Pawan Deshpande
Head of Product & Growth at Linea
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
Head of Product & Growth
2023 - Current
Linea is the easiest, fastest, and safest way to fix broken data pipelines.
Angel Investor / Advisor / LP
2016
• Toast (restaurant PoS software - NYSE: TOST) • Upside Foods (lab grown meat - $608M funding) • LinkSquares (legal SaaS - $800M valuation) • Customers.ai (intent data & AI-driven automation) • Falkonry (Operations AI) • Xpertly (Lightspeed-backed MarTech startup) • Viyaat Agro (India farmland cultivation) • Stage 2 Capital (B2B SaaS VC fund) • Stage 2 Catalyst (SaaS Seed Fund) • Scale Angels (Scale AI alum & employee fund)
Product Leader, Fleet Data Engine & Smart Capture
2022 - 2023
Acted as general manager for a new active learning product designed to capture data from edge robot, drone, and autonomous vehicle fleets, enhancing machine learning models at $7B late-stage AI startup. Led cross-functional teams in product, engineering, and design to commercialize the product and define its vision and architecture.
Scale AI provides a data-oriented platform that assists in the development of AI applications.
Raised $2,602,620,000.00 from WCM Investment Management, Meta, Wellington Management, Y Combinator, Intel Capital, DFJ Growth, NVIDIA, Nat Friedman, Thrive Capital and Qualcomm Ventures.
Product Director, MLOps
2020 - 2021
Directed product and growth initiatives for an enterprise-grade data science & MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) platform at this Series-F startup. Achieved a 10x customer growth within six months for a new product. Streamlined sales processes, conducted extensive customer discovery, and aligned the executive team on product strategy, product vision, and integration plans. Played a key role in integrating an acquired company, achieving zero attrition and creating high-impact demos for key stakeholders.
Domino Data Lab provides a platform that utilizes data science and AI for collaboration, model deployment, and centralizing infrastructure.
Raised $223,600,000.00 from Snowflake Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Empede Capital, Coatue, Highland Capital Partners, Great Hill Partners and NVIDIA.
Founder & CEO
2007 - 2020
Conceptualized and launched three successful content marketing products, generating $15M in total revenue and serving over 1,000 customers, including 20% of the Fortune 100. Scaled the company to a 50-member team with a 100% CEO approval rating on Glassdoor. Recognized as an industry thought leader, speaking at over 50 marketing and tech conferences, establishing Curata as a pioneer in content marketing SaaS. Curata customers included Alcatel, Aramark, Barracuda, Bayer, Cisco, Dell, Google, Huawei, IBM, JP Morgan, Lenovo, GE, Google, McKesson, McKinsey, Nuance, Oracle, PayPal, Pitney-Bowes, P&G, Pfizer, Red Hat, Roche, RSM, Salesforce, SAP, SendGrid, Splunk, Symantec, T-Mobile, US Army, Verizon, VISA, Walmart, Xerox, ZipCar & Zendesk.
Curata builds software to help content marketers grow leads and revenue.
Machine Learning Researcher
2005 - 2005
Invented a machine learning model for transliterating Roman characters to Indic scripts, available across 120+ languages and installed over 100M times. Featured in the New York Times for significantly empowering women and transgender bloggers. Resulted in a patent filing.
Google is a multinational corporation that specializes in Internet-related services and organizes the world’s information.
Raised $26,100,000.00 from Angel Investors LP, Kleiner Perkins, Signatures Capital, Sequoia Capital, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Shaquille O'Neal, Henry Kissinger, Google and Tiger Woods.
Software Developer
2004 - 2004
Invented the first “People You May Know” algorithm for social network recommendations by analyzing messages, emails, and calendars. Demonstrated by Bill Gates in 2006, this algorithm laid the foundation for similar features on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Resulted in a patent filing and a Washington Post Op-Ed on data vulnerability.
Microsoft Advertising provides digital advertising solutions.
Software Development Engineer
2004 - 2004
Co-engineered product from scratch which detects and disrupts illegal peer-to-peer file sharing on corporate networks. Used by over 2,000 companies in 22 industries. IMLogic was acquired in January 2006 by Symantec Corp.
Software Developer
2003 - 2003
Debugged and integrated NOMAD, a C++ based 3D subsurface visualization application, with KRIBS geostatistical soil profiler.
Software Developer
2003 - 2003
Developed SyncML based synchronization engine to integrate Kubi Client, a collaborative email add-on to Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, with Salesforce.