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I'm a product leader who still makes things, not just someone who leads people who…
Articles by Varun
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The Dawn of the Builders’ Age
The Dawn of the Builders’ Age
If you’re a gamer like me, the title may sound like the next installation of Civilization or Age of Empires. In a way…
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Why Agentic AI Will Redefine How We Work
Why Agentic AI Will Redefine How We Work
There’s a revolution unfolding beneath the buzzwords and demos — one that fundamentally rewires how we get things done.…
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The AI Shift Not Everyone is Talking About
The AI Shift Not Everyone is Talking About
Many of us are thinking of AI as a tool—something to speed up a process, tidy up operations, maybe automate things. But…
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Varun Das shared thisThe security headlines over the last 48 hours are a stark reminder that digital hygiene is a continuous practice and it goes far beyond the workplace. 'Black October' shows us how quickly the threat landscape shifts; methodical, hands-on review of both your personal and professional digital security posture becomes essential. Here is a simple baseline checklist you should run this weekend. • Targeted Dependency Review: Run comprehensive CVE and OSV scans across your active projects and codebases to identify unpatched vulnerabilities and bring everything up to secure baseline levels. • Perimeter Hardening: Verify and upgrade authentication layers everywhere. Ensure strict hardware or app-based 2FA is active across your personal and professional accounts, especially all brokerages, banking platforms, and high-value financial portals. • Access Review: Clear out stale API keys, old tokens, and tighten permission scopes across your development tools,cloud environments, and personal applications. Make Security a habit of continuous iteration and calm execution. We're all going to need it. So spend this weekend securing your digital footprint. I'd love to know what y'all are doing. #digital #security
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Varun Das reposted thisVarun Das reposted thisToday, with over 100 industry partners, we introduced the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, bringing together OpenShell and Sentry. Artificial intelligence is extraordinary technology that will advance discovery, productivity, security, health, and prosperity for generations to come. But its full promise can only be realized when people have confidence that AI is being built to be safe and deployed with wisdom and responsibility. NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform Reference Design combines NVIDIA OpenShell and NVIDIA Sentry. OpenShell is an open-source secure runtime that gives AI agents clear, enforceable boundaries. It traces their actions and enforces policy as they work. NVIDIA Sentry delivers added layer of security with hardware-based enforcement on NVIDIA BlueField, continuously monitoring agent activity through a trusted telemetry and detection pipeline and enabling millisecond-scale containment and quarantine. This is bigger than a single product. It's the beginning of an open ecosystem to build the trust layer for safe agent systems. Together, we are building the foundation of the AI economy. Trust and innovation are not in conflict. Safety is how trust is earned. We must build not only the most capable AI, but the most trusted AI, so that this extraordinary technology can realize its enormous promise for the world. https://nvda.ws/4hOkDx7
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Varun Das shared thisEvery company is building with AI to sell better. In the not so far future, your customer may not visit your website at all. Their AI will. It won't see banners. It will simply find the best deal and pay. Are you building for that future ? Thank you ET BrandEquity and Meta for a genuinely open conversation. And to my colleagues around the table - leaders from travel, edtech, insurance, fintech and diagnostics. Aditi Mathur & Krystyna Devina Lason thank you for moderating the session brilliantly.Varun Das shared this#BrandConnectInitiative It was a privilege to host ETBrandEquity's closed-door roundtable along with WhatsApp team on "Maximizing Value from Every Customer Interaction – From Engagement to Transaction." The discussion brought together 20 industry leaders from travel, insurance, EdTech, and healthcare to explore how AI, conversational experiences, and embedded payments are transforming the way businesses engage with customers. Some key takeaways from the discussion: * Conversation is the funnel. When discovery, engagement, and payment happen in a single thread, each step feeds the next. It's not about payments technology, it's about holding attention in a world where attention decays by the second. * Friction hides in plain sight. A redirect. A third-party page. One extra OTP. Each one is a silent drop-off. The industry is moving toward passive authentication and pre-authorised flows — payments should be felt, not seen. * The payer isn't always the user. If your journey isn't designed for the decision-maker, you're optimising the wrong flow. * Too many offers = no conversion. Checkout offers cause decision fatigue. They push users to open a new tab and compare elsewhere. The best offer is the one that's personalised, minimal, and auto-applied. What's exciting is that these aren't future problems. The tools exist today. The question is who moves first. Grateful to the leaders who shared so openly. These conversations are where the real work gets shaped. Aditi Mathur | Krystyna Devina Lason | Aseem Baveja | Ritika PrakashSaurabh Srivastava | Shailendra Gupta | Naveen Kumar Pareek | Yajur Mahendru | Varun Das | Unique Kumar | Siddhartha Poit | Arvind Kumar | Vivek Bandhu | Deepak Gupta | Nitin Malhotra | Gaurav Parashar | Charneeta Kaur | Anshumaan Prasad | Deepak Sachan | Vishal Varma | Milind Pathak | #ETBrandEquity #WhatsApp #CustomerExperience #AI #ConversationalCommerce #DigitalTransformation #Leadership #Roundtable
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Varun Das shared thisField teams, delivery riders and store staff do not come with resumes. The entire applicant tracking stack was built to read resumes, so most players are still optimising and digitising old hiring flows that don't seem relevant to this segment of the workforce. What Sudev's team is doing is starting from the candidate instead. These are people who own a phone, speak in a language other than English and are more fluent in a conversation than filling a form or resume. His product meets them there, using voice to score intent and likelihood they will join from how they actually talk. Picking the right channel reads as a minor design choice. In this market it decides whether the right candidate gets selected. His conversion numbers say it all.Varun Das shared thisFour days. 2,130 people applied for field officer roles across small towns in Bihar, UP, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Across 86 locations. A microfinance lender went live with us on Thursday. This is where they stood on Sunday morning. I want to be precise about what that number means, because volume by itself is easy and mostly worthless. Any recruiter can generate applications. What matters is what happened underneath it. 425 of those candidates had a full structured conversation with Aivi, our AI recruiter. Not a form. An actual conversation, in Hindi, Gujrati or English at ten at night, from towns where no recruiter was ever going to travel and no job board was ever going to reach. 181 of them came out as high fit. The average fitment score across the screened pool was 72%. Four days of work. No branch walk-ins, no local agent commissions, no recruiter travel. The reason the conversations matter more than the applications is what gets scored inside them. Not keywords on a resume, because most of these candidates do not have one. Three things a microfinance hiring manager actually cares about. Whether the person genuinely intends to do the field work, including the travel and the collection reality of it. Whether they fit on language, local familiarity, vehicle access and prior field exposure. And joining predictability, which is our read on whether this person turns up on day one and is still there in month two. Anyone who has hired collection or field staff at scale knows the real cost never sat in sourcing. It sits in the offer that never joins and the joiner who disappears in three weeks. That is still being managed manually across most of this industry, branch by branch, on spreadsheets and phone calls, in exactly the districts where lenders are expanding hardest. The NBFCs and MFIs that win tier 3 and tier 4 India over the next eighteen months will not be the ones with the largest recruitment teams. They will be the ones whose hiring keeps pace with their branch rollout. This lender is four days in, across 86 locations. Most of the industry has not started. If you run frontline hiring for a lender and your field officer pipeline still depends on people walking into a branch, message me. I will show you exactly what four days across 86 locations looks like.
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Varun Das shared this"There's something incredibly energizing about a room full of people asking thoughtful questions" - that's really it. Radhika Kapur it couldn't be said better !Varun Das shared thisThere’s something incredibly energizing about a room full of people asking thoughtful questions. A huge thank you to Swati Awasthi, Women in Product India and Shalini Dayanidhi, M Venture Partners (MVP) for bringing together such an engaged community, and to my fellow panelists Gaganpreet Luthra, Muskan Gupta, Hina Priyadarshini for showing up with honesty, candour, and a genuine willingness to share the lessons behind the journey—not just the highlights. The conversations before, during, and after the panel reminded me that while every founder's path is different, the willingness to openly share our experiences—and learn from one another—is one of the greatest strengths of any community. I left inspired, grateful, and reminded why building is never a solo journey. #Startups #VentureCapital #AI #Entrepreneurship #Founders
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Varun Das shared thisI have seen Radhika Kapur operate in large organizations and I have also seen her build her own. Those reward completely different things. One rewards patience with scale and the complexity that comes with it. The other gives you no cover, just your own judgment. She is good at both, something I have not seen often. Her path runs across continents. Newscorp in Australia, Microsoft in the US, Apple in India. All very different places with very different ideas of what success looks like. Then she walked away from the safety of all of it to build her own company, exited profitably and is back at it again. What I trust most is how she thinks when the picture is incomplete, which for a founder is almost always. She can weigh the market, the customer and the economics at the same time and still commit to a direction. You only get that from making real calls that could have gone badly. She is direct and genuinely generous. Bring her a rough idea and you walk away with a better one. That mix of sharp business sense and genuine warmth is rare. She is building again, in AI. I cannot tell you the future, though I'm betting on her success. What I can tell you is that she has done the hard version once already and chosen to go back in. That is not a small thing. She is speaking at this gathering in Bengaluru organised by Women in Product India and M Venture Partners (MVP) on the operator to founder leap. If that is a road you are on or thinking about, see if you can make time to attend.Varun Das shared thisFrom Operator to Founder: The Venture Leap A curated gathering by Women in Product India × M Venture Partners (MVP) 📍 Bengaluru | Limited seats A high-signal evening bringing together women founders, senior operators, and VCs for candid conversations on building and backing the next generation of startups. We'll dive into: • Making the leap from operator to founder • The realities of fundraising and venture building • What VCs really look for in early-stage founders • Emerging startup opportunities in overlooked categories The Speaker line-up can't be any more fantastic: Radhika Kapur - Exited founder, Third Culture Coffee; Ex-Head of Product, Apple and currently building an AI venture in stealth. Hina Priyadarshini - Founder, House Of Zelena Muskan Gupta - VC, Blume Ventures Moderated by Shalini Dayanidhi - VC, M Venture Partners (MVP) If you're a founder, aspiring founder, senior product/engineering leader, or VC, we'd love to have you in the room. 🎟️ Seats are limited, so sign up soon! 🔗 Apply here: https://luma.com/jw76zng1 Know someone who would benefit from being in this room? Please share it with them. 🙌 Thankful to our partners at Aspire and BHIVE Workspace for doing this alongside us. Swati Awasthi | Neha Nadiger | Shriya Agarwal | Arunima | Shraavani Tople | Sheena Bhalla | Nithya Subramaniam | Trishita Bhattacharjee | Tanu shree
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Varun Das reposted thisWe are hiring product managers to build the agentic layer of one of India's largest consumer apps. https://lnkd.in/gR5KWP4f #productmanager #product #hiring #jobs #ai #airtel #technology
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Varun Das reposted thisVarun Das reposted thisThe skill that made software engineers the most valuable hires in the world just became worthless. What's left is a completely different job. Thousands of years ago, scribes were the highest-paid people in every king's court. They were the only ones who could read or write, understood the laws, wrote the books. Then the printing press showed up, and the whole profession disappeared in a generation. The same thing is happening to software engineers right now. For the last twenty years, being a great engineer meant you could take a spec from a product manager and turn it into working code. You knew the frameworks, the edge cases, the system. That skill used to take years to build. It's what made software engineers some of the highest-paid people in the world. Now my mom can build a website - the same kind of website someone trained three years to build. But just like with scribes, the real job was never reading or writing. The real job was solving a problem someone had. The engineers worth hiring today are the ones who understand that. They have a crystal clear vision of what the product should feel like, down to the smallest detail. And the instinct for when a solution is mediocre versus great is almost automatic. Instead of just coding, the entire job is now knowing what great looks like before anyone else does. Most engineers are going to have to relearn what they do for a living. And the ones who figure this out first will be the only ones worth hiring in the next 2 years. — Written with Wispr Flow
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Varun Das reposted thisVarun Das reposted thisThe real culture of an organisation reveals itself in the five seconds after someone says something uncomfortable. From leadership behaviour to silent compliance, Varun Das, Harry Chawla, Maneet Sehgal, Sushant Bhushan, Atul Kashyap, Pankaj Tomar and Fr. Nelson D'Silva, SJ explore how organisations accidentally manufacture fear while claiming to encourage courage. - Saying something unpopular is easy in theory. Living through the consequences is where courage actually begins - The fastest way to kill courage in a room is to publicly shut down one uncomfortable idea - Smart employees stop thinking independently when the room learns the leadership only rewards agreement - Teams study leadership behaviour far more closely than leadership speeches - A code of conduct without lived behaviour quickly becomes office stationery - Compliance cultures become real only when leaders visibly hold themselves accountable first Every organisation eventually trains people on one thing very clearly: whether honesty is safe here or not. For those building teams where truth can travel upward: https://lnkd.in/dDKGRgW6 XLRI Jamshedpur XLRI Delhi-NCR CEO Lounge Deepak Yadav Hari Govind Nair Kanagaraj Ayyalusamy Rajni Ranjan Singh #LeadershipThinking #OrganisationalCulture #WorkplaceDynamics #Leadership #DecisionMaking #XploreXLRI
Varun Das commented on a post
3mo
Here's something you can try when you brainstorm your problem or the thought process. You can ask your AI to create HTML artifacts that will map out your thinking and the note and explain the concept very simply. I find it better than image generation.
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Varun Das liked thisEarlier this year, I left Amazon after eleven years. Somewhere along the way, I also left Bangalore and moved back to Jamshedpur. I've learnt that you can do one of these things quietly, but doing both in the same year makes people worried. Friends in Bangalore asked me if everything was fine. Relatives in Jamshedpur asked my parents if everything was fine. Old friends asked each other. The uncle across the road didn't ask anyone. He simply started greeting me with a little extra warmth, the kind usually reserved for people going through something. Then the questions got more specific. Is it a sabbatical? Is it health? Did something happen at work? Are you starting something? One aunty told me Jamshedpur is a very good city to retire in, which was kind of her, if slightly premature. The real answer was boring. In fifteen years of working, I had never taken a proper break. Eleven years at one place go by in quarters, sale events and review meetings, and somewhere in between you grow up. I was lucky to work with people who handed me problems bigger than my experience and then trusted me to figure them out. To all of them, thank you. You know who you are, and I'm not going to tag forty people. The break has been busy in its own way. I wrote two books. One is built from the field stories I keep telling here, and the other is a novel that had been sitting in a business school folder for fifteen years. I've also been running leadership sessions, which is a humbling way to find out how much of what you learnt you can actually explain. Last week, the uncle across the road saw me carrying a box of my books into the house. He asked what they were, and I told him I'd written them. He looked at the box, looked at me, patted my shoulder and said, "Beta, it's okay. Job will come." I'll update uncle, and all of you, on what's next very soon.
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Varun Das liked thisVarun Das liked thisI LOVE IT WHEN A PLAN COMES TOGETHER....!!! ❤️👊🏾 a wonderful story 🙏🏾 just finished a run of 12 events across Europe, Australia and America, with more than 100,000 entrepreneurs, and along the way, we met some incredible individuals - one of those people was a young man called Lumore! What an incredible young man and a wonderful cause - I could not be any happier for him. Having spoken to him since, he's now devoting his life to helping others and paying it forward. Thank you to my friend Tony Robbins for his generous offer and to Kayla Itsines for putting Lumore on my radar!
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Varun Das liked thisVarun Das liked thisAfter speaking with a good number of frontline hiring leaders, I started noticing a pattern. Different companies. Different locations. Different hiring targets.But the problems sounded surprisingly similar. “We’re not reaching the candidates we want.” "We need people from Tier II and III towns we are unable to reach them" “candidates drop off during the application.” "Footfall in Interviews is very low" “My team spends hours screening and following up.” “Candidates don’t know what’s happening next.” “They accept the offer, but don’t show up.” “And when hiring volume increases, everything becomes chaotic.” These aren’t just recruitment problems. They’re everyday problems that hiring teams are dealing with while trying to fill hundreds or thousands of frontline roles. These are problems which impact revenues and slows business growth. That’s where I believe AI, agentic hiring and inference Models can make a real difference. Instead of asking candidates to adapt to complicated hiring processes, we can bring hiring into the conversations they’re already comfortable with : WhatsApp, voice and regional languages. Instead of HR teams manually screening every application, AI agents can screen, engage, follow up and keep candidates moving, Inference models can predict outcomes and increase confidence in frontline hiring. And instead of losing candidates along the way, we can stay connected with them right up to Day 1 and beyond. For me, this isn’t about adding another “AI tool” to recruitment. It’s about making frontline hiring simpler for candidates and less exhausting for hiring teams. That’s one of the big problem we’re trying to solve at Aiviue. #FrontlineHiring #AgenticHiring #Recruitment #Hiring #AIinHR #TalentAcquisition
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Varun Das liked thisVarun Das liked thisBehind every successful product are decisions that shape its journey - some that work, some that teach, and some that stay with you. 🎯 DevFest New Delhi 2026 featured Varun Das, EVP & Chief Product Officer at Airtel, alongside Dr. Tanya Singh, representing the entrepreneurship perspective, for “Leader Cast #2: Product Decisions That Hurt, Helped and Haunted Us.” A candid conversation exploring the complexities of product leadership, the challenges of making high-stakes decisions, and the lessons that emerge when real-world outcomes don't always match expectations. From balancing user needs and business goals to learning from setbacks and navigating uncertainty, the session highlighted how thoughtful decision-making and the ability to learn from experience are essential to building better products. 🚀 Thank you, Varun Das and Dr.Tanya Singh, for sharing your perspectives and being a part of DevFest New Delhi 2026! Commudle #DevFestNewDelhi #DevFest2026 #GDGNewDelhi #ProductManagement #ProductLeadership #Entrepreneurship #TechCommunity
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Varun Das liked thisVarun Das liked thisWent to Google to learn about tech. Came back thinking about a lot more than just tech. 🚀 On 18 October, I attended DevFest New Delhi 2026 – Leadership Day at the Google Office in Gurugram. As an AI & ML student and founder of DaretoDegree, I was excited to hear from people who are actually building products and companies, and learn about what happens beyond writing code. A few things that caught my attention during the sessions: 💡 Building a product is one thing. Figuring out how to grow it and make it sustainable is another. 🤖 AI isn’t just about building smarter models. It’s also about rethinking how we approach problems, including education. 📈 Building a company from scratch takes more than a good idea. It takes persistence, smart decisions, and the ability to work with limited resources. ⚙️ And when it comes to scaling technology, writing code is only one piece of the puzzle. One thought I took away from the day: It’s easy to get caught up in the technology. But are we actually solving a problem that people care about? That’s something I want to keep in mind as I continue exploring AI, agentic AI, and building DaretoDegree. A big thank you to GDG New Delhi for organising the event. Also, thank you to Varun Das , Dr.Tanya S. Arpan GargArpan Garg, Gaurav Rawal , and all the speakers and organisers for sharing their experiences and making the day worthwhile. 🙌 One question for fellow builders: When starting a new product, what do you focus on first , the technology, the problem, or the people you’re building it for? #DevFestNewDelhi #AI #Entrepreneurship #ProductDevelopment #Google
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Varun Das liked thisVarun Das liked thisWelcome to the DevFest New Delhi 2026: Leadership Day edition 👑 On 18th October, we held our Leadership Day at Google Office, Gurgaon What made this day special ❓ In my opinion, this was the most important and impactful day that I have been a part of. We had speakers with years of experience and knowledge all together in one room. Speakers that have build up startups and leading great companies. For someone like me who aspires to be leader, this was indeed an experience to be a part of 🥹 Thank you to all our speakers: Bipin Preet Singh , Varun Das , Dr.Tanya S. , Animesh Srivastava , Ankit Maheshwari, Aman Gupta, Vivek Agarwal, Tanuj Attri, Ashish Kumar Verma, Anupam Singh, Saurabh Singh , Pawan Kumar, Loveleen Kaur and Pranav Kumar Also super grateful for Gitesh Sethi Shipra Porwal Aryan Jangra and Harshita Dargan for being a great company in the event ✨ With this we end the 3 day spam for the event, now will post a special post about my journey in GDG New Delhi coming tuesday #DevFest2026 #DevFestNewDelhi #GDGNewDelhi #GDGCloudNewDelhi #LeadershipDay #Founders #CEOs #TechEvents
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