Background
I moved to the United States after completing my undergrad in India in Biology. I knew I wanted to pursue higher education in the Universities of the united states, a place I perceived as one of limitless opportunities to learn and explore, and where curiosity was the only limitation to learning. After getting my masters at the University of Arizona, I joined one of the leading immunologists in the world at the Institute for Systems Biology and continued to do some very exciting work in the cutting-edge space of proteomics and epigenetics.
Path to MBA
After spending half a decade in science, I began to see the field with a little more pragmatic lens. Research biology though exciting was increasingly constrained in funding. Grants were becoming increasingly competitive with an emphasis on preliminary results. However, data generation in biosciences took more time on an average than other science fields (you cannot accelerate the growth rate of cells in the lab no matter what you do. Mice only breed that fast) creating a hamster wheel of fundraising. At this time, I began to take on more responsibilities with research management for a 50-person lab and external communication of our work to diverse audiences, something for which I had a natural flair.
This experience helped me recognize that I really enjoyed being that liaison between the work we did and the external world. I decided that I wanted to move away from research but pursue a career in marketing management and enrolled at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington to earn an MBA.
A business graduate
After a couple of internships in my final year of MBA that focused on bringing products to market, I joined PATH as a product commercialization lead for a portfolio of technologies in the Delivery group. The work was exciting, important and urgent thanks to the leadership spearheaded by the Gates Foundation, our primary sponsor. My ability to strategically assess market forces, evaluate product potential and connect market with the development teams helped me execute in this role very effectively.
During this time, I learned a lot about what makes a product successful in the target market, methods and metrics to evaluate success and most importantly, how to get buy-in from a diverse group of stakeholders. My experience at PATH helped me understand without any ambiguity that I enjoyed being that bridge between the product and the market. However, after 3 years at PATH, I felt like I was still missing the pace and speed of innovation that I had craved when I was looking to leave the lab. In addition, though my role at PATH was that of a business lead for tech, PATH itself was a non-profit. I was passionate about growing a business by driving value to customers and a non-profit was not quite the right place for it. Lastly, I was also trying to balance being a new mother with the demanding travel schedule that came with my role at PATH.
Entrepreneurship and move into tech
After the completion of several high impact projects at PATH, I decided to resign and focus on my family while I considered the next steps in my career. During this time through my experience as a mother, I saw an underserved market in the area of early childhood toys. I found that there was no easy way for parents to source toys that were safe and that supported their child’s development without spending hours researching the stuff. Even then families would need a high budget to be able to provide these toys for their kids.
A perfect combination of circumstances led me to create Toy-Yo, an online rental subscription service for high-quality toys that supported early childhood development.
I envisioned and built Toy-Yo as an online e-commerce business that took the Netflix “rent a DVD model” to toys. Building and taking Toy-Yo to market was an intense learning experience while also facing the pressure to execute from day one. A bootstrapped business with a team of 4 Toy-Yo was launched in 2016. I built on my product commercialization skills to develop the MVP and quickly learned how to build a technical product to support a B2C service. I ran the marketing/logistics arm of the business and ramped up on digital marketing to support Toy-Yo’s growth. We quickly expanded the business from Seattle to NY and built a loyal customer base of over 500 within the first 6 months.
Close to 2 years since its founding, Toy-Yo was continuing to grow. Social media influencer programs, a sustained targeted Facebook ad campaign and organic evangelism was our primary driver for website traffic and new user sign-ups. We also achieved a high conversion and retention rate of our site visitors and customers respectively.
But growth created a need for capital. Unable to sustain growth with bootstrap we set out to raise venture funds to continue to grow our startup. Our startup though admired by investors was generally seen as too early stage and the lack of a technical founder seemed to come up repeatedly as an issue. After a summer of unsuccessfully trying to raise funds, we made the difficult decision to close our operations. Though disappointed, I was lucky to have learned a ton through this experience as a founder. Toy-Yo helped me recognize that I had found my calling. I was excited to be a part of the fast-paced tech industry that was innovative and brought value to its customers in exciting new ways.
My experience with Toy-Yo helped me transition to Microsoft advertising supporting the growth of the SMB business. I got to work one of the best managers ever, Kristin Schmidt, a 10 year Microsoft veteran. Driven business minds with a bias for action, we successfully launched several initiatives including the first lead scoring model, account-based marketing program and real-time personalization of our digital assets, all of which had an immediate impact on our MQL pipeline. Microsoft was an incredible learning experience. I learned how to navigate the complexities of multiple large business groups, annual budget allocations, changing priorities at the corporate senior leadership, reorganizations to continue to move the needle on projects for which I was responsible. I was on a work high, if such a thing ever existed and was excited about the future.
In the fall of 2018, a friend referred me to a role in product marketing for Socrata at Tyler Technologies. (Socrata, a Seattle company had been acquired by Tyler Technologies 4 months prior to my interview). After interviewing it was clear that this was an opportunity to lead product marketing for a growing business and this meant I was able to define the market and pricing strategy, establish the value prop and story for the product and create the experiences in the product that can “get the job done” and delight our end users. After speaking to Kevin Merrit, the founder of Socrata, I was completely sold on the challenge and potential to help take the Socrata data platform to its next iteration as an enterprise data platform. I joined Tyler in October 2018 leading product marketing function for the Socrata product line.
At the time of writing this, I have completed 16 months at Tyler Technologies. It’s been an exciting and challenging time and given me the opportunity to challenge and grow as a strategic leader. I have captured my reflections on my time at Tyler in this post.
What’s next?
Its been a long sometimes winded journey to from researcher to strategic business mind in tech but I finally feel like I am home. Looking forward I want to continue to grow as a product marketing/strategy leader in tech. I am excited about the potential for cloud-native B2B technologies that solve problems at scale and humbled to be a part of this industry.
