work experiences - darshang.xyz

Hey there 👋🏼

I’m Darshan, a web3-native founder, generalist & researcher.

I’ve got 5+ years in entrepreneurship, product management and data science

Am super excited about the early-stage startup ecosystem and eager to collaborate with early-stage founders on business, product, and data insights.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the best projects & VCs in the ecosystem. Some of them include 👇🏼

Sandeep Nailwal’s Family Office

Mira - raised from Framework & BitKraft

Veera - Raised from 6thman, Folius

Topology - DeAi Market Map

Here’s a brief about my experiences 👇🏼

Founder, FutureX

🎯 Product (website)

Building a website to enable early-stage product discovery across web3 verticals
Developed an advanced scraper tool for early-stage project identification and connectivity

💡 Newsletter (link)

I run a weekly newsletter that delves into 100+ projects, subscribers include VCs from Founders Fund, Multicoin, and Coinbase
It focuses more on tech side across infra, zK, tooling
Top 3 coverages (loved by the respective teams / founders as well)

✍🏼 Tribe / Lost Realms - Lead Researcher (link)

I led the newsletter research for Tribe, serving diamond holders (4.5eth floor) and a community of 15,000+ genesis soul holders. Helping partner with projects.
It focused more on the business & strategy side across NFT, gaming, social
Top 3 coverages 👇🏼

💰 WAGMI Ventures - Venture Partner

Venture Partner at Wagmi Ventures, doing project research & driving $8mn+ investments alongside leading VCs like a16z, Dragonfly.
Top 3 threads 👇🏼

🎮 Researcher, Matchbox DAO - Infra & On-chain Games

Conducted an in-depth analysis of 60+ projects in the Urbit ecosystem - connected with 15+ projects including the Urbit foundation & leading investors in the ecosystem.
Focused on researching about launching a discovery platform for on-chain games - worked on strategy, marketing, product breakdowns for user acquisition

🧑🏼‍💼 👩🏼‍💼 Founder JobsQuest (link)

Successfully built an audience of 100k+ with $0 spent in infrastructure & marketing, partnered with 100+ companies like Byjus, Great Learning, scaling to 150k+ MAV, generating 50mn+ impressions, with an engagement rate of 11.29%
Led & managed a team of 20+, driving the growth of product by acquiring users, building communities & partnerships
Overlooked the product, including market analysis, user interviews, creating user personas & roadmaps, building websites. Set up GTM strategy spotting trends & patterns, setting goals, distribution channels, pricing & branding

👷🏼‍♂️ 🛠️ Tech, Data & Product (5+ years experience)

Product Manager (Web3 & Gaming), Loco (raised $42mn Series A):

Co-led building out India's first web3 esports fantasy game
Managed India’s biggest tournament with 260k+ concurrent viewers.
Co-led the creation of mini-games, achieving 50k+ downloads.
Drove app monetization and revamped the rewards & loyalty programs
Conducted deep-dives and research on competitor benchmarking, user interviews, market analysis & financial modeling

Data Science & Engineering

Worked as a data scientist, building recommendation engines for personalised user experiences, serving 200mn+ users.
Designed pipelines for the reco engine, enhancing operational efficiency by 60% by reducing 100+ hours man hours weekly
Led the development of a personalized top navigation model, using topic modeling to rank widgets
Worked on pattern matching algorithms and improved data quality to increase the search click rate by 7%

🔎 Stanford & MIT Research (google scholar)

Been a Researcher at Stanford working on data engineering & ML algos for historical data
Led 3 papers at MIT Pathcheck, focused on COVID-19 vaccine certificate digitisation back in 2020 (was also a part of the leadership committee of MIT Vaccine Conference)

Work Experience

💯 Important links: