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Soumya Mohan
Startup founder (CEO Poised) & Product leader (Glassdoor, Microsoft, Opower) | Stanford, IIT
Soumya Mohan is a highly experienced product leader and VC-backed startup founder with over 14 years of experience.
Specializes in B2B SaaS products, particularly in technically complex products utilizing AI/ML & data insights, with a background that includes top-down enterprise sales and product-led go-to-market strategies.
Started career as a software engineer and has built 0-1 products at different company stages, scaling startups from inception to launching new product lines at established scale-up companies.
Experienced in leading product managers and cross-functional teams, especially in the capacity of a startup founder.
Known for an ownership mindset, extracting critical customer insights, creating clarity from ambiguity, fostering empathetic collaboration across functions, and possessing a strong interest in continuous learning.
Educationally holds a Master of Science (MS) in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. Also completed Growth Series at Reforge, Founder Fellowship at On Deck, and CBSE - 12th in Science at Delhi Public School - R. K. Puram.
Previously served in leadership roles such as Co-Founder & CEO, Head of Product at Poised, Lead Product Manager - Head of Product, Employer Branding at Glassdoor, Senior Product Manager at Glassdoor, Senior Product Manager - Machine Learning & Business Intelligence at Opower, Product Manager at Opower, Program Manager at Windows Phone - Microsoft, Software Engineer at SNRLabs (acquired by Seven Networks), Software Engineer at Microsoft, Research Intern at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, and Software Engineer Internship at SNRLabs.
Highlights
Poised has been acquired by Deepgram, a leading AI speech platform! I am excited to see how Deepgram continues to evolve the service and to have our engineering team join forces.
The journey of founding & leading Poised has been incredibly fun and fulfilling. We set out with a meaningful mission: helping professionals improve their spoken communication in meetings through AI-based personalized coaching (some years before AI started its hype journey). While we didn’t scale to the extent we initially aspired to, we impacted almost 50k professionals who used Poised over time. Some key lessons that limited us were that significant improvement in spoken communication requires significant effort and motivation & businesses generally want to purchase more holistic learning platforms for their employees.
I am deeply grateful to my co-founders, our talented team that chose to join us and shape Poised over the years, incredibly supportive investors, and the tens of thousands of users who trusted and helped us build this product.
As for me, I am evaluating what my next play will be. Open to considering impactful product leadership opportunities.
Talking to many revenue leaders who use Poised recently and heard the below pains.
If my top reps follow a simple process to crush 150%+ quota, what's stopping others? Wish I could be on all client calls & help my team win more faster.
Damn! I can't review all 100s of 30-minute calls to identify why we are at 77% quota. What calls do I even look at? Having spent 1000s of $s on call recorders & revenue acceleration tools, isn't it insane to feel so helpless?
Hitting quota is so stressful with a new team. 3 months of ramp-up is impossibly long! How can I decrease it to 45 days without compromising quality?
If these resonate with you, ping me directly or comment here. Would love to share more on how we can solve this and more learnings.
