Advising hedge funds on technology investments and growth-stage startups on GTM and operations.
Operator-turned-advisor. Research that moves capital.
Sole Research Consultant · AI/ML & Enterprise SaaS
Led primary research (200+ expert interviews, 7 proprietary surveys) and secondary analysis across 30+ investment targets. Work directly informed $400M+ in capital deployment decisions.
Head of VC Partnerships & Growth
Built VC referral channel with Tiger Global, Insight, Thrive, 8VC. Created company's #1 converting and highest-ACV lead source.
Analytics & Operations Lead
Managed 6-person Palantir team building data-driven talent acquisition and performance management for the entire sales organization.
Parsley Health (BizOps), Product Managers at Work (8K-subscriber newsletter). Early-stage advisory: Web3 payments, real-time gaming, enterprise AI.
First ops hire. Built Marketing and Talent from scratch during 5x growth.
Joined at 38 employees. Left at 200+.
Designed and A/B tested 60+ touchpoints across email, social, and direct mail. Increased member sign-ups 14% and product usage 30%, consistently 20–40% above industry benchmarks. Built and trained 7-person team.
Recruited and trained 5-person team that scaled company 5x. Rebuilt outbound sourcing to increase self-sourced hires from 20% to 75%, saving $1.4M/year in agency fees. Designed executive interview calibration and standardized candidate debriefs.
Strategy and capital raising in the CEO's office, from early stage through acquisition.
From early-stage to $2.8 billion exit.
Led 4 funding rounds, raising $200M+ from D.E. Shaw and L Catterton. Set board agendas, prepared materials, coached executives. Analysis used in Congressional briefings and White House meetings.
Built GTM strategy across 11 countries via on-the-ground research and global surveys (n=2,700). Identified 30 retail partners, launched 17. Scaled field operations to 75+ FTEs.
Evaluated market adjacencies (CBD, cannabis) through expert interviews and consumer research to inform multi-year R&D roadmap. Redesigned internal recruiting: cut time-to-hire by 3 weeks and increased offer acceptance 20%.
Growth strategy and PE due diligence across 14 engagements.
Two years of structured problem-solving. The foundation for everything after.
14 engagements across growth strategy and PE due diligence, breaking down businesses for investors making eight- and nine-figure decisions.
Workstreams: expert interview programs, customer survey design and analysis, quantitative market modeling.
About
Both sides of the table.
I help companies scale and investors decide where to put capital.
I've spent my career on both sides of the table: advising a $55B hedge fund on where to deploy hundreds of millions, while also building inside high-growth startups, scaling teams, designing go-to-market, and preparing companies for exits.
I started in strategy consulting, then spent years inside startups — healthtech, consumer, marketplaces — where the problems are less structured and the stakes are personal. Now I'm learning to build software, because I got tired of describing systems to engineers and wanted to understand them myself.
Texture, craft, and stories that reward attention.
I do better with things that take a little time to make sense of.
I'm drawn to interesting textures, small restaurants that don't advertise themselves, and travel that doesn't come with a gift shop. I like being in places that aren't trying to perform for you. Street level feels honest: you're walking, noticing, adjusting. In Kerala, that's a fabric market, not a landmark. Heat, noise, color, bargaining, getting a little turned around and not minding it. I like the feeling of earning your way into a place.
Back home, I pay attention to craft. Clothes are an easy example: weave, weight, hand feel, drape. I'm not interested in labels as a proxy for taste. I'm interested in the work. Cooking is the same impulse. Start with something solid, then tinker until it tastes like mine.
I read a lot of sci-fi, especially the kind that starts fun and ends up making you stare at the ceiling for ten minutes. Consciousness, time, huge structures, weird rules. I like stories that reward close attention. I like direct people and sharp conversation. I can be meticulous about what I care about and pretty relaxed about everything else.
Where things stand.
B.A. Economics (Honors, Merit Scholar), UChicago '17
The engineering side.
Getting my hands dirty.
After years of writing requirements for engineers, I wanted to understand what I was asking for. The CS degree is the formal version. This site — vanilla HTML, CSS, JS, no frameworks — is the informal one.
The point is to stop being the person in the room who can only describe what they want built.
Direct is good. Say hello.
If you're building something interesting, or just want to talk about startups, markets, or whatever you're working through — I'd like to hear from you.
shubham.m.chandra@gmail.comExecutive leadership during 3-year tenure through $2.8B acquisition.
Shubham's innate curiosity, tenacity and structured thinking allowed him to become a key contributor in our early strategy and capital raising initiatives. His friendly, open personality made him a great teammate, always willing to be helpful wherever he could across our organization. He possesses a continuous improvement mindset — always seeking feedback and new opportunities to extend his knowledge and skills.
10+ years of friendship, mentorship, and collaboration. Former interim CPO of Zoho.
In our more than 10 years of friendship, I have come to rely on Shubham to add a broad perspective on my ideas, to challenge and question my assumptions, and to accept me completely and listen to me without ego. He makes connections across disciplines, learns with incredible speed, and improves most things that enter his sphere. More importantly, he makes people around him better. Shubham is a good human.
Executive team colleague during interim Chief of Staff engagement.
Shubham helped us drive cross-functional communication and project managed imperative business initiatives. Most importantly, he brought an incredible sense of quiet confidence to every meeting and every project.
Additional references available upon request.