The through-line of my career is measurement: figuring out what actually drives a business, then building the system that runs on it. Working out what is worth counting is an empirical problem. Making that count legible to the people who have to act on it is a storytelling problem. Building the instrument that does the counting reliably, without you in the room, is an engineering problem. Over twenty-eight years — as a journalist, a digital strategist, a founder four times over, and a Chief Strategy Officer, across India, Asia, Europe, and the United States — I have never been able to treat those three as separate careers, although my CV reads as though they were. What changed this year is that I can build the third one myself rather than specifying it for somebody else.

So I now run Marain, an operator’s practice. The work starts with a bounded question — what is your marketing actually buying, why does this decision take eleven weeks, what is this company for — and ends with a system that answers it and keeps answering it after I have gone. That is one bounded positioning or go-to-market problem for a large company, cycle time out of brand and marketing and process for a mid-market operator, or the design of the business itself for a founder who has not yet built it wrong. AI is not the category. It is the reason the diagnosis and the build can now be the same engagement instead of two.

Before that I was Chief Strategy Officer of A Parent Media Co., where I took the company’s free-to-fan sports service, Victory+, from a model on paper to a product in market: I designed its commercial model end to end, negotiated the distribution deals that kept our live ad inventory in-house, cut content licensing from months to a single day, and stood up the revenue-operations platform the company now sells on. I arrived there through Laminar, which I co-founded — a platform that let media companies launch a full streaming service, backend through monetization and analytics, in eight weeks rather than years. A Parent Media acquired Laminar in December 2023. It was the fourth company I have started, and the second to be sold.

At Xynteo, where I was Chief Digital Officer, measurement became a vocabulary for boards: I advised executive leadership at some of the world’s largest companies — Unilever, Shell, GE, Aditya Birla Group, DB Schenker — on whether their purpose-led growth strategies were actually working. Spending time with leaders operating at that scale is what sent me back to building. Before that I spent six years at Publicis Groupe, where measurement was the product — what a marketing dollar really bought, in a market where the tooling changed faster than the accounting. I grew the group’s digital practice in India from one office to four and from ten people to more than a hundred, running data-led campaigns for the Gates Foundation, Sony Mobile, Bharti Airtel, and Reckitt, then moved up to run integrated planning across every Publicis agency in Asia — where I co-created Content to Commerce, a product the group later launched globally for clients like P&G.

Before any of that, I was a journalist, from 2001 to 2007 — across television (CNN-IBN, NewsX) and print (Mint, the Wall Street Journal’s India partner). I launched the first science-and-technology section in a mainstream Indian newspaper at the Hindustan Times, was part of the five-person team that built out NewsX — which made me one of the youngest Executive Producers in Indian television — and helped set up the country’s first integrated newsroom at Mint. The habit of watching an industry get rewritten from inside has stayed with me ever since.

I have always been passionate about the power of computing and the imagination of science fiction, and I am driven — still — by the need to make a real dent in the world. This journal exists because the working notes got too long for email. I publish essays when an argument has cooled enough to set, and dispatches when something is actually happening and I need to say it quickly. I’m wrong in public when I’m wrong. That is the whole point.