About

My parents left India in the 1970s — fleeing an economy strangled by the License Raj, where you needed government permission to start a business, expand production, or even import a piece of machinery. They arrived in America with no jobs, no technical degrees, and no safety net — just the conviction that they and their future children should be able to build something without asking permission. Their instinct and the refusal to accept shackles on their prosperity — became the operating system for everything I've done since.

The first time I touched a computer, I was about five years old and I was hooked. Techies in the 80s and 90s were "nerds" — socially awkward introverts who definitely did not win popularity contests. But we could not live without our computers. And when you could network them together, hijacking a phone line with a modem to connect to a server — many sleepless nights were had. By high school, I was convinced my career would end up in technology one way or another even though the path wasn't so clear.

After college I went to Wall Street, joining the M&A department at a bulge bracket investment bank which had a technology industry focus. Soon after joining, my boss invited me to help him launch a fintech firm called Epoch Partners. Start ups were the thing to do in the late 90s, since the internet was reshaping every industry, we believed the old investment banks were ripe for disruption. Epoch was a handful of young bankers betting they could rewrite the rules of the equity capital markets. We proved our model could work, and quickly formed the belief that walls fall fastest when insiders protected by them are too comfortable to notice the cracks. Goldman Sachs did notice, and acquired the company for $230m to basically shut it down.

After a year at Goldman, I left to join the Corporate Development team at Yahoo! in 2002. Working for a few Hollywood veterans like Terry Semel and Jeff Weiner, I leaned into the opportunity to bring the media business online, and discovered an open source protocol called BitTorrent. Its inventor asked me to co-found BitTorrent Inc. to commercialize the protocol that moved a third of the world's internet traffic.

Together, we built a monetization strategy, legal defense strategy and even found ourselves defending Net Neutrality when Comcast began secretly throttling our users. We took the fight all the way to the FCC, and helped establish the legal framework for net neutrality, proving that the Open Internet was not only worth the fight but that it could be preserved... even without a massive lobbying budget. Americans are a freedom loving people after all.

Then came Samba in 2008. My current venture was born from the recognition that television, the most powerful cultural medium on earth, was the frontier for digital media. It was under utilized by media companies, lacked digital innovation and was poorly understood by everyone. We realized that the media industry, while making the most consequential decisions, was flying blind. We set out to build a real-time, census-level data set that would give decision-makers clarity and transparency into how TV audiences actually behave. We are well down the path of achieving this mission at global scale.

All along my career, I've had the privilege of meeting and supporting other entrepreneurs — people with more conviction than resources, building something the world hasn't asked for yet. I am an investor in dozens of early stage companies doing important things.

Every chapter of my career has been the same story, told at different scales: technology as a force for personal and economic freedom, connecting people across the boundaries that separate us.

Get Geeky. If you want to live a full life and catch breaks doing what you love, pursue the geekiest thing you're passionate about — ideally before it becomes interesting to everyone else. Going deep is easy and effortless compared to those who are in it for the job or the cash. And when geekiness meets opportunity, that's the good stuff. As John Sculley said when he was CEO of Apple: "The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious."

Destiny = Effort. My brother Alvir and I were raised with the belief that you get exactly what you put in. As a kid, that meant studying hard, staying active with sports, music, and community service. Much like high school, in college I tried to do everything at once — computer science, biology, a job at a research institute, Army ROTC, and start a new campus publication — and drove myself to the edge. It taught me to specialize and focus. After graduation I took a job at an investment bank, rejecting invitations to go out on Friday nights, spending weekends tearing apart businesses and turning them into financial models. Work-life balance has never been in my vocabulary. As immigrants without jobs or technical degrees when they arrived in this country, Mom and Dad never hid their struggles from us, but never let us feel them so acutely that we'd become jaded. They wanted us to take risks, live without fear of failure, and never take things for granted.

In Dog We Trust. Be loyal. Be selfless. Live in the present and cherish moments with family. Don't forget to walk daily, smell the fresh air, and maybe a quick game of ball. Be the person your dog thinks you are. I heard that saying once, and it really stuck with me — anyone who has a dog knows what it means.

Smile: It's all about the journey and the destination. Your intentions in life should inspire you so that work becomes play. Your attitude will always be in your control, regardless of how challenging the journey gets. Choose your travel partners wisely, and then be a strong support to them — because the highs and lows all become sweet memories in hindsight.

Namaste: The light in me honors the light in you. The things which matter most in life always transcend race, caste, creed, age, and gender. There's nothing more powerful than energy gathered from focused individuals with a common purpose. Wake up grateful, meditate daily, and go all-in on your life's work.

When I need to decompress, I play video games — and I'm always up for a multiplayer session if you are. I have a habit of buying useless trinkets online and sending them to people who aren't expecting them. And when I need to quiet my mind, I put on John Coltrane — his music has a meditative effect that lets me space out and get lost in thought.

While I serve as CEO of Samba TV, everything on this website is personal and all views are expressly mine.