Vishesh Gupta

Strategy-first generalist who believes that sustainable growth begins with identifying the right questions, rather than optimizing the wrong solutions. Leveraging cross-functional experience across product, operations, marketing, hiring in both startups and traditional business; I identify structural bottlenecks, challenge assumptions, and design differentiated, scalable business models. I bring the perspective of a strategic advisor with founder-style execution and a bias for action.

Professional Poker Player (2024-09 – 2025-10)

• A break from corporate life to explore a shot at high-stakes poker, combining GTO with exploitative play.

Marketing & Strategy (Independent Function) at Sanwariya Packaging (2023-01 – 2024-10)

Family-owned pharmaceutical packaging company specializing in the conversion and printing of blister and strip aluminium foils.

• Identified strategic and operational bottlenecks limiting business growth and scalability, including limited product differentiation, absence of MOQ policies, unstructured marketing processes, customer concentration risk, and production capacity underutilization.
• Led business development efforts across the Gulf region, Chennai and Kolkata to expand business operations.
• Conducted extensive discussions with procurement managers to identify procurement pain points and unmet customer needs.
• Developed a statistical model to determine the optimal MOQ and quantify the financial impact of operating without one.
• Designed a strategic transformation roadmap to reposition the business from a traditional manufacturing company to a differentiated, scalable, and process-driven enterprise.
• Proposed a "Foil-as-a-Service" business model to create sustainable differentiation in a commoditized market.
• Developed a transformation framework to transition the company into a vision-led, process-driven, systems-oriented, and scalable organization while minimizing key-person dependencies.
• Pilot implementation of the proposed business model was constrained by limited capital investment and differing executive priorities.

Founder at Clan/Intrigd (2020-01 – 2022-11)

Social Media App / Long-form News Aggregator

• Founded and evolved a consumer technology startup, pivoting from a long-form news aggregation platform (Intrigd) to a social media platform (Clan) after reassessing market scalability.
• Defined product vision, features, and roadmap through continuous iteration.
• Built the product and organization from the ground up, leading cross-functional execution across technology, marketing, and analytics.
• Recruited and coordinated UX designers, frontend/backend developers, DevOps engineers, marketers and interns.
• Managed external agencies across content marketing, paid advertising, and influencer campaigns.
• Integrated user analytics to measure engagement, retention, behavioral metrics and product performance.
• Underestimated the importance of building distribution through a repeatable customer acquisition engine or an owned audience/community before investing heavily in product.

Product Manager / Management Consultant at Draup / Zinnov (2016-05 – 2019-06)

Zinnov is a leading outsourcing advisory, and Draup is its internally incubated sales and talent enablement platform.

• At Draup, led cross-functional product development across Backend, Machine Learning, Data Harvesting and Account Management.
• Owned end-to-end development of key features, including Organization Structure, Career Progression, Executive Buying Persona, Wage Inflation, and Skill-Role Fitment Analysis.
• At Zinnov, delivered strategy consulting engagements across technology, outsourcing, innovation and industry value chains.
• Built TAM models, Technology Hype Cycle frameworks, R&D Footprint Analysis, Hub-and-Spoke models in the automotive industry.

Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical – Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (2011 – 2015)