I "took the red pill" when I discovered Ethereum in 2017 and subsequently DeFi in 2020.
Ever since, I've been obsessed with the possibilities that open-financial protocols have to offer every human being with an internet connection.
Build It.
Zerion - DeFi/Fintech
Dug myself deeper into the open finance rabbit hole.
Learned the A-Z of Growth Product Management, Investor Relations, Viral Marketing, Business Development, and Community Building.
1 month in DeFi = 1 year of progress in Centralized Finance.
Current Goal: Scale Zerion to the next billion users.
Invest It.
Radical VC - Venture Capital/AI
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to scale your AI solution. Maybe you want to turn a side hustle into something more. I experienced first-hand how Venture Capital funds augment this value-creation in the early stages of a firm’s growth cycle.
Social enlightenment, manic growth, learning a new industry a day, and everything in between.
Grow It.
Wolfram Research - Cloud Computing
Learned that bridging the gap between IT and business is no joke.
Leveraged data analytics, mathematica, technical documentation, and inference methods for Wolfram’s renowned corporate solutions.
Self-taught myself SEO, led the launch of Wolfram India, collaborated on monetization with Apple Siri’s W|A release.
“Be stubborn on vision but flexible on the details. A good product manager has the brain of a consultant, heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat.”
Case Study: Building the first decentralized NFT marketplace in 2018 - dBay (Tokyo, Japan)
Papers & Research
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This industry-first paper analytically explores how DeFi is emerging as a nascent digital asset class seeking to disrupt several legacy financial processes and contrasts DeFi to the centralized framework of traditional financial markets. Through case-studies of decentralized financial derivatives, network analogies of growth, heuristic models of valuation, and community-driven research, this paper presents novel insights and regulatory proposals into making a case that trustless decentralized systems of financial infrastructure can truly give people access to new financial opportunities, wherever they live, with more control of their assets.
Dissertation reviewed by Prof Nikhil Mathur (Member of the Financial Management Association) and Prof Ali Digby (Lecturer at Cambridge University)
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Drivetrain Approach to Decision Making: Regression & Bootstrapping (October 2019)
Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation (LOOCV) and bootstrapping to estimate the performance of machine learning algorithms along with a drivetrain approach to make data predictions and model training.
Genetic Matching & Causal Inference: Drivetrain Approach to Decision Making (November 2019)
Estimating the effectiveness of the United Nations peacekeeping missions using statistical models of logistic regression, p-score matching, genetic matching, and genetic matching with propensity scores. Such models helped in drawing out the causality between several variables and interacting parameters being utilized within the model. This proposal posits that lenient peacebuilding is more effective in the long-term — the longer a war extends, the effectiveness of the UN’s peacekeeping intervention operations decreases (Multidimensional Peacekeeping Operations).
Econometrics Data-Analysis: Statistical Methods & Economic Theory (February 2020)
Split into three parts, this comprehensive econometrics paper analyses hypothesis-driven answers to consumer behavior questions utilizing tools like OLS regression, price elasticity of demand, gini coefficients, the Poisson model, and negative binomial regression.
Econometric Report on the IMF Austerity SBAs for Argentina (March 2020)
Policy recommendation to President Alberto Fernández, the government of Argentina against the backdrop of the largest ever IMF bailout package, the peso currency crisis, and analysis of the short-term fiscal policy.
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Volkswagen Group: e-sharing M&A proposal (March 2019)
Bank of America x Merrill Lynch: Business risk and economic analysis (April 2019)
Swachh Bharat Mission: Social Change Reforms in India (October 2018)
India, the world’s second-largest country by population, has the highest number of people (732 million) without access to toilets (Salve, 2017). Despite the ongoing Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) that was launched in October 2014, India ranks low on the sanitation index and is placed at the sixth position among the top 10 nations working to reduce open defecation (Bansal, 2017). The SBM is a nation-wide campaign in India for the period 2014 to 2019 that aims to clean up the streets, roads, and infrastructure of India's cities, towns, and rural areas, officially translated to “Clean India Mission” in English (“Swachh Bharat Mission”, n.d.). This paper analyzes the reasons behind the overall failure of the SBM in effectively achieving its objective of completely eliminating open defecation throughout the country, as well as its constant failure of accomplishing strategic objectives and timelines. Furthermore, this paper instead proposes social change reforms to the existing campaign to better tackle the issue of open defecation and sanitation in India using political science and social change constructs.
Randomized Control Trial (RCT) Proposal: Analyzing the viability of mini-grids in South Asia (March 2020)
Electrification is a key element to support the economic, social, and financial development of rural communities in countries like India (Murphy & Daly, 2018). Yet, only about 7.3% of India’s 18.452 villages have household electricity, thus leaving about 31 millions homes still in the dark (D’Cunha, 2018). With several government-run programs increasing the demand for electricity in India, mini grids could be a key component in the overarching goal of providing reliable power to rural India (Prateek, 2019). However, mini-grids have not scaled as expected globally due to factors such as cost-elusive economics (Shrimali, 2020) and their abandonment after the arrival of the main grid (ESMAP, 2018). This research paper analyzes the existing viability of mini-grids through literature and economic review. Then, it proposes a hybrid RCT-questionnaire study to evaluate the abandonment of mini-grids and to quantify the socioeconomic effects on households caused by the arrival of main grids in Indian villages that are currently served by mini-grids.
Economic policy reforms in India: Free trade & Macroeconomic development analysis (December 2019)
India is the fastest-growing major economy in the World (Nayak, 2019) and is also the second-most populous country in the world (Junior, 2018). Due to the large scale of interrelated factors that influence their economic policies, right from fundamental factors like their natural resources to their current free trade and macroeconomic policies, careful consideration of all these factors must be made, along with incorporating the prevailing global and regional economic scenario, in crafting appropriate economic development policies for India. This paper aims to propose economic policy reforms for India based on analyzing these very interrelated factors mentioned above.
Attention and Memory: Designing an accurate system for evaluating the risks of elderly drivers (October 2019)
Regulating driving for the elderly has remained a controversial problem for many years. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) states that an elderly driver is more likely to be at fault in an accident (Fitzgerald, 2010). However, a study by (Langford et al, 2006) portrayed that such statistics may be subject to the ‘low-mileage’ bias, whereby when elderly drivers are compared to younger drivers driving the same amount, the elderly drivers were actually safer than younger drivers. Moreover, (Brand et al, 2012) illustrated how the elderly are more likely to be injured or die in an accident due to their physical frailty, which is generally misinterpreted to portray their accidents as being more severe than those caused by younger drivers.
Driving is a commonly-cited example of procedural memory and in this paper is modeled and broken down as a skill around its subcomponents such as procedural memory, pure motor skills, visuospatial working memory (WM) (Fig 1), etc. For example, a beginner driver initially consciously recalls each control component of an automobile like the process of switching gears, but with practice and time, this process becomes embedded into procedural memory, thus becoming involuntary and automatic. Thus, this paper aims to evaluate current research on the effects of aging on driving and propose a further research question for designing a more accurate system for evaluating the risks of elderly drivers.
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Globalizing the Cost of Capital and Capital Budgeting at AES (September 2019)
Founded in 1981 as Applied Energy Services, the AES Corporation is one of the world’s leading power companies, generating and distributing electric power in 15 countries (AES Corporation, n.d.). This paper analyzes a proposed overhaul of their capital budgeting system in light of the ineffectiveness of their original system and proposes additional recommendations that are relevant for consideration for their future growth and diversification.
The WM. Wrigley JR. Company - Leveraged Recap & Valuation Analysis (November 2019)
At the time of this case in an industry with few dominant companies, Wrigley’s was the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of chewing gum (Barboza, 2001). Wrigley’s has been conservatively financed with a market value of equity of about $13.1 billion and has no debt-financing (Bruner & Carr, 2005). This paper evaluates if Wrigley’s stands to gain strategically and financially from borrowing $3 billion to repurchase shares or issue dividends, essentially focusing on the tradeoff between debt and its costs.
Optiguard Series A Term Sheet - Risk Management & Deal Structuring (October 2020)
With the global cybersecurity space booming following burgeoning demand from global organizations where security spending outpaced IT spending (Yunger, 2019), OptiGuard Inc crucially require their Series A round to set a good foundation for their next stage of growth. However, structuring and evaluating the right terms with their investors wasn’t going to be easy. This term sheet essentially allocates risks between OptiGuard’s founders and WVP, hence indirectly stating a lot of key information on the investor’s perceived risks in the terms being requested. In this paper, I position the investment’s context and detail my analysis on structuring incentives in the term sheet to help scale OptiGuard in the long-run.
Always a student, never a master.