My whole career is one bet
placed early.
That the internet would swallow everything. The full background behind that bet, from Chennai to Toronto.
The short version
Engineering degree, then a PGDM, then fourteen years spent finding out that marketing is an engineering problem wearing a creative hat. I have built the whole marketing stack from zero, often as the only marketer in the building, across entertainment, media, DTC, B2B SaaS and ecommerce.
Days are a full-time contract at Coca-Cola Canada Bottling. The consulting and the software happen around it: strategy, paid, lifecycle and automation for clients, and products I build and run myself.
My whole career is one bet placed early: that the internet would swallow everything. Everything since has been a variation on that bet.
Chennai: stories, then scale
I turned my love for stories into a job. Straight out of engineering I took up work as an editor, right as internet commerce was taking off. The fascination with storytelling and the internet pulled me into digital marketing, and I have spent the years since helping companies grow audiences and revenue online.
When internet video took off I got to help build India’s first multi-channel network, leading media buying, content strategy and social coverage for live events, back when virality was still mostly luck. Marvel, Disney, Warner Bros, Adidas, Netflix, Amazon Prime. Avengers activations, Stranger Things launches. That is where I learned how attention behaves when it is live and at scale. No second takes. No fixing it in post.
The Culture Machine case study →
Canada: the restart nobody puts on a website
I moved to Canada in 2019. A year later I was doing phone surveys at Numeris during COVID.
That is the part of the arc I am least inclined to hide. 2 billion views on your old resume counts for very little when you are new to a country in a pandemic. You start again, and you find out quickly whether the skill was real or whether it was the brand on your badge.
People who have rebuilt from zero tend to be unsentimental about what is working.
Toronto: proving it again, in four industries
B2B publishing at Kenilworth Media, where a stalled subscription grew 25× and 225,000 contacts moved to HubSpot without losing one. Growth lead at Jombone, building a Salesforce stack from nothing and recovering fifteen hours a week before any campaign launched. DTC consulting at Gertex Hosiery, rebuilding paid and email into the best Q4 the company had recorded. Then Coca-Cola Canada Bottling, where a Copilot agent took roughly sixty hours a week of invoice reconciliation off a finance team.
All five case studies, with the numbers →
What I am doing now
Consulting and building software. Those used to be two answers; they have collapsed into one. When people keep doing the same workflow by hand, there is usually a product hiding in it, and AI makes it cheap to build. The hard part is reading the signal under the request.
My Last Friday is that in practice, and there are a dozen more on the products page. I write about AI for marketers at One Spicy Neuron, and I give the workflows away free.
The thing that has not changed
The basics are the same as they were in 2015. A good story, told to the right people, held up by a system that keeps working after the campaign ends. Generative AI takes the grind work and lets humans focus on what moves the big numbers.
Turns out modern marketing requires some engineering, all along.