Work

Based in the Bay Area, Vandana currently works on Walmart Marketplace, where she has launched billion-dollar bets since 2022. She believes her work has routinely deprived sleep for Product Managers at Amazon and eBay.

Before Walmart, she was hired directly by CEOs in the South Indian startup ecosystem to solve pre- and post-PMF growth problems, helping teams scale to the $100M ARR milestone and eventual IPO. Her first role as a Product Manager came from a cold email she sent to the CEO of a $1B company, which led her to build and scale Social Commerce products from the ground up.

Her career is best understood as a sequence of contrarian bets before it became respectful:

• ChemE to Software: She moved from being a gold medallist in the most difficult¹ stream of engineering — Chemical Engineering into a then obscure software product company straight out of college, against wishes of her professors, family members and peers
• Tech career in US without a master’s degree: She declined admits to top programs from top US universities including UC Berkeley, Duke, and Northeastern, choosing on-the-job learning over a master’s degree, which is uncommon²
• Radical transparency: She believes in transparent, direct communication and asks inconvenient questions early, a trait that is widely valued in theory in corporate environments but often³ discouraged in practice

Music

Like most South Indian Brahmin families that quietly assume Carnatic music is good insurance against both moral decay and the afterlife, Vandana was enrolled early. At five, she began learning fundamentals under Vidwan Vellore Lakshminarayanan. What followed was a long, sincere pilgrimage through Mylapore, studying for several years with Rama Raghuram, briefly with violinist Charumathi Raghuram, and most significantly with Durga Venkatesh of the Sangeetha Kalanidhi D.K. Jayaraman lineage.

During her sophomore years in college, she developed a fascination with the violin. She showed up at the doorstep of Rajesh Kumbakhodu, a disciple of Padma Shri A. Kanyakumari, and asked if he would accept her as a student. He told her that if she was willing to take seven years to learn one song properly, she could consider joining. She agreed and now she can play keertanams on the violin and carries a persistent longing to return to formal learning.

Outside classical Carnatic music, Vandana enjoys listening to and performing across genres. Alternative rock, rap, fusion, jazz and more. She also took to learning music software, particularly GarageBand, and enjoys tinkering with loops and crafting original scores, extending a traditionally acoustic training into a more exploratory, digital space.

Today, music has retreated inward. She occasionally teaches younger children the fundamentals online, less as a profession and more as a quiet obligation to the tradition that shaped her patience, discipline, and keeping her mind fit.

Her original music can be found on SoundCloud. Her renditions live on YouTube.

Running
She ran five and ten kilometres, and even a few marathons, largely because her friends did. It died before it could become a habit. In 2026, the ambition is smaller and therefore more serious: to run every day. On a treadmill, on the road, run for everything.

This Blog

Observation Book is an ode to a rigorous student life, when seriousness was measured in ruled pages and we were expected to maintain something formally called an Observation Book, logging the results of endless lab experiments with no room for opinion. Student life eventually ended, but the habit did not. I now treat each day as an experiment, observing what works, what fails, and what pretends to work until examined closely.

I write about work, ambition, systems, learning, music, power, and the small, easily ignored human behaviors that quietly decide how lives and careers actually turn out

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1 – A major student-review–based study of over 2.8 million professor reviews and course difficulty assessments ranked Chemical Engineering as the hardest engineering major among typical U.S. engineering disciplines because it blends complex engineering fundamentals with advanced chemistry concepts that are difficult to master

2- 57% of H-1B workers now hold a master’s degree or higher, making decision to build a tech career without one an intentional and uncommon choice

3 – A Gallup study found that only about 3 in 10 U.S. workers strongly agree that their opinions count at work, meaning most employees feel their voice doesn’t truly matter