AA

Aatif Awan

Founder & Managing Partner at Indus Valley Capital

San Francisco Bay Area

Invests in

Stages:

  • Min Investment:

    $100,000.00
  • Max Investment:

    $5,000,000.00
  • Target Investment:

    $1,500,000.00

Skills

Leadership
Venture Capital
Startups
Growth Strategies
Product Management
Strategy
User Growth
User Experience
SEO
General Awesomeness
Product Development
Strategic Partnerships
Competitive Analysis
Management
Analytics

Work Experience

  • Founder & Managing Partner

    2020

    I started Indus Valley Capital, an early stage venture capital fund focused on Pakistan, 5th largest country with 220M people & $350B GDP. Investments & Boards include: Airlift, Bazaar, AimFit, BridgeLinx, Remotebase, Marham, Maqsad, COLABS. We help founders with: 1. Quick Capital - We back startups early and are often the first money in. Our process takes only days to weeks, not months. 2. Product & Growth Expertise: Having built products and scaled them to hundreds of millions of users, we can help you do the same. 3. Investor Network: Our investors are successful founders and noted VCs who can guide you through any challenge. www.indus.vc

2011 - 2018

  • Vice President, Growth, International & Data Products

    2011 - 2018

    I have done five things during my seven years at LinkedIn: 1. Helped grow LinkedIn by nearly half a billion members and tens of billions of connections through a variety of Growth & Engagement strategies and products including Viral Growth, SEO, Onboarding, People You May Know, Email & Mobile notifications, Mobile App growth and Re-engagement. 2. Led LinkedIn's international expansion, including challenging markets like China, Germany and Japan. ~70% of LinkedIn's member base and engagement is from outside the US now. 3. Built the Data products team at LinkedIn consolidating dispersed initiatives into a strategic team focused on making the most out of LinkedIn's data providing insights to employees and members as well as powering products like Search, Feed, Jobs You May Be Interested In, Recruiter, Talent Insights and more. 4. Led the LinkedIn+Microsoft product integration strategy after Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, partnering closely with product leaders at both LinkedIn and Microsoft. 5. The most important thing I did which made all of the above possible was hiring and mentoring a world-class product team. I scaled the team from a single PM (me) to 32 PMs (who in turn led cross-functional teams totaling 400 people) and hired country managers for China, Germany and Japan.

2005 - 2011

  • Senior Program Manager (Bing)

    2009 - 2011

    Built OneBox search experiences for queries about people, places or things, powering ~10% of Bing’s search queries. Worked on challenging technical problems including entity extraction, disambiguation, and combining relevant content about entities into a cohesive experience. Designed AB experiments and analyze large-scale data using Microsoft analog of Hadoop and Hive. 3 patents (pending) related to entity searches.

  • Program Manager II (Office Communications)

    2005 - 2009

    Designed and shipped the online meetings join experience for Microsoft Lync. Launched v1 of Microsoft Unified Communications API - a developer platform for enterprise messaging and collaboration apps. 3 patents for designing unique communications and conferencing protocols that powered innovative end-user features in Microsoft Lync.