Hello, my name is Aakash. I've been programming since I was a kid, I love building things (who doesn't), and I'm often told I talk too fast. What gets me going is building things that people use.
Currently working on fine-tuning models for internal business functions (incredibly vague, I know), reach out and I'd love to tell you more (my focus changes frequently so you never know what you'll get).
My "background" spans enterprise SAAS (Stripe, Salesforce), Finance/Crypto (Jump Trading, Wormhole Labs), Consumer (Flexible Finance, Zynga, Restaurant POS/order-ahead softeare, a series of mobile apps I've released on my own), and Robotics (not really, I made a single Youtube video).
Writing
- (Strategy Memo) Value Driven Innovation at Shopify and The Incumbency Trap at Salesforce Wrote this essay while I was at Salesforce. Bret Taylor (CEO) and I went back and forth about the ideas in it. Eventually it got shared around and thanks to two guys named Lachy and Jeff, it's how I ended up at Stripe.
- LLMs Won't Replace Anyone Without Context What I've realized in failing to get what I want out of the leading tools on the market. Something I might want to build.
- Tastemakers and Doers What I think value creation in post LLM enterprises looks like and a core principle that guides what I think is worth building.
- Docs as an interface to AI Something I tried to build. I might try again later. Not a good thing to build without something to attach it to.
Work Experience
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Group Product Manager, New Bets + Applied AI - Flexible Finance Launched Credit Builder in the first 8 weeks, from 0 to 1 and currently at a 7 figure ARR. Working on our second product under the Flex umbrella while exploring AI-based tools to enhance business efficiency.April 2024 - Present
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Product Lead | CPO - Jump Trading / Wormhole Labs First PM on Jump Crypto, led Wormhole product development and build out of the developer platform. Increased active developers by 500% and daily txn volume from $1M to $40M USD. Co-Founded Wormhole Labs and served as CPO.Dec 2022 - Feb 2024
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Product Lead, Crypto | Money Movement - Stripe Founding PM on the crypto team, led/designed all 4 major projects including crypto payouts, Onramp, Payins, and Wallets. Before that, I led product for the liquidity engine, policy engine, and banking integrations within the Money Movement org.Dec 2020 - Dec 2022
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Associate Product Manager - Salesforce (Customer Data Platform) Built a unified customer data platform and data collection SDKs across disparate sources for the CDP. Enabled targeted collection and novel structuring of actionable customer data via first party methods.July 2020 - Dec 2020
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Founder - MealPlan Launched cross-platform software suite + POS solution with $4,800+ in weekly recurring revenue & 1,000+ active users in public beta. Signed 12 major restaurant partners and grew MAU retention to 70%.March 2018 - Nov 2019
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Associate Product Manager - Salesforce (Einstein Analytics) Shipped live data explorer for real-time queries across data silos in Einstein Analytics. Designed, roadmapped, and built semantic search MVP using natural language queries (pre LLM).May - Aug 2019
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Product Management - Microsoft Teams Shipped intelligent, chat-engagement experiments with team of 8 engineers, researchers, and designers. Developed model to power user- and context-specific conversational prompts.May - Aug 2018
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Machine Learning Researcher - Duke Medicine (Bioinformatics Dept.) Built a predictive model for Schizophrenia readmission rates + prescription efficacy to reduce healthcare expenditures.Aug 2018 - May 2019
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Software Engineering - Zynga (Farmville) Developed reusable full-stack framework for recurring events throughout game cycle. Implemented various full-stack game features for Farmville: Tropic Escape.May - Aug 2016
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Software Engineering - Atomic Labs (Ever AI) Implemented location based photo search, refactored sharing UI, increased engagement using Optimizely. Shipped sharing and usability features.May - Aug 2015
Projects
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Kaizen - 1st Place @ OpenAI x A16Z x 11Labs Consumer Hackathon
Built a computer vision based open world RPG with an LLM powered NPC framework for contextual RPG interactions.
November 2024
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SculptAI
Fine-tuned GPT to accurately tell you the nutritional breakdown of meals through a photo and give you an accurate estimate of body composition based on a few photos and manual info.
2024
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Robot Minion With A Flamethrower
I built a home security device and made a video about it.
2020 (Covid)
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POKELURE
Reverse engineered Niantics' client/backend relationship to retrieve and re-map hidden game data. 85k+ installs.
2016
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TIMELY
Built time-based location recommendation and schedule planning app using Google Maps & Foursquare APIs. 10k installs and featured in HackerNews and Business Insider.
2016