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Naveen Athresh
Founder/CEO and Chief Product officer - Profile (March 2024)
Naveen runs liquidmind.ai in the mixed reality, digital commerce/Fintech space. A TEDx speaker, Forbes India 2020 top 100 leader (the only leader selected from Rakuten), he has consistently built 200+ member led high performance teams from scratch, led cross geo Product Engineering and Data sciences teams. He has been regularly featured as a thought leader across leading business dailies. Most recently, Naveen was featured on the January 2024 featured section with an elite list of business people globally (mostly USA) on a Global business magazine (Business Today) and USAwire in an article called “Thought leaders making an impact in the world”.
Founder's Profile
Naveen Athresh is a TEDx speaker (~155000+ views on his talk here). Naveen is a Forbes India 2020 top 100 manager/leader.
In his most recent stint, Naveen was the Head and Vice President, Product Management and design for a leading Singapore/SE Asian Fintech/partnering with Stripe (one of the largest Fintechs across the USA, South East Asia) working to create a world class product / platform team across Singapore/India/Philippines (ASEAN countries+India) working closely with our business, data engineering and financial teams. It was an interesting time in MatchMove’s history as they acquired Shopmatic (a Digital commerce co.) for USD $200 MN in May 2022 and Naveen will be involved deeply in creating a product and platform first culture for the digital commerce + Fintech organizations.
Embracing Japanese Philosophy for Business Success
Naveen has been deeply influenced by Japanese entrepreneurial businesses and culture since decades from his personal visits to the Shimaguni (Japanese for Island nation). Some of the best hardware companies in the world have come from Japan. The Shinkansen (the world's first bullet train) came in the 1960's from Japan. A big fan of the book "The entrepreneur who built modern Japan on Shibusawa Eiichi", Naveen was the only leader selected from Rakuten Japan/worldwide in 2020. In this role, he has led high performance cross geography product engineering and data sciences (AI-ML) teams worldwide in incredibly turbulent times (whilst a once in a century pandemic ravaged the world; posing unique leadership challenges requiring character/adaptability to overcome the challenges and produce solid business outcomes).
Naveen is a 2x entrepreneur and a seasoned Product Management/design leader with 23+ years in shipping products and building companies across a slew of startups/ SME's and large enterprises focusing extensively on all aspects of omni channel retail for last 8+ years (membership, offline / e-commerce transactional commerce platforms, payments platforms, supply chain platforms, catalog intelligence platforms and advertising platforms). He has a breadth of experience spanning business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) companies.
A big fan of Japanese philosophy/Shinto/Buddhist-Zen culture, Naveen has participated in the prestigious Global Manager program held at Tokyo in July 2019 for a week by Rakuten presenting to the CXO’s, Rakuten group.
Achievements Across Myriad Verticals/Industries
As a board member: Naveen is an EPIC (Executive product industry council) board member of the Institute of Product leadership (IPL), USA/India that runs dedicated MBA programs in Product Management to create 10K product managers from India from March 2024 that aligns with his vision of creating/nurturing excellent product talent out of India for the world.
As a company/team builder: Extensive startup experience in building and scaling growth focused startups (built IDrive Inc. from scratch - a profitable ~USD $20 MN/year annual run rate
B2C startup with millions of North American/European monetizable customers) and product teams for Capillary Tech - a B2B2C startup (~500 MN+ transacting customers across 200+ brands)
As an Innovator (startups, SME’s): Naveen ran the Consumer shopping experience (Cart/checkout/order management system, returns/reverse logistics) products. In this stint he has helped ship 6+ impactful platform capabilities for Flipkart Commerce Platform (ex: instant refunds) and Supply chain platform that resulted in major reduction in cost by ~90% and raising Gross merchandising sales (GMS) significantly during peak sale events like Big billion days.
As a design thinker: With over 2 decades+ of experience building, scaling, and nurturing design (IXD/UX) teams across B2C, B2B, B2B2C companies of all shapes and sizes, being the design thinking, user research paradigm to build insights from end consumer’s unmet unarticulated needs to build better products/platforms. Naveen was running the Merchant experience SMB team for PayU as a Senior Director, Product, Interaction design and across the suite of PayU’s core payments, Treasury front office and back office product line and across their customer segments from large enterprises to Omni channel/SMB around modern Fintech initiatives.
As an Innovator (large enterprise): Generated millions of USD $ of new revenue/GMS by conceiving, evangelizing, acquiring major B2B customers for a worldwide (Japan, North America, Europe, Canada) competitive intelligence platform and advanced AI/ML capabilities for Product matching as a service for Rakuten (Ichiba/EBates i.e. Rewards) businesses from the ground up for the marketplaces including e-commerce, Travel and advertising businesses. Innovated in creating innovation ninja teams through entry level Product intern and Associate product manager programs (APM; 6-month and 1-year product intern programs) at PayU and at Rakuten (a first at both companies) with 100% success rate in conversions of interns->full time employees (APM’s).
As a thought leader: Goal is to evangelize the product/platform thinking at scale across engineering and B-schools and product talks across India/worldwide to reach 10K students by 2022 (which he achieved/surpassed).
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To this end, have been a very active Product evangelist/panelist/speaker at leading technology and business schools (IIT-KGP, IIT-Bombay (AI/ML), IIM-B, IIM-L, ISB Hyderabad, IIM Sirmaur, SIBM, Pune, NITIE, Mumbai, FMS Delhi, IIFT (Delhi+Kolkata), SPJIMR, Mumbai, BITS Pilani Conquest, UVCE Bengaluru, IIT, Jodhpur, IIM Udaipur etc.), business conclave’s (Government of Karnataka-Elevate 2019, NASSCOM, Mobile10X, Airmeet, NASSCOM etc.), product management schools (IPL-PLF, Upgrad etc.)
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Naveen also an active member of the NASSCOM Special interest group (SIG) and play a pivotal role in crafting NASSCOM Future Product skills across India to build programs working with NASSCOM folks directly.
Hobbies
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In his free time, Naveen loves spending time with his wife, mother and daughter traveling exploring different countries/places and engaging in deep spiritual activities (Tatvagnana with Vignana science) and takes deep interest in Acharya Sri Madvacarya and his spiritual guru - Sri Vyasatirtha under Dvaita Sidhantha. He has been an avid Formula 1 fan for 3.5 decades and currently supports the RedBull Formula 1 team. He loves motorsports of all kinds. He has been to some F1 grandprix venues ex: Singapore. He also loves to sit and watch cricket since he was 5 years old watching India win its first Prudential cup at the legendary Lords stadium with Kapil Dev lifting the trophy. Naveen is a tech geek owning a series of gadgets and every iteration of the Apple iPhone since its launch in 2007/08. He is a book junkie. He finishes a book/week. His latest read is Elon Musk’s biography by Walter Issacsson. He is a vocal free speech advocate and his X profile (formerly Twitter) handle is here. His views are moderate.
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Srivani Vijaya
Director/Chief Technology officer (March 2024)
Srivani has extensive technology architecture experience building/architecting major software systems across her 1.5 decade+ stints at Capgemini/iGate, Mindtree, Wipro and Infosys. She has a flair for hands-on programming (her specialties lie in enterprise software across SAP systems) and is a big believer in approaching problems from first principles and with a goal towards achieving the strategic objectives laid out. Srivani holds a Bachelors in Engineering degree (BE) from the Visvesvaraya Technology University (VTU) in Information science.