pics. The portfolio lives on Unsplash↗. I love exploring speciality coffees and craft beers, and usually hang out with friends over one of these.
I write on Substack↗ and post regularly on X↗.
A small note
I might look serious, but I am not. I am trying to make a point to smile more, and not take life so seriously.