✦ A guide to who I am
RiaMirchandani
I make AI work for the people the tech industry forgot -- emerging markets, non-English speakers, older adults.
Founder · Filmmaker · Author
01
Formation
The thread
My work has one through-line: making AI and technology serve the people the industry usually forgets -- emerging markets, non-English speakers, older adults. At WhatsApp I brought digital payments to tens of millions of first-time users across India and Brazil; at Sarvam AI I was founding PM on voice AI for Indic languages, in contexts like healthcare and law; and at GoldMind I'm making a research-backed bet that irreplaceable expert human signal -- not just more compute -- is what makes AI genuinely good. The line runs from consumer scale to the frontier of model quality, always pointed at who gets left behind. Alongside it sits a rarer combination: I'm an award-winning filmmaker, a published author, and I've traveled to 104 countries.
02
Demonstration
What I've built
GoldMind ↗
The evals data-delivery platform I'm building -- behavioral taxonomies and post-training data sourced from 500K+ credentialed experts in high-stakes domains like medicine and law. The bet: irreplaceable expert human signal, not just more compute, is what makes models genuinely good. Google is a flagship customer.
WhatsApp Payments India ↗
End-to-end ownership of WhatsApp Payments -- scaled to 70–80M users across India and Brazil, bringing digital payments to tens of millions who had never had them, and navigating the regulatory fight to lift the user cap.
Sarvam AI Agentic Voice Platform ↗
Founding PM on voice AI for Indic languages -- agentic, multilingual systems for real-world contexts like healthcare and law, with QA tooling to evaluate and improve multimodal model outputs at scale.
Credit Karma -- Personal Loans growth
As the sole PM on Credit Karma's second-largest revenue vertical, I grew Personal Loans conversion with personalization, social proof, and trust signals -- A/B testing and ML-driven segmentation -- and found product-market fit for a new 'pre-approved' loans category.
03
Vocation
Career arc
Founder
Forward Deployed PM
Founding Product Manager
Product Lead (Level 6), Payments
Senior Product Manager, Personal Loans
Product Manager, Microsoft Teams
04
Creation
What I've made
Short Animated Film ↗
Written, directed, and produced during a sabbatical -- accepted into 7 film festivals and won awards at 3.
Illustrative Book on Bombay & New York ↗
Bombay // New York -- a published book of twenty vignettes on loving two cities at once. Written by me, illustrated by Shivantika Jain Kothari; sold out in ~3 months.
BrownTEDx Talk ↗
The first student chosen to give a TED talk at BrownTEDx -- on putting a liberal education in perspective (~65K views).
05
Experimentation
Prototypes, pivots, and paused bets
In motion
Thappar AIIn use
A tool that helps me focus by slapping me every time I drift off-task. Vibe-coded for my own ADHD brain -- now a handful of ADHD friends use it too.
WhatsApp Roasts ↗Prototype
Send over your chat history and get back a roast of every participant based on the conversation. Warning: it can be pretty mean and might make you cry.
Set down for now
Not everything became a company or a launch. These are the ones I tried and set down -- kept here because the lessons are the point.
VocationPivoted
A personalized AI career companion for mid-career professionals -- it collected and synthesized feedback from your network to surface your strengths and growth areas, then matched them against your aspirations to recommend upskilling and roles you'd be well suited for.
Why I moved on: when startups organically pulled the feedback engine toward lower-friction performance management, I followed the demand and pivoted it into B2B.
Watch demo ↗Vocation 2.0 (B2B)Paused
The pivot -- performance-management tools that help good managers scale, starting with a voice-based peer-review tool that synthesized feedback against a role's core competencies. One startup piloted it.
What I still believe: most people aren't cut out to manage -- it's better to give good managers AI superpowers to scale their impact than to hire bad ones.
InternalizePaused
A no-code platform for building internal tools usable by both humans and AI agents. Non-technical employees prompted it to generate custom tools; an adversarial loop tested each tool against SOTA agents and auto-refined the UI until it passed agent-usability tests -- optimizing for a hybrid human-agent workforce.
Watch demo ↗ProddyPaused
A product-thinking prototype for turning early product instincts into sharper working specs -- clarifying the user, problem, promise, edge cases, and next actions before a team over-invests in the wrong build.
Watch demo ↗Between the BaysDormant
A podcast interviewing people across disciplines about why they moved to (or from) the US -- the challenges, the tradeoffs, what they gained and what they gave up.
06
Reputation
What others see
“Her ability to make execution easy by organizing ownership is extremely rare.”-- Manager, WhatsApp
07
Publication
Out in the world
Book · sold out in ~3 months
Bombay // New York: A Tangled Tale of Two Cities
Twenty whimsical vignettes drawing parallels between daily life in the two cities -- written by me, illustrated by Shivantika Jain Kothari.
“The creators ingeniously place these similarities side by side, making a big world feel much smaller.”-- Anuvab Pal, comedian & screenwriter
Watch
08
Avocation
Beyond work
I'm a certified walking tour guide in San Francisco, New York City, and Mumbai; a filmmaker and published author; and I've traveled to 104 countries -- many during a career sabbatical. I teach product management at Product School, run annual AI bootcamps at my former all-girls high school, and speak at universities and conferences worldwide. I'm also a connector and community organizer -- among other things, I host the SF Singles' Soirée and bring people together across the tech community.
Also into
Walking tours · Sandwich rankings · Documentary film · Illustration · Travel · 104 countries · Teaching · Migration & diaspora · South Asian stories · Bombay & New York
09
Education
Where I studied
Brown University, B.A. Computer Science & B.A. Human Migration Studies, 2011–2015; Rhode Island School of Design, independent coursework in Industrial Design & Interaction Design; University of Washington Certificate in Human Centered Design & Engineering, 2018
10
Exploration
Currently curious
- 01The impact of AI on education
- 02A documentary about the parents of queer South Asians -- capturing their emotions and reactions across the full spectrum
- 03Building a true liberal arts university in India (ETA: 2035)
11
Inspiration
Inputs and taste
- 01
Haircuts in foreign lands
Countries are not Pokemon, but I still want to catch them all. I am at 104 and counting, and usually get a haircut in any country where I spend more than 48 hours.
- 02
Daily swims
I have done 70 slow minutes of breaststroke every day for 13 years. It is less performance than underwater solitude: a repeatable way to disconnect and let thoughts surface.
- 03
Songs that actually rhyme (especially Marc Cohn's)
I miss songs that tell stories and rhyme in meter. Marc Cohn is one of my top brain masseurs; his lyrics make narrative feel musical instead of merely confessional.
- 04
Weakness of strength theory
I carry this management idea around: every strength has a corresponding weakness. Feedback is useful, but sanding off a flaw too aggressively can erase the gift attached to it.
12
Conversation
Ask my work
An AI trained on Ria's work and writing -- here to help you get to know them. Ask anything. Or just send Ria an email at riamirch@gmail.com.