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Payoshni Saraf
Director at Teach For India
Professional Background
Payoshni Saraf is a seasoned professional with more than 15 years of extensive experience in both the Retail and Development sectors. A dedicated listener and learner, Payoshni has honed her skills in strategic leadership, marketing, and community building. Currently, she serves as the Director at Teach For India, where she spearheads initiatives designed to enhance the collective impact of a robust alumni network that exceeds 3,400 members. Her leadership is pivotal in driving changes toward fostering excellence in education for children throughout India, making significant strides in the education sector.
Prior to her current role, Payoshni held various influential positions within Teach For India, including Director of Alumni Impact, where she worked closely with alumni to expand their influence and engagement within the community. Her experience in the education sector is complemented by her previous roles in the retail industry, further diversifying her expertise.
Career Highlights
Payoshni began her career in the retail sector, starting as a Visual Merchandiser at Shoppers Stop, where she mastered the art of merchandising and retail strategy. She then progressed to Spencer's Retail Limited as a Marketing Manager, where she played a key role in conceptualizing marketing campaigns that resonated with customers.
Before joining Teach For India, she excelled in various capacities at Reliance Retail, eventually advancing to Senior Manager of Trade Planning & Strategy, a role that underscored her proficiency in operational excellence and strategic marketing. Her deep understanding of trade planning was further enriched during her time as a Trade Planner and Marketing Strategist.
In addition to her retail accomplishments, Payoshni’s commitment to social impact is evident through her tenure at Pratham Books, where she first served as Manager of Outreach - Digital Initiatives, and later as Lead for Fundraising and Donor Relations. In these roles, she effectively leveraged digital platforms to expand outreach and engagement, enhancing the organization’s mission of promoting literacy and education in India.
Her journey came full circle when she initially joined Teach For India as a Fellow from 2012 to 2014, immersing herself in grassroots educational initiatives that ignited her passion for transformative learning experiences.
Education and Achievements
Payoshni’s educational journey equipped her with the foundational skills necessary to thrive in her professional endeavors. She pursued her Post Graduate Diploma in Advertising & Communication Management from the prestigious Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies. This academic background in communication management has undeniably contributed to her capacity to lead transformative initiatives and effectively communicate visions that inspire action.
Her professional trajectory highlights her versatility and eagerness to learn and adapt in dynamic environments. Over the years, she has developed exceptional skills in stakeholder engagement, strategic communication, and fundraising, allowing her to make meaningful contributions to the organizations she has served.
Lifelong Commitment to Education and Development
Payoshni's current focus at Teach For India aligns perfectly with her values and aspirations. The organization aims to empower and educate underprivileged children by providing access to quality education. Under her leadership, the alumni network is mobilized to foster change, amplifying collective efforts to redefine educational excellence in India. With her unique blend of skills from the corporate and social sectors, she profiles an effective leader who understands the intersection between education and community empowerment.
Personal Philosophy
Embodying a belief in the strength of collective action, Payoshni emphasizes the importance of community in driving educational reform. Her motto reflects her passion for learning as well as her commitment to empowering those around her. Throughout her career, she has shown that by working together, individuals can achieve extraordinary outcomes. This ethos not only defines her professional work but also resonates with the core mission of Teach For India, which champions collaboration in its pursuit of educational equity. Her ability to connect with others, motivate them, and foster a sense of shared purpose sets her apart as a leader in her field.
Overall, Payoshni Saraf’s diverse experience, combined with her dedication to educational reform and community building, positions her as a significant contributor to the social fabric of India. Her journey reflects a profound commitment to making a lasting impact and reaffirms the transformative power of education.
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Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
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- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
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Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.