Journey

I joined Circle in late 2022 to lead product for web3 services — Circle's foray into building an 'AWS for web3' — taking three products from zero to one: a smart contract platform for deploying and managing tokenization, Programmable Wallets (Circle's wallet-as-a-service for embedding smart wallets in any app), and Gas Station, letting developers sponsor gas for their users. From there I moved to leading a team of PMs building permissionless smart contract protocols that expand the utility and experience of stablecoins — including CCTP, which grew into one of the largest bridges in web3, Smart Wallets, Paymasters (letting users pay gas in USDC), and Gateway, a chain-agnostic USDC balance for businesses and end users. Today I lead Circle's Onchain Ecosystem, spanning permissionless protocols — CCTP, Gateway, and Orchestration — and DeFi for both USDC and Arc, Circle's own blockchain.

I'd been following blockchain from the outside for a couple of years. A personal break in Amsterdam finally got me to understand the technology, and I fell into the crypto rabbithole — a year of learning and building full-time across DAOs and side projects. I was particularly interested in using the incentive-ownership of crypto to coordinate human behaviour: I wrote a lite-paper for a community-owned venture fund focused on climate founders, interviewed 100+ DAO contributors and freelancers to design a tokenized marketplace, and ran experiments including Vanir (a work wallet), BountyBoard (DAO tools), and Skout.team (a freelancing marketplace). I was also a member of Gitcoin Kernel KB7, an OnDeck Founder Fellow, and part of the Stanford Blockchain Club, Invisible College, and Seed Club.

I worked as a Product Manager, Technical, developing product strategy for short-form content as part of the Kindle/Prime offering, serving over a million subscribers. I learned the Amazon way of building — especially how systems can scale culture in an organization, thanks to things like PR/FAQ documents and leadership principles. I received a full-time offer to stay, but decided I wanted to build something of my own.

I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to go to Stanford GSB. I thought I'd learn everything about business, but surprisingly my most impactful learning was around self-awareness and growth mindset, alongside a net-giver community of friends across the globe. I spent a lot of time studying early-stage startup formation — specifically all the mistakes I'd made in my own entrepreneurial journey.

Everything I've learned professionally traces back to the five-year roller coaster that was Docon. It started as a small side project for my mother's clinic and became India's largest medical records platform. Through Docon I worked on every part of startup building — from bootstrapped door-to-door sales to managing a 150-person team and $20M+ in VC commitments — alongside two wonderful co-founders. We eventually sold the company to Pharmeasy, believing that was the best way for it to keep growing.

PEC, my undergrad, was a journey of exploration. I discovered early on that I was less interested in what was inside the classroom and more interested in everything outside it — leadership roles in college (president of the student council and the career placement cell) that showed me how much I enjoyed leading people, and five internships across banking, investing, factory floors, and project planning that showed me how much I loved building new things. Those insights pointed me toward entrepreneurship after graduation.

Visiting numerous villages in Bangladesh made me realize you can create impact and make money at the same time — a belief that's stayed central to everything I've done since. I joined a venture fund when all 'carry' meant to me was picking something up, and since the fund had no outbound deal flow, I spent two months reaching out to hundreds of entrepreneurs. I quickly realized I enjoyed the energy on the founder's side of the table far more than the investor's side — a transformative internship that showed me what I really wanted to do. Around the same time, project managing multi-million dollar construction contracts taught me a simple life lesson: by failing to plan, you are planning to fail.