Leaving a Multi-Billion-Dollar Brand to Start Again

Nishant frames his guest with an analogy: SEAL Team Six, purpose-driven specialists sent behind enemy lines on a mission that has to get done whatever goes wrong along the way.

The career behind it: investment banking and private equity, with board seats at portfolio companies; a founding leader at Zeta; PayPal’s cross-border payments business; Amazon Pay’s merchant payments business, which he built past $2 billion in transaction volume; and Country Head for AWS’s banking and financial services go-to-market.

In August 2026 he left AWS, while doing well there, to lead growth at Nugget, Zomato’s agentic AI platform, on the principle that “the biggest risk one can take in a career is not to take risks.”

Three qualities predict which founders make it: learning agility, recognising that zero-to-one, one-to-ten and ten-to-a-hundred each need a different leader, and knowing which questions to ask while hiring people who know more than you.

Once anyone can clone a feature in a weekend, technology alone is no longer a moat. What replaces it is deep workflow integration, trust built slowly in high-stakes categories like banking, and distribution.

From Amazon he brings the empty chair: a seat deliberately left free in important meetings for the customer who is not in the room, forcing every decision through the question of what it means for them.

His corrective for founders in love with their model or architecture: start with the size of the pain, in time, money or efficiency, and let the case studies follow the outcome.

Agentic AI is the move from answering questions to taking action. Nugget’s case is where it was built, hardened inside Zomato, Blinkit and Hyperpure on millions of real-time voice interactions and delivery logistics.

On jobs, his thesis: AI will not replace humans, but humans who use AI effectively will replace those who don’t. The durable skills are critical judgement, empathy and problem framing.

He describes enterprise software moving from Software as a Service to Service as Software, with agents running whole workflows and pricing shifting from seats to outcomes.

Rapid fire: Andy Grove’s High Output Management is the book, active listening the most underrated leadership skill, and his advice to his younger self is to optimise for the steepness of the learning curve and the calibre of the people around you.