2023 is the year of Customer Experience (CX). 86% of customers say they would pay a premium to brands that offer a fabulous experience. Companies with an annual revenue of 1 Bn USD can earn an added 700 Mn USD within three years of investing in CX. There’s no doubt...
Date: March 2023 Source: Middle East News 247 For International Women's Day, women leaders from across industries shared their thoughts with the Middle East media. While there are plenty of reasons to celebrate how far we've come, they also pointed out the barriers...
From home offices to hybrid model to the gig economy, the idea of ‘work’ has evolved considerably over the past few years. Priti Shetty, the Chief People and Culture Officer at WeWork, rightly summarises the change in two sentences, “Flexibility is no longer a...
Would you live as an undocumented person for three months? Lucia Gallardo, Founder & CEO of Emerge, did just that. Her aim: to understand the problems they face. For context, Emerge is a tech lab that works at the convergence of sustainable development and social...
Prashanth Kale has joined Crayon Data to lead the global marketing team. He is an award-winning marketing director with 16+ years of leadership experience in B2B marketing in high-tech, enterprise SaaS, and AI. An alumnus of EDHEC Business School (France), he is adept...
At some point in time, every child would have received a Rubik’s Cube as a gift. Or they might have been fascinated by the challenge and made their parents buy one for them. I was in the third category: my interest was flamed by criticism. When I was in...
In the words of track and field star Kim Collins, “Strive for continuous improvement, instead of perfection.” This is true in the case of mastering coding skills as well. It is critical for programmers to improve their abilities in this era of...
Getting more women in power is still a work in progress. But Maria Li, Chief Operating Officer at Tech in Asia, is tired of hearing, "I couldn't think of any women for my team/event/board." This was the genesis for the Unofficial Women in Power List, featuring leaders...
‘Partnerships’ has been quite the buzzword in SaaS over the past couple of years. It is imperative to scaling business, and according to Kunal Sharma of Rocketium, “The bigger goal of partnerships is to create an ecosystem.” The Head of Sales at Rocketium joined the...
Peter Marini has joined Crayon Data to lead and drive sales in the Asia Pacific region. He comes with more than two decades of experience in tech sales in both mature and emerging markets. Throughout his career, he has helped organizations overcome business...
“Where do you want to be five years down the line in your career?” It’s a question we’re often asked as part of our career progression chats and interviews. However, Vijay Rajagopal does not see the merit in this query. According to him, “There’s a misconception that...
What do I say when a potential Crayon asks, "What makes your employer different from the rest?" As a Talent Ambassador at Crayon Data, such questions get me super excited. Here are my go-to points: We have a team with 10+ decades of collective industry expertise....
Nagesh Jaladi has joined Crayon Data to lead and drive maya.ai Bazaar - the merchant solutions platform. Nagesh comes with 15+ years of experience across Mastercard, Google and AT Kearney. An alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, he...
In 2022, the International Women’s Day theme asked us to “Imagine a gender equal world. A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination.” For many, it is a distant dream. And at Crayon, we’ve realized that neutralizing inherent gender biases is not...
Why is Crayon a great place to work? We won't tell you. But these Crayons will. Scroll down to find out why they chose to work with us. And what keeps them here! Malvika Elango, Customer Success Manager Crayons live and breathe...
My curiosity towards building products started when I first began working on Encarta (a digital multimedia encyclopedia) at Microsoft. I wanted to know how products were conceived, built, deployed, managed, serviced, scaled. I essentially wanted to be part of the...
Wordle and data science don’t seem to have much in common. Find out why there’s more than meets the eye. This is the second blog in a three-part series. Read the first part here. Before we understand how entropy affects Wordle, we need to grasp the basics. What...
Humanity has always had a predilection for prediction. Decades ago, people imagined what life would look like in the 2020s. Some suggested that roadways would be replaced by pneumatic tubes. One issue of Popular Mechanics dreamed up a smart dining table that would...
What are the biases I've faced as a result of my gender? I've thought about this at different stages of my life. While I've been fortunate to have a supportive and progressive family, very often I've pushed against the biases of the external world. When I was in...
Wordle has taken the world (and Crayon Data) by storm. I’m not an expert in English vocabulary. But I am good with data science! And so, I approached the problem of solving Wordle using my expertise. With due credit to 3Blue1Brown for the inspiration. How do...
Ahmet Can Sezgin has joined Crayon Data to lead and drive Sales in the Middle East and Africa region. Ahmet comes with over 15 years of experience in defining and directing sales and business development strategies. He is an Industrial Engineer and graduate of Koc...
Naveen S Pillai has joined Crayon Data as Vice President – Human Resources. In his new role, he will lead our People Team as they drive Crayon to be a diverse, multi-cultural, values-led, and high-performance environment. Naveen comes with over 20 years of HR...
Santiago Duro Tomas has joined Crayon Data to nurture, lead, and drive client relationships in the Middle East. Santiago is an accomplished executive with over two decades of experience across strategy, operations, and technology. He has managed established...
Vinayak Ganapuram has joined Crayon Data to lead and drive the engineering function. Vinayak is a self-taught programmer who is passionate in creating Cloud scalable, performant products that delight users. He is a seasoned hands-on Tech Leader with proven track...
Data is like raw material. You need to be able to put it onto the right production line so that the manufacturing can take place without any disruption. That’s where a product data manager like me comes in. I gauge the data requirements and how we can use it in...
“Whether we like it or not, gravity exists. Gravity doesn't care if we tweet about it, agree, or disagree that it exists. Facts and data are like gravity,” says Rishad Tobaccowala. The author...
It's time for the #CrayonYearbook! Thanks to our amazing Crayons, we've seen achievements aplenty in 2021. As the year winds down, we count down our top 10 moments. #10 Around the world with maya.ai Despite several borders still being shut, Crayon managed to go places...
It took me a while to get my first job. The industry was still reeling after the 2008 financial crash. I found a role in strategy consulting, and in 18 months, I worked on about 14 different projects. These were spread across education, health care,...
What is more important: the journey, or the destination? For Thaddeus Lawrence, it is the company that matters most. “Because the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our relationships. All your high and wins to lows and desperate...
William Blake said, “The true method of knowledge is experiment.” And product veteran Dexter Zhuang strongly believes this. “Experimenting allows you to grow fast or fail fast. Considering the success rate of experiments is 1-4%, either way,...
My career started in 1999, a freshly minted graduate from BITS Pilani. And, like most eager beavers wanting to prove themselves, I was ready to rule the world! My journey started as an SAP developer. I started right at the bottom, working my way up to becoming a...
"Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." In our series, #CrayonCaptains, you'll meet the leaders who take our vision and help their teams bring it to life!
Jane Egerton-Idehen, the Head of Sales Middle East & Africa at Meta (formerly Facebook), has been on a lifelong quest, seeking balance between professional and personal success. She spoke about much of it in Crayon's Lighthouse Fireside Chat series a few months...
Like almost every other computer science graduate in the late 2000s, I started out as a Java software developer. From the beginning of my career, I’ve enjoyed experimenting with and adapting to new tech. I also had an innate curiosity about building new tech products...
Before we talk about anything else: who exactly is a solutions architect? Quoting H.L. Mencken, "For every complex problem, there's a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." Giving a simple solution to a complex problem has never been a reality. A problem can...
I never set out to be a data scientist. After a B Tech in information technology and ME in computer science, I started working on my PhD. My initial idea was to do research on point-of-care diagnostics for osteoporosis. I then switched to breast cancer prognosis and...
When you start a company, you pretty much have a blank slate. You have to think about the picture you want to create on it. You have the opportunity to decide what you want to bring people...
Andrew Michael is no stranger to the startup game. He founded three companies, which created four products. “But I had to sell them for peanuts, since churn and retention was a killer for those products,” he said. This led to an almost obsessive quest to find out...
(Clockwise from left) Vaibbhav Kinkar of Crayon Data, Jane Egerton-Idehen and the Crayon Box in Chennai Growing up in the underprivileged section of Lagos, Nigeria, young Jane Egerton-Idehen had a dream. In it, she wore a white pantsuit and stood in...
Having been an entrepreneur, I can tell you that the 'why' and 'what' are the easiest parts to develop in a company’s mission statement. The 'how' is the stepsister that never gets centerstage in most workplaces. Unless something goes sideways, that is. While...
On October 27, 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emailed his then director of product development. He said, "I just can't think of any instances where data has leaked from developer to developer and caused a real issue for us.” If Zuckerberg...
The CEO and founder of Mason, Kaus Manjita, talked design, tech and entrepreneurship in Crayon Data’s Lighthouse Fireside Chat Kaus in conversation with Crayon Data After spending over 16 years in ecommerce, Kausambi aka Kaus Manjita knows a thing or two...
I come from a liberal literary background. My father was the President of Alliance Française of Madras for several years, a double Chevalier who translated books from French to Tamil. That’s where I got my love for the...
When I first started, there was not much definition to my role. Over time, I have grown to have a fair idea of how this role contributes to the organization. My job is to actively look for areas in the organization that require improvement. Initially,...
How would you define yourself with a prefix? Talkative, fun-loving, socially awkward, hansmukh, creative… These were just some ways in which Crayons described themselves. In an internal Lighthouse Fireside chat on 17 June...
In my 6 months as a Strategic Operations trainee at Crayon Data, I would not be exaggerating if I said that every day was a learning experience. My entire team was kind with their teachings, generous in their support and exceptional in the camaraderie we...
I believe that if you want to emulate the people around you, you shouldn’t emulate their liberties. Emulate the behavior that earned them those liberties. That’s why ‘Responsibility with Freedom’ is my favorite Crayon Data value. Perfection through peer review It’s...
Crayon Data turns 9 today, and we have plenty to be grateful about. In a note to our Crayons, founder and CEO Suresh V Shankar and co-founder and COO Aarti Ramakrishnan look back with gratitude for the year that was. In many cultures and religions, the number 9 has...
Vidhyashankar Sriram has joined Crayon Data as Vice President - Client Solutions. In his new role, he will lead value delivery for our clients. An alumnus of NITIE Mumbai and Madras Institute of Technology, Vidhyashankar is a true-blue banker. He comes with over 15...
Since I joined Crayon during the pandemic, I haven’t had the opportunity to meet all my teammates in person. But I have come to know them as super enthusiastic, very supportive and helpful. They’re always ready to help even when they are busy. Don’t ask me to pick a...