VC Lessons for SDMs

My time at Cornell Johnson and the Big Red Venture Fund gave me a lens that I use every day as a General Manager at Amazon.

Portfolio thinking is real. As a GM owning product, engineering, and program, I'm constantly allocating resources across bets. Not every initiative will ship. Not every feature will land. The discipline is knowing when to double down and when to cut.

Market timing translates directly to roadmap prioritization. At PayU, we launched 1-tap payments at exactly the right moment—India's merchant ecosystem was ready, and we onboarded the top 8 merchants, adding $135M in annual GMV. Timing wasn't luck; it was pattern recognition.

Founder-market fit maps to team-problem fit. At HealthKart, I watched our team of 7 grow to 450 because we had the right people obsessing over the right problem. At Amazon, hiring is the single highest-leverage activity. The wrong PM on the wrong problem wastes months.

The Think Big mechanism at Amazon is essentially a pitch deck with operational rigor. Define the customer, size the opportunity, articulate the moat. The VC lens makes you a better operator because it forces clarity on why this, why now, why us.

The bridge between code and capital isn't abstract—it's the daily practice of building things that matter and measuring whether they do.