Founder · Advisor · Product & GM Executive
I'm Rachana. Twenty years running product and P&Ls — a founder twice over, and the operator brought in at Meta, Wayfair and Gusto when the mandate was messy. Today I'm building Close the Loop and working with a small number of founders and leadership teams.
Building
Inflect Ventures
As companies adopt AI, work fragments across Slack, email, meetings, docs and a growing stack of tools. Leaders have more information than ever and less visibility into how work actually happens.
I'm exploring whether AI can connect those dots — where decisions get made, where work stalls, and where AI creates real leverage rather than more noise. If you're leading a company through AI adoption, I'd like to compare notes.
Close the Loop →Advising
Founders & leadership teams
“The product leader founders call when things are messy and need to scale fast.”
You have product-market fit and a founder still holding product. I build the function, the operating rhythm and the bench that replaces me.
An acquisition that hasn't landed, an underperforming line, a team shaped for the last stage. I reset direction, leadership and cost structure.
Applying AI and ML in data-heavy, regulated domains — where accuracy, privacy and explainability decide whether it ships at all.
Pricing, packaging, portfolio strategy and the org design that makes a second and third product possible.
Selected engagements since 2022
Also mentoring founders through Cremorne Digital Hub, and product managers through First Round Capital, Women in Product and Black PMs.
Track record
The operating years behind the advice — twenty of them, at every scale from bootstrapped to multi-billion.
Gusto
2023—25
GM & Head of Product, Tax Incentives
Turned around a struggling acquisition: reset the three-year strategy with board and C-suite behind it, rebuilt leadership, right-sized the org, and put AI into service delivery — NPS moved from single digits to the mid-60s on a path to double ARR.
Wayfair
2021—22
Director of Product, Data & AI Platform
Led 9 PMs and ~50 engineers across a multi-billion-dollar e-commerce platform. Shifted from build-everything to buy-and-partner, codified privacy and accuracy tenets, and sponsored the company-wide iOS 14.5 mitigation across legal, finance and marketing tech.
Meta
2017—21
Product Lead, Signals & Identity
Global owner of ads data and social shopping products through the platform's steepest growth years — Events API, Ads SDK, identity matching — and the cross-org response to ATT, iOS 14 and GDPR that cut projected exposure by roughly half.
Quantcast
2014—17
Lead PM, Supply
Took inventory supply from firefighting to profitability across a display, mobile and video DSP. Launched Private Marketplaces from zero and shipped the ML fraud models that made the company a leader in brand-safe delivery.
MeTime
2013—15
Co-Founder
Bootstrapped a two-sided wellness marketplace in London to 1,000+ supplier listings across two countries before exiting. The founder experience underneath everything since.
Education: MBA, INSEAD · MSc Applied IT, Monash University · BCom, University of Mumbai.
Contact
Building a company, working out where AI actually fits, or looking for a thought partner on the board-level questions — I'd like to hear from you.