Private Sector
2015 Private Sector
Making US Luxury Skincare Succeed in Asia
In the US, customers already knew the brand. On China's Tmall and Japan's Rakuten, they didn't - and luxury doesn't translate on autopilot. Could the US playbook survive Asia?
Challenge How do you launch a luxury beauty brand in the world's two toughest beauty markets when they demand culturally adapted marketing strategy, and platform-specific merchandising the home playbook never needed?
Approach Market-specific sampling, bundling, and merchandising strategies - executed frugally, without the collateral budgets of a home-market launch.
Outcome Spearheaded successful launch of brand's largest eCommerce stores on Tmall (China) and Rakuten (Japan), resulting in annual sales uplift of approximately 1%, $110M.
2016 Private Sector
Entering the Male Grooming Category Across US & Asia
Estée Lauder had spent decades mastering how women buy beauty. Men buy differently - and differently again across the US, Europe, and Asia. Where does a women's beauty giant even start?
Challenge How do you build a credible market entry strategy for a new, untried consumer segment across fundamentally different geographies, each with distinct beauty norms, retail infrastructure, and consumer behaviour?
Approach Voice of Customer research, a new product pilot, new pricing, and first-of-their-kind channel partnerships across markets.
Outcome Launched new skincare product line and decreased concept-to-production time by 25%. New partnerships strategy adopted and executed across target markets with 2% revenue uplift worth $230M.
2017 Private Sector
Creating the Digital Gold Category in India
India has a 5,000-year attachment to gold making it the 2nd largest consumer of gold globally. We set out to sell gold online by creating the first digital gold product in Asia, from a company that had never sold to B2C consumers earlier.
Challenge How do you drive mainstream adoption of an asset class stripped of its physical form - and stay ahead of regulators when innovation is outrunning oversight?
Approach Research-led product and GTM strategy, refined relentlessly after launch - the decisive calls being who to partner with, when, and who to refuse.
Outcome Launched on Paytm, Walmart's PhonePe, Google Pay, and more investment/fintech platforms. Acquired 10M+ new customers. Built business from 0 to $124M GMV.
2020 Private Sector
Building a Brand-New Partnerships Function with the Private Capital Industry
PE and VC firms control Asia's fastest-growing companies - and Microsoft had no door into that world. The first hire got a blank page and a mandate: build one.
Challenge How do you build a $130M business with no precedent? No playbook existed in the company for this first-time role, and Asia is 15 countries with different investors and different ecosystem maturity.
Approach As first hire, built the GTM strategy and value proposition outside-in - anchored in Voice of Customer and an ecosystem partnerships approach.
Outcome Built and scaled $130M brand-new industry vertical with 2 strategic MoUs and 10 multi-million-dollar deals ranging from $2M–$30M. Partnered for thought leadership, deal flow, due diligence, and value creation and scaled across Asia.
Startup
2016 Startup
Accelerating Enterprise Deal Conversion: British Tech Startup Across US & Europe
Prospects loved the product. Deals still wouldn't close. A Richemont-backed British Machine Learning startup selling brand protection to luxury houses had a pipeline conversion problem that buyer interest alone couldn't solve.
Challenge How do you compress deal cycles and lift conversion rates in enterprise tech when customer stakeholders see clear product value, but conversion remains uncertain?
Approach Revamped pricing, positioning, pitching methodology, and sales enablement end to end.
Outcome Deal conversion rate improved by 50% within 2 months of engagement. Key lighthouse accounts won across UK, Europe, and USA. 7 cold prospects converted to new pilots within 3 months of revamp implementation. Startup achieved successful exit through acquisition by PE-backed competitor.
2018 Startup
Scaling User Acquisition and Engagement in a Competitive Mobile Apps Market
Millions used SHAREit to move files - then closed the app. Turning the Lenovo Group spinoff from a single-use utility into a social commerce platform meant taking on WhatsApp and Facebook for the scarcest resource in Indian tech: user attention.
Challenge How do you transform a single-purpose utility app into a sticky social commerce platform while navigating partnership complexity with telcos, payment providers, and eCommerce platforms - each with competing interests and integration requirements?
Approach Deep user research, a Pinduoduo-inspired social commerce launch, and partnerships engineered so user deals and partner KPIs moved together.
Outcome Launched WeShare social commerce product and acquired 200K new users within 3 months of launch. Commercial partnerships with telcos, payment platforms, and FMCG players drove 13% MAU increase within 4 months.
2018 Startup
GTM Strategy for Cross-Border EdTech Expansion
What wins in Seoul doesn't automatically win abroad. A Samsung VC-backed Korean EdTech had conquered its home market - and hit a wall the moment it tried to enter India.
Challenge How do you make a product from a mature and developed market successful in a developing country where buying processes, stakeholder structures, and product expectations differ fundamentally from the home market?
Approach Market entry strategy grounded in stakeholder research - product adaptation, anchor customers, channel partners, and a sales enablement framework.
Outcome Market entry strategy validated through acquisition of 3 pilot customers within 2 months of engagement. GTM framework and sales enablement materials deployed for rapid expansion and scale-up.
2026 Startup
Thoth: A Human-in-the-Loop AI Form-Filling Agent
Filling out long online forms - applications, registrations, onboarding portals - is repetitive, error-prone work. Existing auto-fill tools either spray-and-pray without oversight or break on anything more complex than a name field. Built at Dendrons.ai as part of the Signal-to-Action Engine.
Challenge How do you let AI do the tedious typing while keeping a human firmly in control of what gets submitted - on real-world forms with logins, OTPs, multi-page flows, iframes, and custom widgets?
Approach Built an agent that pairs vision AI (reading the form the way a person does) with a persistent personal profile that learns from every answer given. Every proposed field value is reviewed and approved by the user before it is filled, and nothing is ever submitted without explicit confirmation. The human handles logins and OTPs; the agent handles the typing.
Outcome Working product: reads any web form, fills from a learned profile that never asks the same question twice, and keeps the human in the loop at every step. Live demo and product page online.
Visit thoth.dendrons.ai →
Public Sector
2016 Public Sector
Digital Public Infrastructure Frameworks for Global Governments
Every government wants India's DPI success story. Few have India's context. The World Bank was advising nations on digital identity and cash transfers - with no playbook written by anyone who had actually run one at population scale.
Challenge How do you translate India's DPI implementation lessons - specifically around national identity systems and direct benefit transfers - into actionable frameworks for governments operating in vastly different institutional, regulatory, and infrastructure contexts?
Approach Translated first-hand execution experience from India's JAM stack into adaptable frameworks for very different government realities.
Outcome Advisory frameworks deployed for global governments on DPI adoption and conditional cash transfer implementation. Policy guidance informed national-level digital infrastructure planning across multiple World Bank client countries.
2024 Public Sector
Scaling AI and DPI Adoption: Domestically and Globally
Central banks don't get to move fast and break things. When the Reserve Bank's innovation hub wanted AI in regulated finance - and India's DPI exported to the world - every step had to hold up to a regulator's scrutiny.
Challenge Which BFSI workflows can AI transform responsibly - and how does India's DPI playbook travel globally via partnerships with international governments?
Approach Led stakeholder consultations across startups serving the BFSI space, multilaterals, and foreign governments building DPI stacks.
Outcome Delivered thought leadership work on AI in the financial sector and scaling DPI in the Global South. Structured and delivered an MoU with an international government for cross-border DPI collaboration.
2026 Public Sector
Building AI Capacity for an Entire State's Administrative Training Institute: AI Envisioning & Capability Building for Officers and Decision Makers
210 officers about to run a state's finance, welfare, climate, and citizen services. Every one of them knew AI mattered. None had been shown how to use it. The state's administrative training institute decided to change that.
Challenge How do you take officers with no technical background from AI awareness to deployment-ready pilots - inside bureaucratic approval chains and real state priorities?
Approach Designed and delivered the state's first-ever Applied AI Innovation Lab - 20 sessions of AI-led governance innovation for 210 officers joining the state administrative services - alongside 2-session overview workshops that brought the total to 438 officers reached via AI Envisioning & Capability Building, IAS and State Civil Services among them.
Outcome Portfolio of 42 AI innovation initiatives established across welfare, climate, agriculture, sports, and citizen services, with teams guided toward pilot-ready solution roadmaps and hands-on MVP development. Established formal evaluation pipeline for executive-level validation and state-level scale-up consideration. Rated 4.81/5 by participants.
Participant testimonials at SkillAI Academy →
None of these came with a playbook - every case started with a blank page. But in solving each first-time challenge, I wrote one. If you're staring at a similar zero-to-one-to-scale problem, the fastest route to the playbook is a conversation.
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