3 years back I joined Marqeta from Roku as an Engineering Manager lacking any Fintech / Payments experience. At that time Marqeta was as a Series D startup with less than 250 employees valued at 450 million dollar. Today is my last day at Marqeta as I am joining Twin Health, a Health Tech startup, next week. I am grateful for the excellent journey together I have been through. We went for a few more fundraising events and went public in June 2021. This made it possible for me to buy a house in Fremont last Christmas.
CEO Jason Gardner has built an excellent company through his leadership, compassion and leveraging his professional network. I was hired by Manish Pandit who was the Senior Director of Engineering, and Director of Recruiting Ali Algarmi who also hired me from Salesforce to TubeMogul in 2015. After few months, Manish left for Facebook and I started reporting to the new VP of Engineering Abhay Kumar. When Abhay left end of the year, I have been reporting to Brad Taylor who joined as Senior Director of Engineering the same month I joined. I always had a good manager luck, and I learnt different things from each of them. With time my scope of work got larger and larger, I moved into mid level management from line level management by starting to manage other managers and principal engineers, being responsible for a relatively large org. I got some very good engineers, leaders, partners, stakeholders around me and I hired some brilliant engineers. Together we did some cool work that I will remain proud of for years to come. I always looked for optimizing globally instead of locally and that strategy worked well for me here.
I am leaving some excellent people here, some amazing memories, some hard earned lessons. I have seen Marqeta grow from small to a medium sized company (800+) and I am confident that it’s just a matter of time when under the new leadership Jason has setup – Randy Kern, Vidya Peters, Suni Lobo – Marqeta will become a 10000+ people company. Wish you all the best my fellow Marqetans as I watch you thrive from the sideline!
I have created a Marqeta Alumni Group in LinkedIn named Ex Marqetans and already see 40 members joined there. Regarding my next step, stay tuned as I come back with my understanding of what Twin Health is up to.
