About

I am an entrepreneurial technologist based out of San Francisco Bay Area in California, USA. I help early to mid-stage startup CEO's as their technical counterpart acting as the company's fractional or interim CTO. The company I head is Bixan. Bixan is a Indian word, originated in Sanskrit, means observation.

As a technologist, I bring the expertise of more than 25 years of building and launching products. I honed my skills in product architecture and engineering management at leading companies, including Yahoo, where I designed and delivered the company's global application architecture.

I built my entrepreneurial muscle at a half-dozen Silicon Valley startups, providing technical leadership to global, multi-disciplinary teams working in the mobile, edtech, and fintech sectors, among others. A collaborator and builder at heart, I specialize in efficient and effective product development, cloud migration strategies, and digital transformation.

I work with the teams to evaluate clients' technical capacity, identify gaps, and gage opportunities. Then, as builders do, I get to work to make those opportunities real.

As an entrepreneur, I cofounded my first company in 2003. I exited (unprofitably, I must add) after 16 months when my inexperience in other aspects than technology brought me down. "Brought me down" may not be the right metaphor, "elevated me up" could have been equally apt since I learnt things that nobody can teach but experience and failure. I also helped built the first online Bengali magazine Parabaas in 1997. Ask me about this sometime. I have some interesting stories to tell.

As a writer and songwriter, I work in my native language Bengali.

Services I offer (aka Things I Do)

MVP Builder

MVP Builder is a 3-12 month engagement to build the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

In this program, I build a dedicated team of engineers to build, who will be working with your team of Founders, Product Managers, Designers, Project Mananger, to build the MVP. The engineering team can also be a hybrid, if you want to bring your team and want me to supplement it.

This is a proven model. The followings are some products I launched using this model in last three years.

Fractional CTO

In this role, I am your partner. I consult you in business strategy, I work with you to develop product strategy to align with you business strategy, I develop technology strategy and roadmap for you and help you execute that strategy.

I offer three different levels of engagement as a fractional CTO.

One is more advisory in nature, another one is strategic and the third one is operational.

Technology Audit

This is a one to three week engagement where I do a in-depth intake of your engineering operations (technology, people, process). At the end of the process I provide you with a technology strategy roadmap which is aligned with your business and product roadmap.

A Few work I am proud of

  • I was one of original developers of Apache Traffic Server, which is a top-level Apache project. The product was developed by Inktomi in early 2000. When Inktomi went down in dot-com bust, Yahoo bought this product. Later Yahoo donated it to Apache.
  • I was the architect for Yahoo's global architecture of the Commerce properties, which consolidated disparate codebase stacks from tens of countries to a unified central architecture.
  • I helped Credit Sesame replatformize it's main product and also move operations to the cloud.