Episode notes and takeaways
Read alongside the original conversation. Explore the ideas, then watch the guest explain them in context.
- From Power Plants to Microsoft: Building a Career in AI Product
Amit Pandey joins Savan Vyas to discuss changing industries, continuous learning and enterprise AI product leadership.
- Why Enterprise AI Gets Stuck at the Demo Stage
Akshay Sharma discusses the product and execution challenges between an impressive AI demo and a useful enterprise deployment.
- The Reality Checks Every Founder Needs
Salma Moosa on founder optimism, honest feedback and learning from paying customers.
- How Twitter Rebuilt Payments and Scaled Its Billing Team
Dwaraknath Bakshi on taking over a team, improving advertiser billing and building the subscription engine behind Twitter Blue.
- Crystal thinking & the untold cloud PM playbook
Kunal Parekh sold industrial valves in Mumbai before he built the control plane under Microsoft's biggest data workloads. His advice to anyone entering product in the AI era is not what you would expect — learn to write.
- The COO playbook: scaling startups & FMCG growth
Arul Oli beat Cadbury in a Karnataka channel by paying cashiers four rupees a bar. Two decades later he sells dates at ₹2,000 a kilo. The through-line is the same — availability and visibility, done properly.
- From data chaos to business clarity
Himant Goyal was the business analyst on Apple Pay's Citibank launch. Now he runs consumption analytics at Informatica, where his central claim is blunt — for a SaaS company, infrastructure is the revenue engine.
- Endurance, discipline and the Ironman finish line
Anuj Aneja joins Savan Vyas to explore endurance, preparation and the discipline behind demanding goals.
- Building Nasscom’s 10,000 Startups
A director of product, author and angel investor on why he bets on founders rather than products — and the one mistake he has watched almost every founder make, including himself.
- From startup to a $200M deal
Ankit Mehrotra passed his CFA Level 3 and resigned the same day. Twelve years later he sold Dineout to Swiggy — then walked away from the ecosystem to start again, because founders make bad employees.
- Scaling Google’s data platform
Dhirendra Sinha quit a comfortable job in Singapore because he wanted to decide what to build rather than how. His first months at Google felt like navigating a sea without a compass — and that turned out to be the point.
- From marketer to CEO
Three decades, a long stint at Coffee Day, and several ventures of his own. His most contrarian advice to founders — stop selling to the customers who only want the discount, and watch revenue rise.
- Leading with vision in the cloud era
Shashank Kumar leads product for IBM Cloud's NoSQL databases. His hidden principle — shared here for the first time — is that the best enterprise product is a boring one.
- Side hustles in the age of AI
She landed an AI product role in two weeks without ever sending a resume — because she had built the thing the company needed instead. A working method for turning side projects into a career.
- How CLAIRE AI is transforming enterprise data
Vishwanath Belur has spent two decades taking enterprise products from inception to market. His sharpest warning about AI is not about jobs or hallucination — it is that a model can only ever give you what it already has.
- From corporate life to the music stage
A house party in May 2023 ran until 3:30am with no plan behind it. Two years later Let's Jam is a 60,000-strong community — run, on the founders' own reckoning, like a product.
- Winning sales & strategy in enterprise SaaS
Kumar has sold for HCL, Tally, Pine Labs and now SatSure — satellites for a country that had no commercial space industry a decade ago. His test for a good salesperson is whether they will tell you the jeans don't fit.
- Endurance, enterprise & excellence
Rishi couldn't swim 50 metres at 38. Two years later he finished a full Ironman. Twenty years at one company, four Ironmans and two thousand books later, his method turns out to be the same one every time.
- Engineering the future: leadership & platforms
Rajeev has spent two and a half decades at the bottom of the stack. His case is that the platform layer decides how fast everything above it can move — and that accountability can never be demanded, only grown.
- Leading through words
Parag Chitnis spent two decades building the software behind international roaming, then became a coach. His argument is uncomfortable: when your message doesn't land, it is never the listener's fault.
- From idea to impact: growing a challenger brand
Vijayaraghavan Venugopal left pharma at 40, launched Fast&Up with four products and five people, and built it into a nutrition brand selling in 25–30 countries. The discipline is the same one he uses to run sub-3 marathons.