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About Me
You can find my professional background on LinkedIn or reach me on X (Formerly, Twitter). I try to respond when the conversation is worth having.
I have been writing here for a few years now. The posts are uneven in frequency, sometimes obsessively regular and sometimes quiet for months. That is honest. This is not a content strategy. It is a record of how I think.
Here is what I write about, and why.
On Social Issues
Everyone is entitled to an opinion. The problem is most opinions travel faster than the reasoning behind them. I try not to do that here. When I take a position, I back it with data I can name and a line of argument I can defend. I am not interested in outrage for its own sake, and I have no permanent team to cheer for. Not everything wrong in the world is the government’s fault. Some of it is the society. Some of it is us. If you want something to change, you have to be willing to give something back. That is the deal. I hold myself to it too.
On Technology
I have spent over two decades building technology products, first as an engineer, then as a product manager, then as a founder, and now as a CPO. The work has taken me from embedded systems in set-top boxes to programmatic advertising infrastructure handling over a billion ad requests a month. Right now I am experimenting with building agentic AI systems in the adtech space while running my day job as a CPO at Moving Walls.
I write about technology not to explain it to beginners and not to perform expertise at practitioners. I write because the industry moves faster than most people can interpret it, and the gap between what is actually happening and what gets reported is wide. I try to close that gap, at least in the corners I know well.
For deep dives specifically on adtech and programmatic advertising, I write a separate publication called BidStream at bidstream.amitgoel.me.
I also build things on the side. Penome (penome.com) is a collaboration tool for product managers. Careerplot (careerplot.com) is an AI-driven career planning platform. Both came out of real problems I kept running into, and both are still very much works in progress.
On Product Management
I have been a product manager long enough to have strong opinions about what the job actually is, as opposed to what job descriptions say it is. The best product work I have done was when I treated it as an engineering problem with a business constraint, not a PowerPoint exercise with a roadmap attached.
I write about product management from that angle. The organizational dynamics, the measurement failures, the gap between strategy decks and what actually ships. I spent years at The Trade Desk working on retail media and mobile DSP products with Fortune 500 partners, and before that at Amagi building an OTT ad platform from zero. Those experiences give me specific opinions, and I share them here without softening them into consultantspeak.
On Startups
I founded a company once. It was called Patterbuzz, a digital magazine platform built before the market was ready for it. We raised angel funding, built the product, partnered with publishers. It taught me more than any job has. I am not nostalgic about it. I am grateful for it.
Since then I have worked inside high-growth companies at different stages of scale, from Series B startups to a NASDAQ-listed company with a multi-billion dollar market cap. I have seen what works and what sounds good in investor memos but does not survive contact with an actual customer. I write about that gap. Not with cynicism, but with the specificity that only comes from having made the mistakes yourself.
On Education
India produces graduates at an enormous scale. It does not produce enough critical thinkers at the same rate. I went through the system, benefited from it in some ways, and watched it fail people in others.
My view is simple. Education should create knowledge, and knowledge should create options. When it does neither, and people have paid heavily for the credential anyway, that is a problem worth naming. I write about it because I have seen too many people make irreversible decisions based on credential prestige that the market stopped caring about years ago. Unless you are in the top fraction of a percent of your cohort, the degree is not the asset you think it is. Take informed decisions. That is all I am trying to say.
