Prastut Kumar

Experience

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  BetterButter

  Jun 2015 - Jul 2015

  Product Design Intern

  My responsibilities included designing the current homepage of the website, a number of inner pages, as well as key launch marketing collaterals for social media and email distribution. The user experience (UX) was improved also.The process of design started first with creating wireframes in photoshop which after approval were HTML-ised. The Bootstrap framework was used to make the designs responsive.

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  Mutiny Labs

  Dec 2015 - Mar 2016

  Full Stack Developer Intern

  ● Created functionality for the current user interface for B2B, B2C clients. ● Closed Parse API by assigning ACL. ● Moved code server side using Express to increase SEO.● Technical Lead for new interns. ● Assisted in managing the code-base and delegating issues on Github.Technical Stack: Parse, Jekyll, Express.

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  Stanford University

  Jan 2016 - Mar 2016

  Member, Stanford Crowd Research Collective

  Member of the Stanford HCI Crowd Research Collective, a worldwide group of researchers led by Michael Bernstein in Stanford CS. Work Details:● Mentor: Snehil Gaikwad● Focused on issues concerning open governance in crowdsourcing.● Identified Holacracy as a viable structure to infuse the idea of open governance in Daemo.● Presented preliminary research to improve reputation of workers through the use of Glicko rating.Crowd Research initiative: crowdresearch.stanford.edu Show less

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  Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University

  Apr 2016 - Aug 2016

  Google Summer of Code Student

  ● Selected for Teem, a P2P Value Collaboration Project. ● Worked with research team's at UCM & Harvard.● Optimized UX for matchmaking newcomers with communities appealing to them.● Developed an automatic keyphrase extraction system to auto-tag communities.● The keyphrase extraction system was connected with the new on-boarding experience.

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  Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

  Jun 2017 - Aug 2017

  Data Visualization Research Intern

  Worked on Bubble, a data visualization research project.● Led product strategy and execution of deliverables.● Conducted contextual inquiries & created affinity maps to analyze user needs & behaviour. ● Designed the interactive consumable framework experience with fellow graduate students.● Developed systems that incorporate the framework: messenger bot, web & mobile app.● Project Mentor: Professor Ventakesh Rajamanickam in IDC, IIT Bombay.

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  Paytm

  Dec 2017 - Feb 2018

  Product Design Intern

  Mainly worked on 2 projects:Help Center Revamp on Paytm:● Led UX to simplify help across all 20 (product+transactional) verticals. ● Researched on user's intent for help by analysing data. Used data to influence design. ● Worked with business analysts & customer support team to account for their experiences. ● ⬇️ cognitive load by grouping verticals & reducing the no. of steps in order to get help. ● Met business goals of reducing no. of help tickets/calls by humanising system design. Revamping CX of onboarding users to Paytm's ecosystem:● Heuristic analysis of Login, Logout, Password (change, forgot), Signup etc. ● Data validated presumptions of above analysis. ● Ongoing work is to simplify/revamp these experiences. Show less

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  EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)

  Feb 2018 - May 2018

  Research Intern

  ● Worked inside CHILI Lab on Project FROG.● Led the design process of the FROG platform. Crafted the new design system for the same. ● Accounted for complex data communication and UI interaction requirements by developing case studies, low fidelity to high fidelity prototypes. ● Proposed the technical framework in order to integrate the new design system.+ Ate a lot of good food exploring around Switzerland, France & Madrid

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  Centify Technologies

  May 2018 - Sept 2018

  Co-Founder

  Audience Engagement tools which enable digital media platforms to integrate social reactions with video or textual content.Selected in YC Startup School '18. Shelved this project as acquiring distribution became exponentially hard as we iterated over initial customer feedback. Should have thought about it before building 😅.

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  GoodEd Technologies

  Sept 2018 - Feb 2019

  Head of Product

  Reducing the cost of education to ₹1 a day for every student in the country. At a valuation of $8 million, GoodEd is the biggest player in the Indian medical ed-tech industry. ● Was instrumental in scaling GoodEd's flagship product: NEETPrep. Utility player from finding early product-market fit, to engineering to design. Built the tech team from scratch. ● Integrated Amplitude SDK's and defined data taxonomy to get insights about user behaviour. ● Increased overall retention by working on core product themes: Social, Doubts, Marketing. Led to an increase in D1 retention from 9% to 38%, DAU 2k to 4.5k (+125%) and MAU from 13k users to 28k users (+115%) across all users (free/paid). Show less

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  The Vantage Project

  Mar 2019 - Oct 2020

  Partner

  When the world is moving towards idea meritocracy then the only thing that matters is having vantage. Vantage is nothing without execution hence building the operating principles of the 21'st century organization. Read more here: https://www.thevantageproject.com/playbook/Always looking for A Players. Join us :)

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  BUIDL Labs

  Jul 2019 - Dec 2020

  Partner

  Launched web3 dev shop. Scaled it from 0 to $500k total revenue. Built projects in Zcash, Polkadot, Livepeer, Tezos, Filecoin, Celo, ecosystems.

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  Find Signal Studio

  Jan 2021 - now

  Founder

  Built an angel investment firm around sweat equity model (https://www.sweatequity.vc/) Thesis: ● Crypto opens up very large markets as soon as a new tech efficiency drops. ● Saw potential in creating and scaling small sass businesses that can churn out free cashflow ($10k MRR - $100k MRR) < 1 year. ● Incubated 2 ventures and scaled the portfolio to $100k AUM from $20k investment.