My Story

I went from being a wartime refugee as a child, to student leader in university, to portfolio manager at large hedge fund, to co-founder of a successful startup. This is my story.

Childhood.
    I was born in a small town in south India. The formative experience of my childhood was this: at the age of 13, I spent 3 days in the hold of a cargo ship, escaping a war zone with nothing more than what I could carry in a backpack. This gave me (what I think is) unusual levels of optimism, detachment, perspective, and risk tolerance.

School.
    I graduated from high school as valedictorian and head boy. I was on my school’s debate, quiz, math, soccer, track and basketball teams (captaining the first four), and won intramural and interscholastic (state, regional) competitions with all of them. I also edited the school magazine. I did these for fun: extracurriculars don’t count towards college admissions in India.
    I was accepted, via competitive exam, into India’s top medical school AIIMS, as well as India’s top engineering school IIT Bombay (<0.2% admit rates at each; very dissimilar exams!). I chose to join the latter.

IIT.
    I graduated from IIT Bombay with a B.Tech. in Engineering Physics. While at IIT-B, I was elected Institute General Secretary (the highest post in student government) with a record number of votes, and served as sole student rep on IIT-B’s Senate. I was a member of the “core group” for Mood Indigo and TechFest, IIT-B’s two main (and India’s largest) campus festivals. I captained IIT-B’s quiz, debate and literary teams, winning multiple national tournaments; I was also the #1-ranked competitive trivia player in the country. I graduated with a bunch of awards including the institute’s “Roll of Honour (cultural)”.
    But I realized that a career in physics was not for me. I was accepted into India’s top business school IIM-A (100th %ile nationally in the competitive entrance exam; <0.2% acceptance rate); I decided not to go. Instead, I joined a Japanese hedge fund, Simplex.

Simplex.
    Simplex Asset Management, headquartered in Tokyo, is one of Asia’s oldest and largest quant hedge funds, with several billion dollars under management. I joined them as employee #7, and built many of their core trading systems. I started as a programmer and quant analyst, then became a junior trader, and eventually, senior portfolio manager and head of all non-Japan investments. While at Simplex, I built a system for automated quant trading of the US Treasury market, one of the first in the industry.
    I was an excellent trader: contrarian, aggressive, thoughtful, informed. My best trade at Simplex was my last one: I exited all my positions at the high-water mark in 2007, just before the global financial crisis of 2008. I then quit my hedge fund job and moved to Toronto, looking for new challenges.

Quandl.
    A few years later, I started Quandl with my friend and co-founder Tammer Kamel. We set out to solve a well-known problem: there’s an enormous amount of valuable data in the world, but it’s fragmented and intractable: hard to find and hard to use. We built technology to aggregate and harmonize millions of datasets from thousands of sources, all in a single data marketplace with a uniform, powerful API.
    Quandl pioneered the category of “alternative data for finance” – datasets of great value to professional investors, but previously unused (and often unknown). Our alt data was used by a majority of the world’s top hedge funds, asset managers, fintechs, and investment banks, serving millions of downloads and powering billions in investment decisions.
    I wore many hats at Quandl: heading all things data as Chief Data Officer; raising $20M in venture capital from blue-chip Silicon Valley investors; managing (at various times) finance, marketing, sales and ops; recruiting and team-building; and perhaps most importantly, setting culture and vision.
    Quandl was acquired by Nasdaq in December 2018, in a substantial and successful exit. Tammer and I stayed on to run the business for a few more years, before each moving on to fresh pastures.

Windkey.
    After a sabbatical (during which I angel invested, mentored and advised, and explored lots of ideas), I’ve returned to the startup arena with Windkey.ai. Windkey is a new startup building at the intersection of finance, data and AI. It’s still in stealth, but it’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. Stay tuned!

Excellence.
    I am an unabashed believer in excellence. I abhor sloppiness and unseriousness. When I commit to something, I want to be the best: not just the best in my school, or company, or city, or country, but among the very best in the whole world. My career is testament to this. I’m drawn to hard challenges – trading in hyper-efficient markets, building novel technology, founding a category-creating startup – and succeeded in them, on my own terms.
    Excellence requires confidence, curiosity, humility and hard work. It often entails taking risks and straying from the beaten path. Talent helps, and so does luck, but they’re far from sufficient.
    Above all, excellence is a choice: it is downstream of the desire for excellence. This is rarer than one might think.