💼 Professional
🏗 I like building tech products, and growing tech enabled businesses
👷♂️ I enjoy working with tech companies and helping them grow. I do this by:
- Angel Investing in early stage companies
- 🚀 Working at early and growth stage companies
- 📈 Advising boards / founders of companies on growth
👨👩👧👧 Personal
🐳 I love scuba diving, and just hit my 100th dive in the Maldives in March 2022!
🛫 I like planning travel, especially by finding arbitrage opportunities by hacking credit card points, hotel points, and airline miles.
👨💻 I'm a tinkerer. Learn more: Personal Stack & Projects
👨👩👧👧 I am the lesser half of my amazing wife and am easily bullied by my 2 daughters
🚀 Work
- I'm currently a Partner at On Deck, where I lead our investing, business and expansion activities in APAC + India. Here's more about why I joined On Deck.
- I had a short (3 quarter) stint at Skillshare, working on international (ex-US) expansion, with a core focus on product initiatives. I was the first and only product hire responsible for international product & growth initiatives; part of the product leadership team, helping the company as it progressed towards an IPO. During my time there I led product initiatives that directly contributed to revenue growth, including localizing payments, building our payments platform strategy, working on product localization, and executing on growth partnerships.
- Before Skillshare, I worked at Quora for ~3 years, in a unique and high impact role at the company. I was Quora's first international hire. My primary focus was growing product usage, specifically the usage of Quora internationally, with a special focus on India. I really enjoyed being a one-man army for Quora outside the US: doing whatever was needed for Quora to grow and succeed outside the US. During my time, I was directly involved in:
- more than doubling usage in India to 70+ million monthly uniques
- building and scaling Quora's new community product, Quora Spaces
- launching Quora in 8 Indian languages (from 0) and writing Quora's international growth playbook
- building Quora's sales presence in India, international community management teams, and helping set up Quora's first international entity and office
- Before that, I spent 6 years as the Founder & CEO of AudioCompass. We aimed to digitally replicate the experience of having a local show you around a destination while you travel. We helped passionate people (our tour creators) show others around their city, virtually. We raised a small seed round from Blume Ventures, but I stopped working on it in early 2017.
😇 Angel Investing
- There's more detail about my early stage investing on my Angel Investing page.
- I've been angel investing in early-stage companies since 2010/11. I typically invest in companies at the early or formative stages (pre-Seed, Seed). These also happen to be the stages I am able to add the most value. Occasionally and opportunistically (usually via syndicates or friends), I invest in companies at later stages.
- My typical cheque size is small ($5k - $10k), but I recently started a syndicate on AngelList that allows me to bring more capital to the start ups I invest in
- I consider myself an operator-angel. Founders enjoy working with me because I'm brutally honest, ask difficult questions and offer sincere advice, and am always willing to give them the time to think through (and sometimes execute) whatever they're struggling with
📨 Stay in Touch
💁♂️ Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora
📰 Half-Cooked on Substack
📮 gautam {at} hey.com
👇 More
Angel Investing
Writing, Interviews, etc
Personal Stack & Projects