Builder | Tech Founder (0→1→Scale) | Tech Pragmatist
I’m a hands-on builder and tech founder with over 18+ years of experience in transforming ideas into market-ready, scalable products.
I prefer doing hard things the hard way - be it "10 days of Vipassana meditation (2004)", "running half and full marathons (2006, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2022)", "bootstrapping a startup (2012)", "strength training (2018)" and "learning to swim (2023)".
TLDR;
- 12+ years as technical founder: Bootstrapped DeltaX (2012–2024) from 0 to 90+ engineering team and $2M+ ARR, staying profitable and bootstrapped
- 0→1 obsession: Architected and launched 10+ vertical-specific B2B ad-tech products at DeltaX, evolving from whiteboard concepts to market success and failures
- Tech Pragmatist: Deep curiosity for innovation with balanced judgment to separate signal from hype and buzzwords
Current focus
Today, my energy is channeled into exploring:
- AI-first Startups & LLM-Driven Tools: Building next-generation products that leverage APA (Agentic Process Automation) and LLMs.
- Enterprise AI/ML Solutions: Crafting AI/ML innovations that drive business value.
- Advisory Roles: Helping non-tech founders navigate the complexities of AI/ML technology and innovation.
Experience
DeltaX | Co-Founder (Jul 2012 – Dec 2024)
For over a decade, I co-founded and led tech at DeltaX, building it from a whiteboard concept into a robust ad-tech platform. Here are some key highlights of what I built and achieved:
- Built “The Advertising Cloud” Platform: Created a comprehensive platform managing over $100M+ in media spend annually across Search, Social, RTB, Video, and Mobile channels.
- Launched 10+ B2B Ad-Tech Products: Spearheaded the development of more than 10 vertical-specific B2B ad-tech products, taking them from initial whiteboard sessions to successful (and failed) market launches.
- Scaled Engineering Org to 90+: Grew the engineering organization from a home office to a dedicated HQ of 90+ engineers, establishing engineering rigor and a strong culture of ownership.
- Architected for Scale: Designed systems capable of processing 1B+ daily events with seamless integration across 40+ APIs (including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc.). I hand-coded the core ad-tracking and ad-serving infrastructure in the early days.
- Innovation: Architected predictive models for cross-channel attribution, bid optimization, budget distribution, and ROI forecasting, driving performance and efficiency for our clients.
Key Highlights: Alum of Microsoft Ventures Accelerator & Blackbox Connect (SV).
P.S: I've made some notes about the journey in tech, design, scalability, and war stories on our engineering blog here.
Ideeli Inc. | Remote Lead Engineer (Feb 2008 – Jul 2012)
I was fairly active in the Ruby / Ruby on Rails community around 2006-2008. It was then I saw a posting from Mark (CTO of Ideeli) around an opening for working on a challenging Rails app. I reached out to him and after a couple of discussions, I was thrilled to join the rocketship.
I started working remotely with Ideeli. It was a flash-sales e-commerce website headquartered in NYC. Ideeli was one of my first in the ring experiences of working in a hyper-growth environment. We started as a small extremely agile team of ~6 developers spread across the globe (Canada, Spain, US, and India) which in 4 years was 60+ full-time engineers and supporting revenue of well over $100 MM revenue, and more than 6 MM members. In all honesty, during this time - I solely focussed on writing scalable and performant code.
Social Innovator | Founder (Jul 2007 – Apr 2012)
Launched initiatives like SocialSync.org (backed by UnLtd India), Ads4Good.org (backed by GoodCommpany Ventures, Philadelphia), and OpenCivic.in to empower nonprofits and foster civic engagement - mentions [1] & [2].
Pinstorm | Lead Programmer (Jul 2006 – Jun 2007) | Early-Stage Digital Marketing Startup
I joined Pinstorm fresh out of college. The story of me joining is nothing less than legendary - happened because of my talk at the BarCampMumbai in 2006 (while I was still in college).
Worked bid/budget optimization algorithms in the early digital marketing space (pre-"data science" era) and conceptualized tools that set the stage for modern campaign analytics.
I also met Ravi at Pinstorm, the future co-founder of DeltaX. We used to continuously discuss ideas and plans around starting up. Little did we know that things will finally materialize in 2012.
Exploring ProductHunt / Independent maker movement (2019 - Present)
I've always been curious about the indie developer movement. I stumbled upon ProductHunt (PH) around this time. Started interacting with the community of indie makers and also following product launches on PH. I released a fun browser extension on PH in July 2019 - it was featured on the first page for most of the day and ended up with close to 4000 Weekly Active Installs in months from the release. Here is my PH profile.
Various Hackathons (2006 - 2015)
I used to love participating in hackathons while the spirit of the hackathon was intact. More recently, they have become hiring events for companies. Good for them - but not for me anymore - here are my thoughts on what it means to take part in a hackathon.
- Match.AI (2015): Winner at XHackNight powered by IBM Bluemix and Xamarin — an app that uses personality profiling to add context to online reviews. Read more here.
- LinkedIn India Hackday (2014): Developed a Chrome extension to enhance web accessibility and productivity.
- Internal: ideeli Hackathon - Most Creative Hack (May 2012) & Most Ready for Release Hack (Dec 2011)
- Zwingmo - Winner at #Pi Hackathon - by Zomato (Oct 2011)
- Yahoo Open Hack Day (2009): Earned recognition for Kiva Mobile, blending social impact with mobile innovation.
- Silver Hacker - Pune Ruby Hackathon (Jul 2006): Built Mars, a planetplanet.org like feed reader with multi-user multi-planet support. Also features easy configuration, themes, caching, and Ajax UI.
Education / Opensource (2003-2006)
I've deep gratitude for having gone through formal education in computer science. A lot of this is also attributed to me starting to enjoy and explore academic interests while in college.
Don Bosco Institute of Technology, Mumbai (2003 - 2006)
BE in Computer Engineering
Bombay Institute of Technology, Mumbai (2000 - 2003)
Diploma in Computer Technology
Key themes around this period were around my exploration were - GNU/Linux, Open Source, FOSS, Sourceforge, Web 2.0, HTML, Blogging, RSS, and WordPress.
In college I was fairly active in promoting and using free and open source software. I also happened to release an Open Source blogging engine for communities.
QuickBlogger - Website | Blog | Project Page