I came late to mindfulness, stumbling into it through yoga retreats and meditation apps. I’ve gone deep into this world, consuming various books, courses like Nervous System Mastery, breathwork and other facilitated journeys, and meditation retreats. I have a regular meditation and yoga practice that I do an okay job at maintaining :)

Fitness was a latent love in my life. I grew up very non-athletic, and had very little confidence in my ability to move my body. Through the work of Daniel Martinez, my personal trainer in SF, I learned how to love moving my body and pushing it to new limits.

I’ve run a half marathon (an a few other races) and aspire to run a triathlon someday!

My love for salsa started in Richard Power’s social dance class at Stanford, which I discovered way too late in my undergrad career. I loved the playfulness and sensuality of the dance, never fully serious nor static. Few years later, I took a trip to Cuba to train with the Santiago All Stars, where I perfected my salsa skills (along with private lessons with a salsa instructor). I currently dance at the Salsa Salsa dance studio in Brooklyn.

Check out a video of my first ever salsa performance in Cuba!

On a chilly San Francisco morning, my best friend Preethi and I lamented the lack of representation in the media. Therefore, we decided to start a podcast to tell the stories of South Asians in a way accessible to South Asians, focusing on news and major stories happening around the world.

Enter Brewing Headlines! It’s been a big labor of love, but we produced our first season of 7 episodes, discussing topics from feminism in South Asian community to the Kashmiri conflict to South Asian representation in the media. Before our break, we grew to 1000+ streams and ~50 unique listeners. I’ve learned a lot about content production (and have so much respect for anyone who does it as their full time gig). For now, we are on a break, but maybe one day we’ll get back to it.

As someone motivated by large scale policy change, I’d always been fascinated by the intersection of politics and tech. During my time at Thumbtack, I was craving to get more deeply involved in the broader political conversation, especially after the election of Donald J Trump.

Therefore, I applied to join as the product lead for Anna Eskamani’s election campaign in Florida, hoping that our get out the vote texting efforts could help elect another woman of color to a key swing state. I worked with a team of three other tech workers with similar passions, and rallied them to send texts urging people to vote for Anna. I learned a ton about the use of tools like Hustle in political campaigns, voter files, etc. It was an eye opening experience, made sweeter by Anna’s eventual victory!

Living in San Francisco, it’s hard to escape the housing and homelessness crisis plaguing the city. It’s something that constantly crossed my mind every time I stepped into the city. YCore was the perfect marriage of learning about this issue while doing good for the community. I became a project lead at YCore, where I found the project with HRC, scoped the problem, recruited a team and led them to solve it.

Through the team’s work, we were able to completely digitize HRC’s client intake process, resulting in data that could be used by the organization to report on the housing crisis to the City of SF. I’m also pleased to report that the YCore team is still in touch and very much involved in service work, something that makes me very proud!

When I first started at Google, I was very intrigued by the idea of social entrepreneurship and marrying the concept of scalable social impact. It frustrated me that most of my colleagues equated my desire for social impact to nonprofit work. So, I sought to profile founders who had thought through different ways of scaling social impact, and thus Social Good of Silicon Valley was born with my roommate at the time, Gloria Chua.

We spent six months profiling six different founders, and I learned a lot of different things about social impact, startups, and the tradeoffs with social impact and entrepreneurship through the process. I’m proud of all the relationships I built and learnings I was able to share with others.