SYNAPSE - Key Persons
He is a seasoned engineering leader and a full stack engineer who's worked in companies like Cisco and several successful startups. He has over 12 years of experience of building software products and scaling them to reach millions of users. He is a polyglot, skilled in multiple technologies and frameworks. Previously, Devang helped built the engineering team at India's top rated budget hotel chain Treebo as Head of Engineering. He built and scaled an engineering team from 4 to 45 members with focus on people, processes and products.
Ranjan Jagannathan loves productizing human behavior. He has a decade of experience in innovation management and product management building consumer products with a strong focus on habit formation and digital wellbeing. Previously, he led product marketing for an award winning travel startup Mygola Inc, which was named one of the best travel apps by Lonely Planet and was acquired by NASDAQ listed Make My Trip (MMYT). Prior, he ran large scale innovation programs at Yahoo! generating over 500 new product ideas in a year.
He was a Stanford Ignite fellow, a participant entrepreneur at MIT Global Startup Labs. Most recently, he was a Behavioral Research Scholar at Duke University and is co-authoring a paper on notifications and wellbeing with Dan Ariely. He has been a reviewer of books on habit formation, Hooked by Nir Eyal and living mindfully with technology Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky and has given talks on behavioral economics and wellbeing products at Google and Apple.
His work on smartphones, wellbeing and notifications have been covered in FastCompany, Wired Magazine, Vox Media, Business Insider and Business World to name a few.
Terrel Lewis is an full-stack developer who loves to get his hands dirty on code. He has worked on several interesting apps in the past. When not tinkering with the code, he enjoys playing the guitar and also has a passion for short film-making.
His life advice, "When in doubt, stackoverflow".
Vijay Raghavan - Chief Data Officer, Founder
Vijay Raghavan is passionate about building consumer products at scale with a strong focus on mobile and data. He worked at multiple startups in the valley such as 23andMe and Gametime. As an early member of Gametime, Vijay helped build the Android/Engineering team. Under his leadership, the app grew from 5k to 2 million downloads, won multiple awards and became one of the top-rated apps on Play Store. Previously, he worked with Mike Tamir at Sears Holdings Corporation to build a personalized indoor navigation solution for shopping malls, based on user's shopping behavior. Prior to that, Vijay was at Samsung and Kyocera Wireless (acquired by Mindtree Ltd.) where he built a search engine for keypad-based phones way before search became mainstream on mobile devices.
Vijay graduated from Carnegie Mellon University. While at CMU, he collaborated with Google on a research project to detect relative position of devices based on ambient sounds. Most recently, Vijay was part of the advisory track at Y-Combinator's Startup School.