Solopreneurship
In 2022, I started my journey as a soloprenuer by founding Voohy. In 2023, I additionally started a fractional consulting role with a couple of early-stage startups and consultancies.
Voohy is an AI-enabled leadership development app that is based a blend of AI-enabled features, scientific research, and my own leadership experience.
Working on Voohy has taught me a lot. Something that would not be possible if I simply an employee. When you're a soloprenuer, then of course, you have to do everything by yourself. From development, to product, to marketing, to sales - it's all on you. At a large company, you don't get a chance to do many critical things yourself - there are entire teams and departments for that. So you don't develop those skills. But here, I had to develop the knowledge on how things I previously offloaded to other teams. This has made me a better generalist. Working solo also meant that I did not have to ask for permission to explore new avenues and methods, and I fully delved into applied AI and worked on RAG based systems and agents for my own research and development for Voohy.
Working solo also made me realize that I am not tied to working on just one thing. I could do additional things like consultancies, fractional consulting, and even some product management. So I decided to do that. I have helped multiple early-stage startups on the tech and product side, often acting as a fractional CTO/CPO and AI Advisor. I've helped them define their tech (especially AI) strategy, and often have helped hire their first tech and product people.
Fractional consulting has been a pleasent surprise for me. It is tremendously fulfilling for me to work with multiple clients and help them grow their business.
eyeo GmbH
I joined eyeo as a Product Owner in July 2018.
Based in Germany, eyeo is most famous for Adblock Plus. I joined a Product Owner (doing product management rather than striclty product owner stuff) for a brand new team, and was elevated to a lead role for the companies most important priority in 2019, and in 2020, promoted to VP of Core Technology.
Anti-Circumvention
As PO of a team called anti-circumvention, I had to quickly get up to speed on an industry and domain I had almost no idea of. Ultimately, I ended up leading the strategy for the company's approach towards the topic, and wrote the playbook on how to approach anti-circumvention for Adblock Plus.
Manifest V3
Early in 2019, Google announced it's plans for Manifest V3, which had the critical implications for ad blocking extensions. I was taked to lead an internal working group to understand, analyse and develop a plan navigate these changes, so that the company could continue to offer an effective ad-filtering product as a browser extension.
Core Technology Business Unit
I was asked to contribute towards shaping of a company-wide re-org, which resulted in the creation of a few business units. I was asked to co-lead the core tecnology business unit as VP. I reported to the CEO, was part of the company leadership team, and help define OKRs at both company level and business unit level. I led 3 new critical technology products, 4 critical R&D efforts and 10+ product features. Our business unit had 5 teams, and I help hire almost all the people in it. I helped form the company's first AI team, co-led the effort to re-architect the core engine to a different language to enable faster execution on mobile, led the effort for the company's developer docs portal, and core infrastructure upgrades for a host of internal processes.
From 2019 to 2021, I led ad-filtering industry's premier industry conference - the Adblocker Developer Summit (now renamed to Ad-Filtering Developer Summit). I reached out to, and curated the speakers, and led the organizing committee. I also co-MC'ed the event, both in-person in 2019, and online in 2020 and 2021.
I also was eyeo's W3C AC rep during that time, and represented a greater case for ad-filtering to the outside world. I also talked about ad-filtering, especially eyeo's anti-circumvention efforts at JSConf (the world's biggest JS conference) in 2019.
At the end of my time at eyeo, I was feeling like venturing out on my own and becoming a founder of my own product, and take the soloprenuer route. I had an idea of what to build based on my years managing and leading people, so I took the leap to found Voohy.
Barrierbreak
I joined Barrierbreak as Head of Accessibility Innovation and Research in Janurary 2017.
Barrierbreak is a Mumbai-based tech company offering products and services around web accessibility. It was incredibily satisfying to work in a company using tech to help people with disabilities. A vast majority of the staff were PwD (persons with disabilities) and it was one of the rare tech companies where the majority of the staff were women, including the CEO, who I reported to.
At Barrierbreak, I got to continue some of the work I did at Opera, in terms of W3C standard work. I helped in the development of the WCAG specifications, and helped in the development of the W3C HTML specifications. Apart from the developer relations work, I got to continue some of the product management work, along with work on coding focussed projects too.
Newzhook
I led the revamp of the site Newzhook, which is a news site specifically focussed on news relevant to people with disabilities. I essentially threw away the old code and made it from scratch. I made it into a PWA (progressive web app) and added features for editorial and content staff to better edit and publish stories. It led to a 2x increase in monthly traffic and 4x the amount of daily active users. Site awarded Zero Project's Innovative Practice Award for 2018
Applied AI Research
I worked on taking AI research and developing concepts that could be used to make tools helpful to people with disabilities. I established the company's first AI team, and worked on developing a mobile app that used machine learning and computer vision (along with some other device specific APIs) to help people with disabilities. The main concept was a currency detection app to help visually disabled people to more accurately detect and convert currencies.
I also led extensive R&D prototype efforts to develop simulating tools for various visual disabilities. This helped able bodied people to better understand various visual impairments.
I left Barrierbreak in 2018 to join eyeo GmbH.
Opera Software
I started my career at Opera Software in 2007. I have since been working on a variety of projects, including the Opera browser, the Opera browser extensions, and the Opera browser mobile apps.
I joined as a Web Evangelist, and initially, my job was to find out why certain sites were breaking in the Opera browser. In case its the browser's fault (rarely), then file detailed bug reports to help the developers fix it, and in case its the websites' fault, contact them to make them fix it somehow! I helped fix hundreds of sites over the years.
With time, I ventured into deeper areas of developer relations, and worked closely with marketing, sales and product management. Eventually I took a PM role leading the browser extensions platform for Opera.
Developer Relations
I ventured beyond just this work and started participating with the web development community at large. I gave talks at hundreds of developer events, mostly about the open web, html5, web accessibility etc. This was also the time I started contributing to W3C efforts.
Product and Program Management
In 2015, I became PM of the browser extensions platform for Opera. This involved looking at the Opera add-ons store, and making it better for everyone involved - end users, developers, and the companies behind the extensions. During my time as PM, I focussed on a few key areas - Growth, Safety and Developer Experience. For growth, I worked on bringing to the Opera add-ons store a large amount of extensions which were not previously available there. For safety, the number 1 priority was to reduce the number of unsafe and malware extensions. We worked on identifying and removing such extensions, and developing moderation policies which helped reduce such in the future. For developer experience, we modernized the add-ons portal for developers submitting to the store, came up with better developer documentation, and worked on the new (at the time) sidebarAction API.
I left Opera in november 2016, and joined Barrierbreak in Janurary of 2017.