South Asian Trailblazers

Simi sits down with Reshma Saujani — Founder of Girls Who Code. Reshma is also an international bestselling author, attorney, and activist. 

The daughter of Indian refugees, Reshma studied political science and eventually went on to pursue her Masters in Public Policy and J.D.

After graduating from Yale Law, Reshma worked as a corporate attorney on Wall Street. But soon, she pivoted to politics. She founded South Asians for Kerry, during John Kerry’s 2004 presidential election run. She also served on the Hillary Clinton’s National Finance Board during her 2008 campaign. In 2010, she herself became the first Indian-American woman to run for congress. Though her was bid was unsuccessful, her time on the campaign trail laid the groundwork for Girls Who Code. Reshma’s visits to K-12 schools made her increasingly aware of gender disparities in STEM classrooms. So in 2012, she founded the nonprofit in an effort to close the gender gap in tech. To date, they’ve served over 450,000 girls around the world. 

Since retiring as CEO of the organization, Reshma has embarked on a new mission: the Marshall Plan for Moms — her vision to revitalize women in the workforce and to compensate them for their unpaid labor. Her book on the subject, Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work is due for release in March 2022. Listen in for key insights into Reshma’s successes in law, politics, and tech.

South Asian Trailblazers is an award-winning media platform, community, and agency dedicated to elevating leading South Asians. Join our community at SouthAsianTrailblazers.com. Subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and updates on our latest events in your inbox. Follow us @southasiantrailblazers on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify.

Simi welcomes Sruthi Lanka, Chief Financial Officer at Public.com. Public is a platform that makes investing easy, accessible, and social. The Robinhood rival launched in September 2019, and has since acquired 1 million users, achieving a valuation of $1.2 billion.

Before joining Public, Sruthi served as Head of Strategic Finance at MoneyLion, another emerging fintech startup. But Sruthi isn’t new to the financial trade. She previously spent time as an engineer at Goldman Sachs and in investment banking at the Royal Bank of Canada. Beyond her core roles, Sruthi has worked to empower women in and outside her industry, founding a women’s organization while at Money Lion, and now sitting on the Board of Women Creating Change, a non-profit that uplifts under-resourced women in New York City.  She currently holds an MBA from Duke University and a bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the National Institute of Technology in India, one of the country’s top engineering schools.

South Asian Trailblazers is an award-winning media platform, community, and agency dedicated to elevating leading South Asians. Join our community at SouthAsianTrailblazers.com. Subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and updates on our latest events in your inbox. Follow us @southasiantrailblazers on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify.

Simi sits down with Nik Sharma of Sharma Brands. Nik got his start in one of the most unique ways we’ve yet to see on this podcast: by managing  social media for influential celebrities like Priyanka Chopra and Pitbull when he was just 15 years old. With that as his start, Nik decided to forgo college to make his mark in advertising and marketing. He eventually made his way to Hint Water to lead their Direct to Consumer (D2C) business. He also built audiences for Bustle Media Group and Refinery 29 and served as Head of D2C for VaynerMedia. 

This all paved the path to Sharma Brands, where Nik advises companies on how grow and scale online.  His portfolio of companies he advises and has invested in spans Morning Brew, Pill Club, JUDY, Orgain, and The Juggernaut. And because advising wasn’t enough, he recently launched a rolling fund called Masala Capital. In this episode, we dive into Nik's moniker as the "D2C guy," his origin story, and what it means to define brands of the modern era.

South Asian Trailblazers is an award-winning media platform, community, and agency dedicated to elevating leading South Asians. Join our community at SouthAsianTrailblazers.com. Subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and updates on our latest events in your inbox. Follow us @southasiantrailblazers on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify.

In this episode, Simi welcomes Geetha Murali, CEO at Room to Read.

Dr. Geetha Murali is the first non-founder CEO of Room to Read, an international education nonprofit that seeks to transform millions of children’s lives through the power of education. In her 12 years with them, Geetha has expanded Room to Read’s presence to 20 countries and reached 20 million children globally.  Geetha began her nonprofit journey as a Program Officer at the American India Foundation, an organization committed to improving the lives of under-resourced individuals in India. Prior to that, she spent time in the world of pharma, startups, and as a teacher. 

A senior leader in the industry, Geetha is also a member of Forbes Nonprofit Council, an invitation-only organization for executives at nonprofits. She holds an impressive BS in Biostatistics and a PhD in South Asian politics, and a member of the Young President’s Organization. Her extensive and transformational work in nonprofits has been recognized by the former First Lady Michelle Obama and the Gates Foundation. In this episode, Geetha gives Simi a peek behind the scenes into the world of nonprofit leadership, from an organizational redesign during the pandemic to her path to the sector.

South Asian Trailblazers is an award-winning media platform, community, and agency dedicated to elevating leading South Asians. Join our community at SouthAsianTrailblazers.com. Subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and updates on our latest events in your inbox. Follow us @southasiantrailblazers on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify.

In our Season 3 opener, Simi welcomes Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer at Coinbase.

As Chief Legal Officer, Paul spearheads all legal and regulatory matters for the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, which also IPO’d in April at a valuation of $65 billion. A friendly face in the world of law and tech, Paul previously served as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Facebook. He began his career as an intellectual property attorney and as a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California He sat on the bench for 6 years, and during his judge service, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts appointed him to the Magistrate Judge Education Committee. Paul holds a degree in Civil and Environmental engineering from MIT, and a JD from UChicago. In this episode, Simi maps Paul's unconventional path from the courts to crypto and what the day-to-day of his work looks like.

South Asian Trailblazers is an award-winning media platform, community, and agency dedicated to elevating leading South Asians. Join our community at SouthAsianTrailblazers.com. Subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and updates on our latest events in your inbox. Follow us @southasiantrailblazers on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify.

Simi speaks with Ann Mukherjee, CEO and Chairman at Pernod Ricard North America. 

Ann is a marketing maven turned rebel executive at various household consumer companies: Pernod Ricard, Kraft Foods, and Pepsi. As Chairman and CEO of Pernod Ricard North America, she heads up hallmark brands in the spirits industry: Absolut, Jameson, Kahlúa, and others. Unafraid to center cultural issues, she led the Absolut team in taking a stand on consent; rallied the company’s manufacturing facilities to produce hand sanitizer in support of FEMA’s response to COVID-19; and she’s currently calling on brands across industries to stop hate speech online. 

Ann joined Pernod Ricard from S.C. Johnson, where she broke ground as their first-ever Global Chief Marketing Officer and, later, ascended to the role of Global Chief Commercial Officer — overseeing a $12 billion business division in 90+ markets. She previously made a decade-long impact at PepsiCo, most recently as President of Global Snacks and PepsiCo Global Insights, and as Chief Marketing Officer for Frito-Lay North America. She similarly transformed brands at Kraft Foods Group for over a decade, after starting her career at Citibank Diners Club. In this episode, they talk about her leadership fundamentals and the anecdotes behind some of her most iconic marketing campaigns.

South Asian Trailblazers is an award-winning media platform, community, and agency dedicated to elevating leading South Asians. Join our community at SouthAsianTrailblazers.com. Subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and updates on our latest events in your inbox. Follow us @southasiantrailblazers on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify.

Simi welcomes Snigdha Sur, Founder and CEO of The Juggernaut. The Juggernaut is a subscription media company and community that produces deep-dive reporting on South Asia(ns).

A trailblazer with a passion for telling South Asian stories? Dare I say more?

Snigdha Sur began her career journey at McKinsey.  She subsequently moved to India and channeled her long-time passion for media into independently consulting for companies like Buzzfeed and Quartz. Shortly after, she pursued media investing and helped develop the launch strategy for Reese Witherspoon's media company, Hello Sunshine. What's more, Snigdha has ties to Bollywood, having worked in film production with Phantom Films which produced the Netflix hit, Sacred Games. She is an alumna of Yale, Harvard Business School, and the esteemed Y-Combinator. In this episode, Simi dives into Snigdha's journey to and experience building The Juggernaut — from its name down to the numbers. She speaks to fundraising struggles, her passion for Bollywood (and a chance visit with SRK), and how her experience in media shaped her vision for the company. Dive into Snigdha's story for her secrets to success and a round of South Asian story-telling. 

South Asian Trailblazers is an award-winning media platform, community, and agency dedicated to elevating leading South Asians. Join our community at SouthAsianTrailblazers.com. Subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and updates on our latest events in your inbox. Follow us @southasiantrailblazers on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify.

It's not all that often we see South Asians in sales. This week, Simi welcomes Renu Gupta, Head of Sales at Thrive Global. 

Renu is a seasoned sales executive who’s traversed some of the most ambitious tech companies in the world. She currently serves as the VP of Sales at Arianna Huffington’s famed company Thrive Global, a behavior change platform tackling the burnout epidemic. Previously, she served as a Director of Sales at Slack for Large Enterprise, where she built the sales team and closed Fortune 100 customers.  She has an extensive record in the tech space: having worked and led sales teams at Dropbox, Google, and Cisco.
 
A trailblazer in two traditionally male-dominated arenas (sales and tech), Renu has a record-breaking repertoire. In this episode, she shares how she got her start and paved her path to the C-suite. Want to learn what it takes to sell well and sell yourself? Listen to this episode.

South Asian Trailblazers is an award-winning media platform, community, and agency dedicated to elevating leading South Asians. Join our community at SouthAsianTrailblazers.com. Subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and updates on our latest events in your inbox. Follow us @southasiantrailblazers on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify.

Can you imagine a world without Google Maps? Well, imagine building it. Simi meets the man behind Maps, Manik Gupta, Investor and Former Chief Product Officer at Uber. 

Manik Gupta mapped the world from scratch as a Product Leader for Google Maps, where he also spearheaded the Maps launch in India and led the parent company’s acquisition of Waze. His foray into tech began out of college, when he founded an e-commerce startup called BuyItTogether.com, which he subsequently sold. Afterwards, he joined Hewlett Packard, managing their e-commerce initiatives in Asia-Pacific.

In this episode, they chat about Manik's time spent leading an 1100+ person team as the Chief Product Officer at Uber, where he helped lead the company through its May 2019 IPO and grow to 100 million+ monthly active platform customers. And they also touch on his departure, his reasons why, and what he's up to since: becoming a startup  investor and founding a non-profit, CVKey, devoted to helping small businesses battle Covid-19.

South Asian Trailblazers is an award-winning media platform, community, and agency dedicated to elevating leading South Asians. Join our community at SouthAsianTrailblazers.com. Subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and updates on our latest events in your inbox. Follow us @southasiantrailblazers on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify.

In this episode, Simi welcomed Adi Raval to the pod. Adi currently serves as Head of Communications for Shield AI, a venture-backed AI company that serves the national security industry. 

Adi's work in comms has spanned some of the best and brightest teams in the world: he served as Head of Communications for TaskRabbit, which was acquired by Ikea. He led global media relations at the Bechtel Corporation, one of the largest engineering and construction firms in the world. What's more, he spent time as a Senior Crisis Communications advisor for Lime Bike. His comms experience extends to public service: Adi served as the Communications Director for President Obama’s “Power Africa” initiative, a unique public-private partnership designed to deliver clean energy to countries throughout Africa. He began his time in government as a U.S. diplomat based in Afghanistan. 

In a different lifetime, Adi also spent 12 years as a journalist with BBC and ABC News, including as the bureau chief in Iraq for BBC. In the episode, Adi shares how journalism paved his path to comms. He delves into his experiences abroad that shaped his career trajectory -- from covering the war in Iraq to Washington to venture. With serving society at the core of every decision, Adi has built a career around purpose and is a paradigm of passion and versatility. Be sure to check this one out!

South Asian Trailblazers is an award-winning media platform, community, and agency dedicated to elevating leading South Asians. Join our community at SouthAsianTrailblazers.com. Subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and updates on our latest events in your inbox. Follow us @southasiantrailblazers on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify.