His unflinching desire to learn, openness to new ideas and possibilities, and ability to adapt makes Pankaj a versatile leader that are rare to find. In his 25+ years’ career, Pankaj has built several Technology & Product organizations, scalable systems, and large scale global products driving global businesses in both B2C and B2B spaces

He has honed his leadership skills and delivered outstanding outcomes for large enterprises, MNCs as well as start-ups in different phases of their journeys. He has left his impact across versatile domains including Telecom, Bioinformatics, Distributed computing, SaaS, Big Data, Ecommerce, Fintech, Omnichannel Retail and Logistics

An Harvard Business School (HBS) alumnus, Pankaj did his M.E. from BITS Pilani and B.E. from NIT Surathkal.  He is currently Chief Product and Technology Officer at Reliance Retails for its Fashion & Lifestyle business building new age technology and products for fast growing muti-billion USD business. At Reliance, he is also a certified Leadership coach.

Pankaj has also been instrumental in scaling several start-ups including Lenskart where, as CTO he transformed it into a deep tech organization, established and drove Lenskart’s Omni-channel Tech strategy with innovations like seamless Virtual Try-On, Headless commerce platform, Endless Aisle, and Assisted selling, and played pivotal role in company hitting 100 Mn USD revenue, becoming profitable and enter into Unicorn club in 3 years of his stint. In a completely different domain of Big Data SaaS, Pankaj played pivotal role in building three product lines at Guavus (later acquired by Thales Group) enabling to take its revenue from almost zero to more than 35 Mn USD in 3 years.

Pankaj has always questioned traditional model of leadership that sees people as resources, rather than assets and infinite spectrum of possibilities. This led his quest to deeply understand human behaviours and potential and ultimately led him to quantum model of leadership. This has enabled Pankaj to be an inspirational leader who uses empathy, empowerment, building trust and coaching as primary tools while setting and achieving audacious goals. Empathetic yet decisive, Pankaj always challenges status quo and don’t hesitate to take hard calls. Most of the people who worked with him are strongly willing to work with him again with many joining him in his subsequent innings, is a testimony to his leadership.

He has personally coached and mentored more than 50 leaders and entrepreneurs over last 7 years. He blends his understanding of human behaviours and potential, Vedantic philosophy, Quantum physics, and his spiritual and professional experiences in his unique approach to coaching.

Pankaj had a deep desire to create larger impact on ecosystem. When Indian start-ups landscape started coming of age, Pankaj found the entrepreneurs and start-up grappling with challenges that he has consistently solved across start-ups. He realized that he can use his rich experience and learnings to help these start-ups. For last 7 years, he has been an early stage angel investor and/or advisor and mentor to start-ups helping them with product strategy, technology architecture and roadmap, defining & launching MVP, organization design, product positioning and GTM, and  also fund raising in some cases.

Currently he is mentoring a few start-ups  in the Education, Wellbeing, Omni-channel eyewear retail, and helping his wife build MindsPrism (https://mindsprism.com) – a life coaching and holistic well-being platform.

Pankaj has authored 10 worldwide patents and more than a dozen research papers in top-rated international conferences and journals. He also has authored several articles in Business and Technology magazines.

Regarded as a thought-leader on Technology, Start-ups, Digital Transformation, and Leadership & Coaching, he is regularly quoted in publications and invited to speak at conferences and events. Last year Pankaj was also awarded as CTO of the year, Retail by Quantic Business Media, and CTO of the year by IAF.