🥂 Welcome to business & pleasure!

You made it… But what is ‘this’?

I love writing. It is such a great way to condense my thoughts and reflect on things I have experienced and learnt.

Over the past few years, I have written a bunch of stuff!

I wrote about stumbling in Product Management and what it means to be a Product Manager.

I’ve written about productivity, books I like [1][2] and pop culture among many others things.

Last year I did an experiment, where daily, I consumed one piece of content and shared my insights on LinkedIn, I wrote them under the banner of #newsbits.

As you can see, I really enjoy this. It could even be called a ✨ passion ✨ of mine.

And then in the summer of 2023, I went to business school. And all my writing energy started going into papers, final projects, calculating NPVs and 🤑 increasing shareholder value 🤑 

Somewhere in the back of my mind I had an itch to keep writing, but life took over. Now in the summer of 2024, I plan to restart and challenge myself to prioritize this. Okay now enough history of what I have already done. Let’s come back to the question.

What is this newsletter about?

You may have heard of the phrase - ‘Don’t mix business and pleasure’

To that, I say - well then what’s the point? 🙃 Ever since I started my MBA, my life has been a constant chaotic balancing of learning about the world and having fun while at it. And I wanted to document those experiences as well as learnings. For myself, but also for anyone else - whether you’re a current or aspiring MBA student, climbing that professional ladder and/or just have a curiosity about life and what it has to offer.

But who are you?

Oh, thanks for asking 🙋. I didn’t even introduce myself. Tanmay here. Some people call me Tanny, and some people find it funny when other people call me that.

I was born and brought up in New Delhi, India. I then spent 4 years in Hong Kong pursuing (barely surviving) an engineering degree at HKUST. Following that I spent another 4 years in Tokyo, Japan - where I worked as a Product Manager for a Japanese big tech company and started a few ventures of my own.

Then I moved to Evanston - a quaint suburb of Chicago, to start the MMM program. A dual degree masters at Kellogg School of Management in MBA and Design Innovation. Currently I am writing this from New York city where I am doing a summer internship at Google.

My joke is that life keeps sending me eastward, until I’ll eventually end up back in India 😆 

Professionally I have spent my whole life immersing into tech, user experiences, product development, and entrepreneurship. And personally, a lot of my interests intersect with music, travel and reading and writing. I am part of a band and also make some music on the side.

What’s next?

Over the next few weeks, I already have some ideas, and I’m writing these to keep myself accountable.

1. What you can expect from your first year at Business School - especially at Kellogg

2. How to recruit for tech PM roles in the current economy

3. What it feels like to be an intern at Google

4. What’s it like living in NYC

These posts will be sprinkled with random stuff like tech analysis, pop culture reviews, travel recs and philosophies of life.

I also want to pre-populate this blog with all my previous posts and consolidate them in one space.

Eventually once I start my second year at Kellogg, it will become a space to document my business school experiences and also showcase some of the brilliant people I meet throughout this journey.

Bottom line, there is a lot!

And why are you doing this?

Well if I didn’t just spend a few paragraphs explaining my love for this, I am very interested in making experiences like MBA, Product Management etc transparent to others. A lot of times I had to go into these without much context and figure things out on the way. I believe having a starting point can be very reassuring and motivate people to start their own journeys.

I want to get more college students / young professionals excited about doing and MBA or pursuing PM as a career. Simultaneously, I want to help prospective MBA and PM people to gain context about what to expect and how to navigate these pathways.

Finally I think of this as my journal. Life is moving fast, and we are consuming content at a rate we can’t comprehend. I want to use this space as a way to document my thoughts 😌 

Strap in!

So are you ready for the ride? Click on the button below and I’ll see you in the next one!