We are delighted to announce and officially welcome Manjot Pahwa as Vice President at Lightspeed India. Manjot will be based in Bengaluru and will be looking at companies across developer, enterprise and consumer markets in India and Southeast Asia.
One of our core values is diversity of background, thought and experience. Manjot is a great example of someone, who brings together so much of what we value, making her a perfect fit for our growing team. This is not only reflected in the way we partner with founders and companies but also in how we build and grow the team at Lightspeed.
Another value we hold closely is about learning new things continually. Manjot has moved from core infrastructure to high-scale consumer applications to developer tools to payments during her career. She has also moved between continents multiple times. And she has moved from software engineering to product management to a leadership role.
Manjot has a stellar track record including time spent working in the heart of Silicon Valley. She completed her BTech in Computer Science from NSIT, Delhi, where she worked on queueing systems and clustering algorithms. After university, she was one of the few from India recruited by Google directly to their Mountain View headquarters. In her 7 years at Google, Manjot worked as an SRE and software engineer leading core infrastructure teams serving billions of users, building and scaling Google Photos and then as a product manager for Google’s Kubernetes and Network Security teams. She jointly holds a patent in multi-cluster container orchestration.
Post Google, she moved back to India in 2019, with nothing but a backpack and a new-found purpose to create something impactful in India – like all of us, she believes deeply in the potential of technology and founders to transform India.
Her goal in India was to be entrepreneurial from the get-go. For a year, beginning 2019, she worked with her co-founders to build Scrybe, a “GitHub” for AI/ML development, targeting developers and data scientists. She also advised several India-based founders on their product and GTM strategies.
However, in 2020, the pandemic hit, leading to a pivot in this journey and the emergence of a new path – one both familiar and new – that of leading product for the India team at Stripe, as they established and grew their India presence.
Outside of work, beyond her interests in network security and cloud computing, Manjot enjoys running, fitness and aerial skills. A self-confessed bookworm, her reading interests straddle a wide array of subjects ranging from human psychology to Stoicism.
She also has a Medium blog where she often reviews non-fiction books and memoirs. She spends her time listening to podcasts, favorites among which include Acquired, Tim Ferris. You can also find her sharing ideas and recommending books in this particular 3-2-1 podcast episode.
Manjot is active on Twitter as well as LinkedIn and you can write to her on either.
We look forward to everything she is going to build and do at Lightspeed India!
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