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Hi, I am Surya

Surya Pradyumna

Head of Products at MyCaptain

Seasoned product manager with 8+ years of PM experience building and scaling B2C, B2B, and SaaS products to $XXM+ growth. Strong engineering background with 3+ years of hands-on coding, development, and tech consulting. Proven leadership in xFN team management, leveraging data and emerging tech such as ML and AI to enhance UX. Deep expertise in ed-tech, having built 0-1 to 100+ learning products and running a non-profit globally.

Product Sense
Business Strategy
Growth Strategies
xFN Leadership
UX Research and Design
Technical Knowledge

Skills

Career Journey

1
MyCaptain

Aug 2022 - Present

Bangalore, India

Edtech platform for helping youth discover and monetize their passion, careers of the future geared towards gig economy. B2C 0-1 rocketship with a $MM revenue, poised for XXX% growth YoY.

Head of Products

Aug 2022 - Present

Responsibilities:
  • Seasoned cross-functional leadership navigating the macroeconomic sentimental shift towards edtech, ++developing a thick skin by making tough decisions.
  • Leading all things digital and strategy - product, design, data, user research verticals, mentoring the technology team.

Cuemath

Sept 2020 - Aug 2022

Remote, India

Edtech company in the K-12 space, specifically for mathematics. Primarily B2C with a base of 400,000 parents, with more than a million kids using the Cuemath App across 80+ countries. In its 10-100 journey, invested by marquee investors such as Google, Sequoia, valued at ~$500M in 2022.

Product Lead

Sept 2020 - Aug 2022

Responsibilities:
  • Learnt real leadership in a remote setting riding the edtech boom during pandemic, and then the brunt post it, leading the parent charter from onboarding to renewals+referrals.
  • Big delta in product craft, got to apply Wharton B-school learnings of storytelling, vision setting in a rewarding way.
2

3
MeetHub

Nov 2019 - March 2021

Bangalore, India

Social health platform combating urban loneliness by creating healthy and safe offline micro-communities. Our small crew managed to scale the community to 15,207 members, 10+ cities partnering with 150+ experience curators, and practitioners across US and India, shutdown due to global COVID-19 regulations.

Co-Founder & CEO

Nov 2019 - March 2021

Responsibilities:
  • All things business - user research, product, community, marketing, moentization, and investment.
  • Got a taste of what founders go through - with skin in the game, hands everywhere, and ruthless prioritization, every small step feels like a celebration.

Vogo (Acquired by Chalo)

April 2019 - July 2020

Bangalore, India

Last mile mobility platform, with a 10-100 B2C, and a 1-10 B2B product. Clocking 10M+ rides, 50K+ rides/day with 2.5M+ users, got acquired by Chalo in 2020.

Technical Product Manager

April 2019 - July 2020

Responsibilities:
  • Learnt team management under great leaders. Got ringside lessons of how to stay ahead of the curve by taking ambitious bets, which pay off when macroeconomics change. B2B product line recovered 70% of lost revenues when disaster struck in the form of COVID19.
  • Platform product management for consumer-microservices, leading integrations with other partners such as Ola and PhonePe.
4

5

Bangalore, India

Edtech in the IT services and upskilling space, with global presence operating in more than 160 countries for 5M+ users, trusted by enterprise clients such as Walmart, Cisco, KPMG, Cocacola amongst others. B2C and B2B 10-100 bootstrapped product, acquired by Veranda Learning.

Senior Product Owner, R&D

April 2018 - Jan 2019

Responsibilities:
  • Learnt how 0-1 works in a mature company, right from team building to roadmapping while navigating ambiguity.
  • NPIs, greenshoot enterprise projects in R&D, reporting in to the CEO.

Voonik (Acquired by ShopUp)

Jan 2016 - April 2018

Bangalore, India

Multi-category fashion eCommerce from personal stylists, 10-100 B2C, $800M valuation funded by marquee investors including Sequioa. Made 6 acquisitons becoming a leader in unbranded fashion; got acquired by ShopUp.

Senior Product Owner, R&D

Jan 2016 - April 2018

Responsibilities:
  • Got to understand the entire lifecycle starting from product discovery to GTM. Developed a keen understanding of customer success obsession working on post-acqusition workflows.
  • Led end-to-end Localisation, Self-service tool, AI Chatbot for Shopping.
Software Engineer

Jan 2016 - Dec 2016

Responsibilities:
  • You get to do everything in a startup. Full-stack development using MERN, AI/ML for image classifers using Python, backend Ruby on Rails
  • Ringside ticket of building for scale - Worked on Microservices migration, ambitious industry-first projects such as V-Assist, VoonikTV, Voonik Primo.
6

7
Suryodaya

Aug 2014 - Present

Kenya and India

Social Impact NGO focused on leveraging technology for social good, especially in the education and social wellbeing for Bharat inspired by DPI and FOSS.

Founder & Architect

Aug 2014 - Present

Responsibilities:
  • Built the teams and platforms hands-on, seeing power of compounding over the last 10 years. Raised ₹20L till date, utilising for 100+ hours vocational training in rural areas, and giving educational resources impacting 10,000+ individuals from underrepresented communities globally.
  • Two major products: Swa-rg, a resource sharing platform aimed at creating sustainable communities used by 2M+ across India during COVID, and Swa-des for civic education and mobilisation of the youth.

Education

Business, Enterpreneruship, Leadership Specialisations
CGPA: 3.56 out of 4
Courses and Learnings:
Business Foundations, Enterpreneurship, MGMT610,
Thesis Project:
MeetHub is a platform combating the loneliness pandemic born from the idea of dwindling mental health with the increase in immigrants to new cities. Our goal is to tackle this by building a community, where in hubs of like-minded individuals can plug in, and create safe third places.
Bachelor's in Computer Science and Engineering
CGPA: 3.7 out of 4
Extracurricular Activities:
  • Leadership and Development President
  • Jr. Leader in Social Welfare Association
  • Centre of University and Industry Collaboration (CUIC) representative
Enterpreneurship & Leadership:
Incubated and raised funds in college for Suryodaya. Led L&D initiative; a group of 80+ promising mentors, collectively responsible for 2000+ students for driving programs around self-growth, healthy habit cultivation, career discovery, leadership, and soft-skill development.
Trade school:
I left college to come to Bangalore in my 2nd year to start work. Under CUIC, consulted on cool projects for Amazon India, Daimler Benz, Payoda, etc. Studied by myself from textbooks, online class notes from Moodle (Edtech of 2000s) and still scored a 3.7.
High School, Pre-University, Computer Science Stream
CGPA: 9.8 out of 10
Extracurricular Activities:
  • House Captain, won the House cup, elected the School Pupil leader
  • National Spelling Bee Runner Up, Spartan
  • Quizmaster and Lead in the inter-school debate team
  • State-level Badminton Team, U-14/U-17
Takeaway:
Saw the power of teamwork, devloped a knack for leadership solving problems as a team. Made memories; friends for life. Ignited passion for coding, hacking through firewalls (too young to know ethical stuff). Apart from being a proud geek, have two cases of 50+ merit certificates in sports and cultural events.

Products

MeetHub
MeetHub
Co-Founder & CEO Nov 2019 - March 2021

Social health platform for meeting like-minded people over fun experiences, in safe pockets of community

Swarg
Swarg
Founder & Product Manager April 2019 - Sept 2022

Resouce sharing platform to crrate self-sustainable communities, and mobilise good samaritanism.

Swades
Swades
Founder & Architect Aug 2014 - Jan 2016

Civic Literacy and Engagement platform to mobilise youth in participatory democracy.

MyCaptain WebApp
MyCaptain WebApp
Head of Products Aug 2022 - present

Portfolio of products for upskilling professionals in alternate careers from learning to job placements. LMS to attend live classes, submit projects, interview practice, and jobs portal.

MyCaptain App
MyCaptain App
Head of Products Aug 2022 - Nov 2023

Gamified mobile application to discover passion, explore alternate careers, and further it to a professional career over live classes from industry experts, live internships, and projects.

Cuemath App
Cuemath App
Product Lead, Mobile Jan 2021 - Jul 2022

A freemium gamified platform for learning mathematics with cognitive puzzles, engaging games for K-8. Parents can manage live classes for their children with Cuemath experts.

Vogo App
Vogo App
Technical Product Manager Aug 2019 - May 2020

One-touch ride booking app enabled by IoT for discovery, ride, and user management. Generated ~20M events/min from the bikes and used ML algos to understand asset usage and user behaviour.

Edureka CloudLabs
Edureka CloudLabs
Product Owner Aug 2019 - May 2020

FlightSimulator is a suite of auto-deployable sandbox environment to practice, train IT Skills with a personalised AI instructor for doubt-solving, nudging towards certification.

Voonik App
Voonik App
Product Owner Jan 2017 - May 2018

Personal stylist on fingertips. Using AI, built a multilingual virtual shopping assistant curating styles on the user profile. AR for virtual trialrooms - a one stop destination for shopping.

Voice of India App
Voice of India App
Technical Architect Nov 2013 - May 2014

A social platform for Bharat, inspired by the campaigns of Elections 2014. Made governance a collective effort by creating voice channels for citizens to share ideas, report issues and reach their leaders.

Smart College App
Smart College App
Technical Architect Mar 2014 - May 2014

Social network for banking oldies! Applied learnings of PHP Laravel to build an Intranet application used for weekly engagement and team activites paired with centralised LDAPrecords for aunthentication.

Corporation Bank - Employee Portal
Corporation Bank - Employee Portal
Software Engineer Mar 2013 - July 2013

Social network for banking oldies! Applied learnings of PHP Laravel to build an Intranet application used for weekly engagement and team activites paired with centralised LDAPrecords for aunthentication.