Work

Scaled Partnerships is an engine for early-stage creators. Contracted to optimize for operational efficiency within the program.

• Built a custom memory system on top of the AI tools available to me — greatly enhancing both the quality and productivity of my output.
• Built an LLM-based quality-control pipeline that took the team’s review coverage from small samples to the large majority of cases, with a viable pathway to full coverage.
• Benchmarked AI voice-calling vendors and documented a vision for how the technology could dramatically scale the program’s reach (without losing headcount).
• Designed and built a dashboard tracking tooling friction across the team — time to resolution, priority issues, blind spots, and overall trends.

Myco produces an eco-friendly packaging alternative to Thermocol using mycelium — the root network of mushrooms. I played an active role in setting up the company. We are currently revenue, cash-flow and operationally profitable, and my co-founder (who originally spotted this opportunity) currently runs the show. My role is currently largely dormant — I primarily support by providing AI-based solutions where needed.

• Secured a collaboration with a Czech mycelium-technology firm, adapting their proprietary methods to the Indian market.
• Built a sales strategy targeting industries exporting to the EU, where more challenging environmental-packaging rules are being enforced.

Joined as reporting lead for Facebook Community Learning Labs (FCLL) — a meta community for Facebook group admins, back when Meta was not yet the company name — and ended up leading the program when my manager moved on.

• We worked with some of the best Facebook group admins in the world — a roster whose communities collectively reached a substantial share of Facebook’s active users.
• Developed a product-feedback reporting pipeline: forged relationships with product teams by offering a rapid path to feedback on key product decisions, drawn from a high-impact, representative population of group leaders.

Strategy consulting for mission-driven work with USAID, the Gates Foundation, the World Bank, Omidyar Network, and UN agencies.

• Facebook Community Leadership Program — Facebook 2019

  My last Dalberg project: mentoring 20 high-impact Facebook group admins across APAC, selected by Facebook — communities ranging from safe online spaces for women in deeply conservative countries to youth support networks.

  Arguably my most personally successful project at Dalberg. Got excellent feedback from the FB team, and maintained relationships that translated into a full-time contract in June 2021.

• Digital payments for financial inclusion — USAID, India 2015

  The project that opened my Dalberg years: building the coalition behind India’s push to expand digital-payment acceptance. We convened a partnership of 20+ organisations — banks, payment networks, FMCGs, telcos, e-commerce firms, civil society — ran pilots, and built the roadmap that fed the Beyond Cash report.

  High impact. The coalition and the acceptance-network agenda outlived the project — India’s real-time payments story met our wildest dreams; as a working team, we used to fantasize about being able to pay at a Kirana store using our mobile phones.

• Project Gaze — privacy and the low-income citizen — CGAP & Dvara Research 2017

  After the Supreme Court declared privacy a fundamental right, we used human-centred research — interviews and group discussions across rural Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Uttarakhand, and low-income neighbourhoods of Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai — to understand what privacy means to lower-income Indians. Findings (Privacy on the Line) were presented to the Srikrishna committee drafting India’s data protection bill. One day of that fieldwork became Shivaji Nagar.

  One of my favorite projects. The common argument being made in India at the time was that people at subsistence levels of survival did not care about privacy — this was a chance to document real individuals across the country and their feelings. We presented our findings to the former Chief Justice of India, and some of our recommendations found their way into the whitepaper he drafted on the subject, feeding the country’s data protection bill.

• Scale-up strategy for low-cost clinics — Swasth, Mumbai 2017

  Swasth runs low-cost health clinics in Mumbai’s densest low-income neighbourhoods. We built the strategy to reduce the wide variation in financial performance across their 20 clinics — fieldwork in the clinics, consumer-data analysis, and lessons from comparable providers globally.

  Another interesting project — the client was convinced that location was the core determinant of clinic success; our strongest hypothesis was that it was the quality of the doctor. Swasth was largely funded by USAID, but they appear to have survived that turmoil and found alternative investors. My impression was of a strong, passionate team, and I hope they’ve been successful.

• Sanitation workers’ innovation summit — New Ventures Fund 2018

  Convened 35 donors, NGOs, companies and government bodies to design pilots for improving the lives of India’s sanitation workers — a worker registry, better contracts, an entrepreneurship programme, a culture of safety, and dignity campaigns. I later wrote about this in The Wire.

  The actual pilots ran into foundational implementation challenges. For example, the Government did not grant sanitation workers time off to attend the safety training workshops we organized — we were instead asked to pay each sanitation worker to attend the training sessions.

• Blueprint for a sanitation innovation hub — ASCI, Telangana 2018

  A strategy blueprint for a state sanitation innovation hub: a sourcing programme for innovations, an accelerator for sanitation start-ups, and a knowledge hub for the ecosystem’s stakeholders.

  Fun project, but I don’t believe ASCI ever ended up building this.

• Feed the Future opportunity scan — USAID, Cambodia 2018

  An opportunity assessment for USAID’s Feed the Future programme: a competitiveness review of Cambodia’s agricultural value chains, and the white spaces where donor money could matter — a transport-and-storage challenge fund, digitised traceability, and certified raw cashew exports. The findings fed the design of the programme that followed.

  Our recommendations were implemented in the HARVEST II design. I should dig up the monitoring and evaluation reports to see what they say about the programme’s success. Along the way I had the opportunity to interview senior government officials and key business representatives across Cambodia’s agricultural sector.

• Women & girls’ financial inclusion — UNCDF 2017

  Country assessments of the barriers women and girls face in accessing financial services — Senegal, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Myanmar — via a toolkit we built for the purpose. The work supported UNCDF’s global PoWER platform; the Myanmar assessment is public.

  I led the Myanmar workstream — we ran focus group discussions with women and children in areas of Myanmar only accessible by boat, and I had the chance to interview senior representatives across the country: leaders of the central bank, leadership of the largest banks, the most innovative startups, and the bilateral and multilateral aid agencies. An extremely memorable project. I was shocked at the dependence most citizens had on private, often ruthless, moneylenders.

• A mobile wallet for low-income users — CGAP & Eko 2016

  A product strategy for a mobile wallet aimed at low-income users, built from behavioural principles of how people actually think — and subconsciously behave — around money. Ethnographic research, consumer segmentation, and design-and-testing clinics.

  Mostly harmless. I still believe that there is a market in designing a better UI for low-cost savings bank accounts in India that provides users a feeling of secure control with a simple interface. However, as far as I know, Eko never ended up implementing any recommendations.

• Digital connectivity & consumer behaviour — Omidyar Network 2016

  A study of the true state of digital connectivity in India — infrastructure, devices, and consumer readiness — through macro analysis, expert interviews, and human-centred fieldwork across five regions. The work fed the Currency of Trust report.

  Uncertain impact — Omidyar Network established itself as a thought leader in digital payments and made real investments in startups. I lack insight into the success of those investments.

• Fellowship outreach strategy — Indian Institute for Human Settlements 2016

  An outreach strategy for IIHS’s urban-practice fellowship — market sizing plus ethnographic research with target applicants across five cities, distilled into personas the institute could actually market to.

  The IIHS fellowship is still active.

• Entrepreneurship in Indonesia’s energy sector — a multinational energy major 2016

  Strengthening an enterprise-development programme to stimulate energy-sector entrepreneurship in Indonesia — a phased five-year pivot built from research with small enterprises on the ground.

  I didn’t actually do much on this project — I was just in a support role for slide creation.

• Leadership development across a portfolio — LeapFrog Investments 2016

  Two engagements with an impact investor: designing and facilitating the CEO Indaba — a leadership workshop for portfolio-company chief executives — and a feasibility study for an academy to develop talent across the portfolio.

  For years I’d have called this low impact — the Indaba itself was fascinating (I got to sit with global CEOs of multi-million-dollar companies), but I assumed the academy concept died in the deck. Writing this page, I checked: LeapFrog’s Talent Accelerator exists today, recognisably descended from the concept we studied. Perhaps it mattered more than I thought.

• Fortitude Creations — Co-founder 2019 — 2020

  A venture promoting global access to Khadi — a sustainable fabric made by Indian artisans.

  • Built a business model bridging Indian artisans with international markets, with a sales pipeline across New York, San Francisco, and London.
• Sonadka — Director 2009 — 2014

  My family business, so not really an entrepreneurial venture of my own. I am somewhat convinced that I joined largely based on my father’s trickery. Looking back, it was an incredible experience that forever shaped the outlook I have towards the work I do.

  • I focused primarily on sales, and had many hits and misses. The biggest hit continues to account for a large proportion of revenues to this date.
  • In misses — I leveraged an existing relationship with our best client, and sold them on investing in a high-quality, indigenously built water purifier. It was the biggest sale I had ever won, and I celebrated the victory prematurely. I knew nothing about designing a water purifier, and we ended up losing the client entirely.
  • Encountered a number of extremely interesting companies in my time there — Ion Exchange, Eureka Forbes, Bajoria Appliances, Honeywell India, Livinguard Technologies, and a host of small companies, of varying flavours, from across India.

My early education was at (arguably) Mumbai’s best school of the time — Bombay International School. I was captain of my house, and co-represented my school at the Harvard Model United Nations in 2002.

My undergraduate program was the B.M.S. at HR College. The entrance exam — the C.C.E.E. — drew over 25,000 applicants; I placed 28th in the country and won my seat via the general quota, studying alongside the guy who came 1st in the country (and several in the top 10).

One notable event: in 2008 our team of three won an inter-college business case contest — ₹40,000 and free first-class return tickets to anywhere in the world. To my eternal and everlasting shame, I let the ticket lapse — but there was a picture of my back in the local newspaper!

• 2024 DPI Exemplar stories Kalpa Impact
• 2019 Finding viable solutions to India’s sanitation problems ★ The Wire
• 2017 Myanmar — Women and girls financial inclusion country assessment UNCDF
• 2017 Currency of Trust Omidyar Network
• 2017 Privacy on the Line Dalberg, CGAP and Dvara Research
• 2016 Beyond Cash — Why India loves cash, and why that matters for financial inclusion USAID

★ sole author — on everything else, a co-author.