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Chandrika Maheshwari
Exploring new things
Chandrika Maheshwari is a technology executive and entrepreneur currently exploring new opportunities at NewCo in San Francisco, California.1 Her professional background includes:
Career Highlights
Founder and CEO: Chandrika founded and led Pull, a fintech startup aimed at revolutionizing how people access and manage their earnings.2 The company's mission was to improve financial well-being and loyalty among employees by providing advanced access to earnings.
Product Management Experience:
- Product Manager at Plaid (May 2021 - November 2022)
- Senior Product Manager at DocuSign (November 2020 - May 2021)
- Product Manager at DocuSign (August 2019 - October 2020)1
Earlier Roles:
- Product Marketing Manager at Google in India (July 2015 - August 2017)
- Various positions at Bain & Company, including Senior Associate and Analyst (July 2011 - June 2015)1
Education
- MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Sloan School of Management
- M.Sc.(Tech.) in Information Systems from Birla Institute of Technology and Science1
Personal Insights
- Originally from Jaipur, India, Chandrika now considers San Francisco her home
- She enjoys running, bouldering, and maintaining a morning ritual of coffee and short walks
- Chandrika values the startup community in San Francisco and finds inspiration in the driven individuals around her23
Chandrika's experience spans consulting, product management, and entrepreneurship, with a focus on technology and fintech. Her LinkedIn profile username is chandrikamaheshwari, as mentioned in the query.1
Highlights
Tl;dr - Pull is no more
Over the last couple of years, some of you have seen me post about my journey of building Pull. Earlier this year, we made the tough call to shut it down.
Anyone who has gone through this before knows that the decision to shut down your startup is one of the most difficult decisions to make, after you've poured blood, sweat and tears into making it what it is. I'll someday write a detailed post about my experience, the learnings along the way and share it if there's interest. For now, here's a brief explanation of what happened -
Despite our best efforts, adoption and business metrics were not where they needed to be to take important next steps. On the lending side in particular – funding volatility had stressed unit economics and regulatory hurdles delayed our expansion. We worked relentlessly to adapt our strategy at each turn.
I'm so proud of what we were able to achieve and the impact we had on our customers but ultimately we failed to scale. The problem, the mission of helping employees unlock the potential of their future earnings is still very close to my heart and if you're building anything in consumer lending/ employee benefits, please feel free to reach out if I can help in any way.
As I think about all the lessons I have learned along the way and the people without whom this journey would be impossible, I'm filled with gratitude. To everyone who was a part of this, who believed in us, rooted for us and supported us through what was an incredibly grueling and fulfilling journey - thank you!
I have taken the last few months to decompress, read, travel, just look around and see what's going on and what I've missed in the last couple of years being laser focused on building Pull. I'm recharged and excited for my next chapter, will share more on that soon.
Onwards 🫡
