Product  ·  Growth  ·  The room itself

San Francisco  /  printed in two colours

GARGIKAND

I build products that reach millions and rooms that people rearrange their week for — usually in the same quarter.

Growth is not a funnel.
It is a guest list,
a first screen,
and someone deciding
to stay.

Move your cursor — the plates come into register

Sheet 01

The numbers, printed

Shipped, not projected

01

16M

Users on the conversational AI voice assistant I owned end-to-end product strategy for

AT&T · Lead PM

02

$9M

Annual cost savings, by retaining 2.6M customer contacts inside the assistant

AT&T · Lead PM

03

+30%

CSAT lift via NLU tuning in DialogFlow, generative AI A/B testing, and a voice-of-customer loop

AT&T · Lead PM

04

$1M

Pre-seed raised from angels and VCs to launch the AI-powered membership platform

Vently · Co-founder & CPO

05

10K

Downloads in week one after the pivot, then 15% month-over-month growth held

Vently · Co-founder & CPO

06

2,500

Paid members within three months of launching the membership tier

Vently · Co-founder & CPO

07

50K

Members in six months — covered by TechCrunch, CBS News and The SF Standard

Vently · Head of Growth

08

1.5M

Accounts reached monthly through partnerships with the Golden State Warriors, Adidas and Nike

Vently · Head of Growth

09

300+

City-wide brand activation events organised as the full-funnel GTM engine

Vently · Head of Growth

Sheet 02

Breakout events

Open any line

A gala-level art evening in a Pacifica mansion for founders, investors, art curators and tastemakers — built around live painters and featured artists rather than a panel and a step-and-repeat.

Sponsored by Fondo, Wells Fargo and MongoDB. I built the guest list myself and sold access to it — which is the whole model. The room, not the programming, was the product.

Live paintersCurated guest listSponsor-funded
View the gallery →
Guests in evening dress gathered on the terrace of a cliffside modern house at dusk during The Patron's Circle.
The Patron's Circle · Pacifica

A celebration of women founders, hosted at AngelList for the second consecutive year with four featured speakers. Sold out both times.

It runs on the same thesis as my work as COO of Women Founders Bay: women receive roughly 2% of venture funding, and the fix is not another panel — it is a shorter path between a founder and the person who can write the cheque.

RecurringVenue partnershipCommunity → product
View the gallery →
Four women founders seated on stage for the 'Your Name is an Asset' panel at entrepreneuHER, with the audience holding up phones to film.
entrepreneuHER · ‘Your Name is an Asset’ panel

Invited to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt two years running — one of the startup world’s most competitive stages — on 0→1 product development, community-led growth, and building a consumer social network, to a global audience of thousands of founders, investors and operators.

Disrupt is where the two halves of this portfolio stop looking separate. The stage is product credibility; the floor is distribution. I have never been able to treat those as different jobs.

Two consecutive yearsStage + activationGlobal audience
View the gallery →
Gargi Kand seated on a stool with a microphone, speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in front of a window wall.
TechCrunch Disrupt · on stage

Eighteen seats, invite only, no panel and no programming — the format I keep coming back to. The most recent was Series A and later healthcare founders only, with every guest verified on stage, location and sector before the invitation went out.

Sourced by mining years of my own guest lists against those filters, and hosted under my own name rather than a brand. Curation is a data problem wearing a dinner jacket — and the format compounds, because each edition is easier to fill than the last.

Invite onlyVerified sourcingCompounding list
Founders seated along a long table at a private dinner, with handwritten place cards and a shared family-style spread.
The founder dinners · place cards, no programming

Sheet 03

Product work

Where the numbers came from

Calling PMF failure, then pivoting the company

Vently · Co-founder & CPO

Sept 2025 — Present · Stanford StartX '25

One quarter into joining the product team, I called product-market-fit failure from user interviews, adoption data and retention signals, and pivoted the company from community management software to a consumer mobile app.

That pivot produced 10,000 downloads in week one and held 15% month-over-month growth afterward. I then raised $1M in pre-seed from angels and VCs to launch the AI-powered membership platform, which reached 2,500+ paid members in three months.

Spearheaded 0→1 development end to end: foundational user research, roadmap definition, and feature prioritisation through data-driven frameworks across a cross-functional engineering and design team.

Full-funnel growth, run as 300 live experiments

Vently · Head of Growth

May 2024 — Sept 2025

Owned full-funnel GTM: 300+ city-wide brand activation events, user-generated content campaigns, strategic partnerships and influencer management.

Scaled Vently to 50,000 members in six months, earning coverage in TechCrunch, CBS News and The SF Standard. Brand partnerships with the Golden State Warriors, Adidas and Nike drove 1.5M+ accounts reached monthly, alongside large-scale productions of 2,000+ attendees.

Conversational AI at consumer scale

AT&T · Lead Product Manager

Jan 2022 — Mar 2025

Owned end-to-end product strategy and roadmap for the customer-facing conversational AI voice assistant serving 16M users, leading a cross-functional team of 20 across engineering and design.

Improved CSAT by 30% through NLU tuning in Google DialogFlow, generative AI A/B testing, and a voice-of-customer feedback loop. Built an OKR and metrics-based prioritisation framework adopted across 5 agile squads and 300+ employees enterprise-wide, and secured executive buy-in at both AT&T and Google — driving $9M in yearly cost savings by retaining 2.6M customer contacts.

The engineering years

AT&T · Software Engineer / Data Scientist, AI Net Ops

Jul 2020 — Jan 2022

Identified $14.32M in cost savings by analysing recurring payment datasets across AT&T cell tower infrastructure in Palantir and PowerBI. Built ETL pipelines in Python and Spark SQL for network telemetry, cutting per-project processing from days to hours across 20+ infrastructure stakeholders.

Awarded a patent (No. 2021-0754) for Packet-Based Network Delivery Control — a network optimisation system using packet multiplexing and demultiplexing to improve throughput efficiency at scale.

Closing the gender funding gap, operationally

Women Founders Bay · Chief Operating Officer

Sept 2024 — June 2025

Built a 5,000+ subscriber platform and a 25+ event series to close the gender funding gap in venture, securing partnerships with General Catalyst, a16z, AGI House, SignalFire, LinkedIn and Techstars.

The goal was never awareness. It was a shorter path between a woman founder and a person who can write a cheque, in a market where women receive roughly 2% of venture funding.

A media company for the rooms that don't exist yet

Current · Founder

2026 — Present

Building a media company and production house for hyper-curated tech events with artist elements — live DJs, live painters, experiential work — alongside a Substack and a podcast covering AI, startups and the VC ecosystem.

It exists because most tech events are uncurated and forced, and because the people worth putting in a room together are the ones at the frontier of tech, art and culture at once.

Sheet 04

The short version

Colophon

I started as a software engineer and data scientist, moved into product management, and then co-founded a company — which means I have shipped to sixteen million users and I have also carried chairs at 2am because a vendor no-showed.

The through-line is the same in both: find out what people actually want, build the smallest true version of it, and then find the channel that makes it grow without you standing next to it. I am unusually comfortable in the gap between a dashboard and a room full of people, because I have been held accountable for both.

Outside the work I write poetry and make immersive art, which is less a separate hobby than the reason my events have live painters in them. Most of what I have built came out of the Bay Area founder and investor ecosystem, and most of it went back into it.

  • — TechCrunch Disrupt Speaker, Oct 2024 & Oct 2025
  • — Founder in Residence, Stanford StartX Accelerator
  • — Patent No. 2021-0754, Packet-Based Network Delivery Control
  • — B.S. Computer Science (Machine Learning), Purdue University
  • — Minors in Management & Psychology
  • — Product Management Certification, Product School
  • — VP of Operations, GITPRO
  • — Press: TechCrunch · CBS News · The SF Standard

Let's put the right people in a room.