About Navdeep Singh

Navdeep Singh leads Product Management for one of the largest affiliate programs in the world, along with several other product tracks in Personalization, AdTech, and MarTech space. He has also published 10+ academic journal papers on the industry applications of the emerging technologies like Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence, and has been working on AI Products long before AI had its ChatGPT moment and became a mainstream topic of interest.

Hi, there! Thank you for visiting my author profile page, and for your interest in learning more about me.

My career path has been exciting to say the least. From being the founder of an EdTech startup to Product/Program Managing the software aspect of large-scale industrial construction projects at some of the extremely remote and tribal locations, and then eventually transitioning to a Tech Product Management role in Silicon Valley – one could say, I have seen a lot!

It goes without saying, every professional experience that I have had to date has been instrumental in shaping my perspective as an individual and as a tech enthusiast, thereby playing a huge role in the creation of NerdCuriosity.com.

Consolidating 30+ years of journey on a single page is no easy feat, but I will do my best to tell you about the most pivotal moments of my journey in the following sections.

Let’s Start with the Education

I went to Punjab Technical University in India to pursue Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering, and did my MBA from the Pennsylvania State University in the United States. 

Growing up, I was surrounded by a ton of engineers – in other words: family 🙂 , so deciding to pursue engineering for undergrad was an easy decision for me. Given my surroundings, I grew interest in mechanical engineering and industrial complexes from an early age, and engineering appeared to be the perfect career track given my interests at that time.

Going into engineering school, I knew little about the sharp turn my interests and career journey would take – more on that later :). But, post engineering school, after working for a few years, I wanted to transition to a mainstream tech role and an MBA seemed like the easiest route to make that transition. That is what led me to the Pennsylvania State University in United States, where I pursued MBA with three concentrations – Marketing, Finance and Supply Chain Management. 

Why three concentrations? Well, part of it was my genuine interest in learning as much as I could during the two years of MBA, and part of it can be attributed to my lack of clarity on the exact area that I wanted to build my expertise in. To understand this lack of clarity, you will first need to learn about my career journey up until this point, which is a great transition into our next section – my professional journey!

Double Clicking on My Professional Experience

In real sense, my professional journey began in 2008 with IndiaText.net, which was an EdTech platform that I created while in engineering school. It was this platform that, despite my enrollment in a full time mechanical engineering program at that time, made me a better full-stack developer than mechanical engineer. It was also this experience of creating, growing and eventually sunsetting IndiaText.net that laid early foundations for a career in Product Management for me. 

I can see how that is a lot to unpack so let me take you through this journey one step at a time, beginning with the idea behind IndiaText.net itself. While in engineering school a ton of my classmates were preparing for various competitive examinations, and they would often complain about not having free preparation material to prepare for those exams. I saw that as an opportunity (post some business case and addressable market validations, of course), and created IndiaText.net – which at that time became India’s first e-Learning program to offer free preparation material for a targeted set of exams. Over the next few years, both our traffic and team grew, and we landed on a series of partnership engagements with various coaching institutes to monetize our traffic with Ad Placements and Paid Promotions.

This experience was instrumental for me and gave it me some great exposure to a variety of different areas, including – full stack development, CMS (content management system) platforms, digital advertising, affiliate marketing, A/B testing, Personalization, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), CRM/Email Marketing. 

In 2011, when I graduated from engineering school, IndiaText.net was doing quite well. Our traffic was well over 500K page-views/month, and we had long term advertising contracts signed with five different institutes. However, I was not yet convinced with the idea of focusing full-time on IndiaText.net, and therefore, took a full time role with an engineering services company, named – Tecpro Systems Limited, that took industrial construction projects in power generation and manufacturing space. My role at this company was to help with ideating client specific feature requirements and integration of DCS (Distributed Control System; it in essence is the software that runs a manufacturing or power generation plants). Yep, sounds a lot like present day’s definition of Product Management.

Thus, it was in Distributed Control System space that I had my first official Product Management job, and it was at this company where built my foundational Product Management skills. A lot of the work that I did for IndiaText.net can also be seen as Product Management. However, being in this profession for over a decade now, I feel the true essence of Product Management lies in influencing and steering cross-functional groups towards a common goal without authority – which is not usually the case when you are the founder. 

Fast forward few years, I had honed upon my skills in Product Management and it was at this stage that I decided to transition to mainstream tech industry in Silicon Valley. To make that transition, an MBA seemed like a reasonable path, and that is what led me to the Penn State University in the US. 

It was also at this stage that I had to make the hard decision to focus fully on my product management career and shut down IndiaText.net. Why make that choice and not keep running IndiaText.net as is? Well, a lot of different reasons including growing competition from different eLearning platforms and some major SEO algorithm changes which caused a major drop in our organic traffic. 

Anyways, moving on with my professional journey: post-MBA I wanted to work for a tech startup, so I joined an up and coming eCommerce startup at that time, called Jet.com. 

Jet.com was a company with an amazing leadership team, they had raised some good funding, and were taking a unique stab at eCommerce with the membership model and their proprietary smart cart technology. So, it seemed like a great place to kickstart my career in mainstream tech. However, the day I got hired was the day Jet.com got acquired by Walmart for $3.3B, making it the largest ever eCommerce acquisition at that time. Yes, that was on my very first day at work!

So, in a nutshell, that is how I ended up working for the Fortune 1 company (the largest company in the world by revenue) from wanting to work at a startup. Looking back, this might have been one of the luckiest moments of my career to date, since being part of Walmart gave me an opportunity to work on several huge product initiatives impacting hundreds of millions of users, and make positive impact at really huge scale. 

At present, I lead Product Management for cost per action based marketing pillar at Walmart, also known as Affiliate Marketing. Prior to this current role, I have led a variety of different product areas at Walmart that includes – Last Mile Delivery, Returns, Replenishment, and Forecasting.

Sneak Peak Into Some of My Side Projects 

Someone once said to me that we are way more than our job. I could not agree more! 

My work is an important and very dear part of who I am, but there have been some interesting projects outside of work that I have also pursued over the last several years. 

In 2014, even though we decided to sunset IndiaText.net, but my spark of running a content based business never rested. Consequently, I ended up creating a series of passive blogs and content based websites in niches that I have had a genuine interest and somewhat of an expertise in. 

I have created and run many different websites and it might be pointless to name them all here, but TradeVeda.com is the largest one in my current website/blog portfolio. Outside of technology, Personal Finance and Investing are two areas of great interest and passion for me, hence creating and growing TradeVeda.com came naturally to me.

In addition to content based businesses, I have also experimented with drop shipping and marketplace businesses on platforms such as Etsy and eBay, and at a future state I am sure I would share learnings from those ventures here at NerdCuriosity.com as well.

A Quick Glimpse at the Research Papers That I Have Published

Being the tech enthusiast that I am, over the last several years I have published quite a few papers in various academic and scientific journals. Publishing papers and staying connected to the academic community in my area of work/interest is just another way for me to stay up to date on the latest and greatest developments in the fast paced world of technology.

Listed below are some of the latest papers that I have published: 

In case you are interested in keeping up to date with my published literature, you can follow me on Google Scholar, Research Gate, and Academia.

But, How Did NerdCuriosity.com Came into Being?

Reading thus far, you might have gathered a few things about me: 

  1. I have a love for technology, and as a Product Manager – my job requires me to stay up to date on the latest tech developments.
  2. I love creating content based businesses on niches that appeal to me personally and that I have some form of expertise in.
  3. My recent product experience has been in a very AdTech, Personalization and MarTech environment, which gives me a ton of experience across various pillars of performance marketing.

NerdCuriosity.com sits right at the intersection of these three things, and that in essence is what led me to create this website. Since, both my job and personal interests steer me in the direction of keeping up to date with the latest technology trends and I love creating content based websites, I decided to combine these two passions and that is what led to the creation of NerdCuriosity.com. 

Here on NerdCuriosity.com, I plan to share the latest and the greatest developments in tech from my vantage point, and also share learnings from my direct experiences in areas such as Product Management, Affiliate Marketing, Content Monetization, Display Advertising, Email Marketing, Artificial Intelligence, etc. In some sense, I also intend to use this website as an accountability measure to keep myself up to date with the latest developments in technology.

My Hobbies and Interests

Besides my day job and website creation, I feel extremely passionate about Personal Finance and Investments. It was the interest in this space that led me to create TradeVeda.com, which in addition to NerdCuriosity.com, is another high focus project of mine. 

For this reason, when not working, you would find me deep into a stock chart analyzing whether an investment opportunity is the right fit for me. 

I also enjoy going out on a few hikes every week. When you live in the bay area, incorporating short hikes into your everyday schedule is not too difficult, and this is something I have been taking great advantage of.

Contact Me

In case you would like to get in touch with me, or simply say “hello”, you can always email me at Navdeep@NerdCuriosty.com.

For business inquiries on NerdCuriosity.com, please refer to the contact details shared on our Contact Us page.