I’m Promeet I am a database engineer turned Product Manager living in Silicon Valley. I grew up in Bangalore, India, once a beautiful city and my path is unlike the path of a .. shall I say .. typical Silicon Valley person.
I graduated with a business degree as as well as a masters in tax and business and I pretty much was a failure all through school. I do not have an engineering degree from ANY engineering school let alone from an IIT. What I had instead was a deep work ethic and the drive to succeed which brought me to the United States and finally in 2005 to the Bay Area.
Probably like several other people in Silicon Valley, I came here after working my first job in India starting from a trainee engineer to a job at Oracle (which was the coolest company back then - yeah go figure). I still remember standing outside (yes outside) the gates of the Oracle office trying to get my foot in the door with what was back then known as an “recruitment drive” and after a bit of coaxing and cajoling I got into the gates and into a crazy day long interview process and finally a job.
Several years later, after slaving away waiting for my Green Card while at Oracle complacence had set it and a perfect opportunity to join LinkedIn showed up. This was back in 2008 pre IPO and I surely wasn’t going to leave a company like Oracle and join LinkedIn right? Ha! I didn’t and guess who the joke was on?
In 2011, I had the opportunity to join LinkedIn again (and the recruiter was the same person who had reached out in 2008!). I went to interview and within a whirlwind week I got an offer and joined LinkedIn on Sep 19th 2011 to work for the kindest, nicest human being on the planet!
Right after I joined I felt like I had missed out on being early LinkedIn because I had no freaking clue what or how businesses run and I decided to enroll in an MBA at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. Once again, my boss at the time, supported me in SO MANY ways that I’ll forever be indebted to him.
After a 3 year long MBA, I did my best to get into the Product Team at LinkedIn and even though I had a lot of support from my boss back then, I just wasn’t good enough for the Product Team but I didn’t let that stop me!
During my MBA, I met a bunch of people in product at different organizations and for almost 2 full years, I got rejected by EVERY SINGLE COMPANY in the valley. I kid you not. Whats a guy to do? I mean really! At this time I had a mentor who worked at LinkedIn who used to help with interview prep, opened up his network to me and opened up other roles for me to try and switch within LinkedIn. I met the people I am closest to today back then, not because I am selfish and wanted something from them, but because they were selfless with their time. Selfless. To the day. Finally one of these endless conversations materialized and I joined WalmartLabs as an eCommerce Product Manager (both having no clue what eCommerce entailed or what Product entailed LOL).
From there on it was smoother sailing and I worked as an B2C Product Manager at Indeed, joined a startup called Zently for about 3 years and focused on Growth/Product/Making Coffee and then finally a company called BOLD to run their retention efforts. I current lead the Renters Insurance Product Team @ Appfolio.
If you’d like to connect, send me a message on promeetmansata@gmail.com or on LinkedIn
