Patman - The Origin Story
September 2021
Patman - The Origin Story
Hi, I’m Pathik.
This is my new blog. I’ve blogged, tweeted and spread my gyaan all over the internet a lot in the past 15 years - but I’ve burnt it all down and doing a fresh new start here.
Work - 2011-2020
I lead DB Digital, a digital content products startup. We’re building multiple digital content products for the 500 million+ users coming online on mobile by 2020, starting with a mobile-first news product built for Bharat with high quality trusted content for multiple languages, engaging content formats and a seamless product experience optimized for India. Something that India really deserves, but certainly lacks right now. We’re backed by India’s biggest newspaper group (The Dainik Bhaskar Group) which reaches tens of millions of consumers across India on a daily basis, in multiple languages including Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi.
Before that, I led Product, Growth & M&A at Hike Messenger. We built some really cool shit and grew to more than 100 million users in India, raised more than $250M to become one of the fastest unicorns in India. We were building India’s first super-app and leading the Product and Growth teams, we built everything from messaging to social to content to gaming to payments and even commerce within a single app. We also acquired 3 companies and invested in one.
Other Shit
Other than that – I spend most of my free time evaluating, mentoring and investing in promising consumer tech startups solving real problems for the Indian market. I’m an avid learner and reader of business, finance, technology and I love good sci-fi. I’m also trying to dabble with exercise, sleep optimization and basic biohacking to achieve peak human performance and would love to spend more time learning and mastering that.
Ancient History - Pre 2010
Before all of this, I tried to create my own business empire in the dark unexplored areas of the internet while in college (but dropped it when I realized my ideas won’t scale), barely scraped my way through an engineering degree, tried to become a professional gamer (CS & DoTA – quit when I realized probably only 10 people in India would make good money doing it), joined an investment bank in the technology team (to eventually become a cool investment banker, and left when I realized that wasn’t the path to it), dabbled with an MBA to drop out on the first day, completed 2 levels of CFA (and then dropped out as both weren’t worth the time), joined and eventually led the India Ops of a US based tech enabled equity research startup.
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