Ashish Desai

Summary

CPO for Monograph, open to new board and advising roles with early stage marketplace or vertical SaaS businesses. I'm best at: - Developing a clear and focused product strategy that ladders up to the company strategy and vision - Formulating the key metrics, org structure and prioritization to ensure that we achieve that vision - Marketplaces and/or Vertical SaaS - Series A-C (i.e. solving the particularly messy problems) What makes me qualified to advise founders? - Served as the executive product leader for the last 10+ years at multiple early stage companies - Strategies I've developed have been significant factors in successful acquisitions (Tinyprints to Shutterfly, 99designs to Vista). Still TBD on a few others :) - Each leadership role I've had has seen 10X+ revenue growth and the challenges that go along with that growth - My background and experience in multiple disciplines and industries means I can connect a lot of dots and pattern match better than most More details if you are still going Most recently, I joined Monograph to lead the product and design teams and keep building the easiest to use system for architects to run their business. Focusing on a single vertical has allowed us to truly customize an all-in-one platform to work perfectly within our customer's workflow. Prior to that, I joined Handshake to bring a consumer mindset to a marketplace and product team that had grown up as a B2B SaaS platform. By building a focused product strategy with an emphasis on the unique value to students (our consumer users), hiring a great team of PMs, designers and analysts and bringing a culture of experimentation and accountability to results, we were able to transform both the perception of Handshake (as measured qualitatively) and the regular usage (as measured by MAUs) dramatically. Previously, I joined 99designs as the first product manager and over 7 years grew the product, design and analytics teams as CPO from when we were still a modest logo design crowdsourcing site for micro businesses to a true global creative platform used by Fortune 500 companies and agencies. And you probably don't care about anything before that. Father of two energetic boys, long time avid Duke basketball fan, not so recent NBA convert and LeBron fanboy.