About

I'm an engineer turned product manager turned entrepreneur. India has a lot of raw IT talent and I wake up everyday finding more needles in the haystack.

What Do I Do?

I help people make money.

In my first job, I was an engineer at Amazon in the Product Advertising API team. We helped blog owners make money by linking to products on Amazon and earning commissions. I handled scale at the rate of 10k+ requests per second. I also dived deep into Java hardware optimizations to bring in cost savings of $1M!

In my next job, I was an early tech hire at Meesho. Handled all sorts of stuff. Moved to a product manager role in the search and personalization team. We helped housewives make money by reselling clothes locally. This eventually gave them a voice in their family finances. Saw the 1-10 journey up close!

Currently, I'm the CEO of Cactro. We help developers from tier-3 backgrounds make money by getting good tech jobs and move their entire families up the socio-economic ladder.

Why I Do What I Do?

My Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is INFP. I'm always up for trying new things as life is too short to postpone fun!
I love to play long-term games with long-term people.
I'm a life-long learner. Part of over 20 CBCs, including Entrepreneur First, Stoa, Write of Passage, Transcend, altMBA!

I graduated in Computer Science from IIT Guwahati. Somewhere along the journey, I got bit by the impact bug.
I saw my code save money.
I saw the lives of users impacted.
I talked to people and heard their problems.
In my college days, I helped 100+ people to start their open-source journey. I'm still proud of that one!

My mom is a government teacher. She planted the seeds early on: Education is the only answer. It changes entire households. It lifts families into new economic classes. She also taught me that every student is different. My life's goal is to take people out of their local maxima. 😇

What I Do In My Free Time?

As a child, I loved playing video games (try xyzzy). Continuing it on my PS5 @swapnilagarwal. 5 platinums so far. Currently exploring VR. 100+ hours into it, I can see it's the future!

I am an avid reader since 2019. I read everyday without fail. 2500+ days and counting! I love psychology, especially Adlerian - I wish it were taught in schools. DM for book matchmaking.

Outside work, I've groomed 50+ first-time speakers over multiple conferences/meetups like JSFoo, VueBLR, AwesomeConf, DXClub, etc.

I also love coaching developers, been 5+ years now and I don't see myself stopping anytime soon. I've found my Ikigai, have you?

How Can You Contribute?

Drop a message to me using any of the social links in the footer.
I'm always happy to connect with like-minded individuals and find collaboration opportunities. Here's something interesting about me: I have been to a live WWE match. I completed a 10k run in under an hour. Phoebe is my spirit animal. Of course, 2 of these statements are true and one is not. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what is what. 🙃

Check out the below links to know more about my thought-process:

1. The OEPS Framework of Giving Feedback
2. The Art of Being a Good Mentee
3. Life is Easier with Pronoia
4. Advice to Younger Me
5. My 12 Favorite Problems
6. tech book club S1 2020, S2 2024, S3: To Be Announced...
7. going slow podcast, lowlights, devswag, geeksay