Six years of go-to-market work. One habit that hasn't changed.

It started with a dare.

In the first weeks of the COVID lockdown, I was a psychology student writing overly philosophical Instagram captions. A friend read one and told me, half-joking, to stop philosophizing and go get a job.

I took the dare seriously — nobody knew when college would reopen. I started applying to content marketing roles with no portfolio, just conviction, and had an interview call within three days. The final question from the person who'd become my boss: name three bloggers. I said Komal Pandey and That Boho Girl. I got the job.

Six years later, that's still the story I tell when people ask how this started.

Learning by doing.

Over the next two years, I led content and campaign strategy for restaurant launches across two cities, then moved into influencer marketing for a skincare startup — negotiating with creators, managing deliverables, learning the unglamorous mechanics behind every polished campaign.

When COVID-19 hit its second wave, I helped run a public-health content collaboration between two hospital systems and a major payments platform. It was the first project I worked on with real stakes — and the first time I understood how fast good marketing has to move when it actually matters.

Systems thinking.

Marketing had stopped being personal for me and started being something I wanted a career in, so I went back for an MBA in Marketing & Sales. Restless from lockdown, I also took an evening role at a startup called Gyanwave — and that's where marketing automation clicked for me: running one campaign across multiple channels from a single platform.

For my MBA research, I built a complete CRM strategy from scratch for a healthcare client — mapping the entire decision system, from IVR to CRM to sales outreach — and trained their sales team to run it. Their sales grew 5x.

The one I wanted.

Placement season is where I learned what I actually wanted. I'd already cracked most of the interviews I sat for, but none of them were the one I was holding out for. I remember sitting in a room, close to giving up, when a friend pulled me out and told me flatly: you're getting Moody's — you're not selling credit cards.

He was right. That offer is still one of the best days of my career — three years at a global company that took me from lending SaaS launches to a board meeting in Paris.

Owning the GTM engine.

At Moody's Banking Unit, I owned go-to-market strategy for the Lending Solutions portfolio — positioning, campaigns, and content for twelve global product launches, working with stakeholders across the US, UK, and Costa Rica.

I used LLMs to run competitor and customer research that fed directly into ICPs, sales plays, and battlecards. I built a performance dashboard in a week that was estimated to take six. And I watched a single SEO-led landing page influence one of the largest deals of the year.

There's always more to see.

Three years in, I understood my own potential better than when I'd started — and knew it stretched further than the role I was in. I left Moody's in September 2026 to go all-in on AI and automation, because I could see where the industry was heading and wanted to be building in it, not just reacting to it.

Marketing got me here. AI is where I'm taking it next.