Sagun Garg
3 x Founder/CTO (15+yrs), 2 x CTO Advisor, 3 x EIR, 9+ Polyglot Programmer, ex-Deloitte, B-Tech(CS).
About my expertise: CTO/Founder: Sagun. You can also find me on linkedin Sagun
Entrepreneurship(poem) for me is a self discovery of a polymath within you while you solve a problem creating something: Along the way you sell value to stakeholders, you enagage in resource mobilization & cultivate skewed skills (Polyglot: Programmer in 9+ languages, System Architect, Engineering Manager, Product Owner, Product Manager & DevOps Expert) to deliver a vision inspite of the constraints.
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đź—Ł Brief: Currently serving as Global Innovation Director - Software Engineering & Enterprise Architecture at Bank Julius Baer. In my past life I have been a repeat Founder/CTO with 3 x startups [DevTools, CareerTech, PropTech] built with AI/ML to craft data products specially in architectures that are characterised by time-series, textual, geospatial, bigdata, nosql & erratic nature of data. I have also played couple of stints of CTO-on-Hire to turn around two(2) pre-Series A startups in Singapore & Hong Kong respectively.
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đź’¬ Speaker/Judging/Presenter Series:
- Stay tuned…More talks will be updated soon…
October 2024: Masterclass at NUS MBA Business School
Topic: "Microstrategy: Modern Corporate Finance Case Study on Bitcoin Treasury
October 2024: Launch of AI CTO Program: Singapore Google Office Panel Discussion
Topic: Building a Sustainable COE - AI CTO Program
October 2024: Tab Conference 6 2024 at Georgia Tech - Atlanta Talk
Topic: Architectural Nuances for Bitcoin Enterprise Custody for Institutions/Orgs (Small/Medium) on Bitcoin Standard - Self Sovereignty for “Corporate Plebs & Non-Profits
October 2024: Bitcoin Conference 2024 at Amsterdam Panel amongst industry experts
Topic: Bitcoin Wealth & Inheritance
September 2024: Podcast with OnRamp MENA on Intersection of AI and Bitcoin exploring the Hyperdeflation and Hyperbitcoinization scenarios
Topic: Intersection of Bitcoin and AI: How AI will cause Hyperdeflation & Bitcoin will help measure wealth in a HyperBitcoinization world
Are these two ideas two sides of the same Coin and why corporates will move on to Enterprise Custody Multsig, Mult-jurisdiction and multi-agents setup on Bitcoin Standard
YouTube
September 2024: Presentation talk at Lightning Returns Bitcoin Conference in Singapore
Topic: Technological Progress Driven HyperDeflation, Bitcoin Hyperbitcoinization Era & Future of Wealth Banking"
YouTube
September 2024: Presentation at Thailand Bitcoin Conference (TBC 2024)
Topic: Intersection of Bitcoin and AI: How AI will cause Hyperdeflation & Bitcoin will help measure wealth in a HyperBitcoinization world
YouTube
September 2024: Panel talk with industry experts organised by ABS and MAS
Topic: Unlocking the Future: Key Considerations and Path to Capture Generative AI Value
August2024: Guest lecturer at Singapore Management University to batch of industry VC professionals
Topic: Market Overview & Global Perspectives and Advanced Certificate in Venture Capital
August2024: Evaluator for the Global FinTech Hackcelerator at Singapore Fintech Festival
Topic: Judge & Evaluator for AI Startups for applications in Singapore Fintetc Festival (SFF 2024)
July2024: Panel discussion on mainstage at Bitcoin Nashville Conference with Caitlin Long, Miles Paschini and Sagun Garg
Topic: Bitcoin's Role in Traditional Banks
July2024: Industry Competition in GenAI LLMs: Google + EDB(Economic Development Board) - Industry Competition AI Trailblazers
Topic: GenAI Narrative builder for protfolio re-assement for switching positions using factual references of internal publications
May2024: Panel discussion at Bitcoin Conference Asia 2024 - Hong Kong
Topic: Miniscript & Bitcoin Inheritance Planning
May2024: Students from Indiana University - Kelley School of Business
Topic: Fireside Chat on Bitcoin, Crypto and Tokenization
March2024: Guest speaker organised by Plug & Play Tech Center & Aelf Blockchain on Layer 2 solutions on Bitcoin
Topic: Web3: Blockhain and RWA Tokenization
Linkedin Post Plug & Play Tech Center
January2024: Investor - Judge for Tenity Singapore Incubation Batch 7
Theme of Startups Pitching: Fintech, Insurtech, or RegTech, DeepTech, Web3, Sustainable Finance, LegalTech, CryptoFinance startups
Link To Event
December2023: Singapore SMU professor doing a Series for Bank Julius Baer Employees
Topic: Intersection of Web3 and AI for Digital Assets
Decemberh2023: Competition: Corporate Innovation Challenge at Singapore Fintech Festival - Launchpad Team - Bank Julius Baer
Topic: GenAI: Using LLMs building Impactful Corporate Cost Saving Applications
November2023: Investor - Judge at Carta Investor program at Singapore Fintech Festival 2023
Investor: Meeting and Guiding startups shortlisted bt Carta for pitching at Singapore Fintech Festival
Link To Event
November2023: Speaker - At Hustle Fund Angel Squad event in Singapore in November 2023
Topic: Evolution of Bitcoin and Web3 in next coming 1 year
July2023: Judge for Hackcelerator AI Startup Competition organised by Singapore Govt through MAS
Judge: for MAS AI Competition to evaluate global Startups for upcoming SFF 2023 Singapore startups !
June2023: Speaker - Master Class in Zurich for, Tenity(formerly F10 Batch)
Judge: for MAS AI Competition to evaluate global Startups for upcoming SFF 2023 Singapore startups !
Tenity Accelerator
- ✨ Current Active Interests: What keep’s me busy these days
- đź’¬ Â Lately my nascent curiosity has been sparked in Quantum Computing influencing the AI/ML space, Gene therapy leveraging AI and private LLMs deployed on edge computing devices.
- 🌱  I’m currently experimenting with Replicate, Data Catalogs & Vector Search Engines
- đź“ť Writings: I like to write newsletter(s), Blog(s) & curate content as note making process to myself
- Twitter Curation: Twitter
- About AI/ML: Newsletter
- Startups in General: Medium
- Linkedin Posts: Linkedin
- đź’» Serial Entrepreneur x 3:I am a Tech Entrepreneur at heart (ambidextrous skills to get job done)
- Early Stage Decade Experience: 11+ years of early stage startup, product and engineering tech stacks.
- Bootstrapping: Startup with Customer Money before seed round
- P/M Fit: Pivoting everything till you hit the target with paying users in a Sizeable market for outsized outcomes
- Raising Venture Capital: Proven track record [Pre-Seed -> Seed -> Pre-SeriesA]
- Product Owner: Experience building & executing Product Roadmaps [Market Sizing, P/M Fit and User Acquisition]
- Leading teams: Building Atleast 20+ developers in CTO capacity
- B2B & B2C: Prior proven experience launching B2C Mobile Products and B2B Enterprise Products
- ⏱ CTO-on-Hire x 2: I have proven ability to turn around AI/ML ventures in CTO-on-Hire capacity. I recently have a track record for two Pre-Series A Startups in Singapore(Supply Chain - Predictive Data Intelligence) and Hong Kong(Ed-Tech - Natural Language Generation Authoring) by stepping in shoes of outgoing Co-Founder/CTO in both ventures respectively to help the Co-Founder/CEO
- close Pre-Series A round,
- scale prototype to production grade usable product with live users/customers serving fortune 500 customers and
- managing engineering teams of 10+ team members. Both startup turn arounds involved managing product strategy, product features, engineering technical debt removal, hiring, devops & technical budgets. It approximately took me 18 months to turn the ship with a lot of support from the team I inherited in these ventures.
- đź’» Entrepreneur in Residence x 3:I have extensive experience as Entrepreneur in Residence in Deeptech products in South East Asia:
- Market Sizing: Define target market, customer persona and go to market strategy
- Weekend Prototyping: Build initial prototype(s) and iterate week on week with user feedback
- Cofounder Matching: Find a Cofounder for the venture with complementary skills
- Pitch to VCs: Investment commitees for initial round of capital
- Define KPIs: Tracking monthly user growth, lead/lag indicators & growth hacking
- đź’» Hackathons/Competitions: I am also winner of international Hackathons.
- Singapore: Launchpad’s LLM - AI/ML Sophie platform built inside Bank Julius Baer top 6 winner in SFF(Singapore Fintech Festival), 2023 pic1 & pic2
- Singapore: NEC Labs, 2020
- Singapore: Microsoft: Global AI/ML Summit, 2019
- Mumbai: India: IIT-B Hackathon, 2015
- Dublin: Web-Summit Alpha Startup Category, 2014
- Bangalore: Poster presentation for VLSI at Intel, 2008
- Ahmedabad: IBM + GIL Project for Gujarat Govt, 2006
Expert & Specialist in Architecting Systems
- Data pipelines: Geospatial, timeseries, streaming 365 days a humming data engine with Validations at data lake level
- Data Engineering: AI/ML usecases demand data preparation i.e clean data, wrangle for spotty, missing, malformed, invalid and intermittent empty datapoints
- Big Data: Order of billion rows in a single query: Quering datapoints to mathematically handle OLAP processing for B2C or B2B interfaces to run metrics in realtime for users
- Search Indexes: Less than 500ms search engine query responses in big payload responses with 100k JSON payloads
- Predictive Data Intelligence: Generating and Managing 20 million predictions a day architecture, data warehouses and complex streaming data ingestion
My Work experience includes
- đź’» Architecting: BigData achitectural patterns in AWS Infra jigsaw puzzle
- ⚙️ Vendor Management : Navigate “Build vs Buy” to optimise for “startup speed” and avoid “technical debt complexity”. This is possible with stable setups for opensource products on BigTech platforms(AWS, Google, Microsoft) with startup credit grants there by direct savings of bills of atleast USD 300k in first 2 years worth of digital infrastructure, developer tools and devops using street smart ideas.
- đź‘Ą Mentoring: Senior engineers, product managers and growth hackers to become leaders by cultivating their skills to manage bigger teams in their respective verticals
- đź“‹ Managing Product Roadmaps: sprints, cost budgets, recruiting, writing detailed specs, product roadmaps and manage release cycles
- 🤖 Automating: CI/CD the whole release process to QA, TestFlight, AppStore & Improving the CI/CD pipelines and build times…
- đź‘Ą Devops: Improving the PR review experience (using Danger and Vapor Bots to interact with your PRs, among others)
- ⚙️ Tools: Providing integration between tools for developers, QA & product (GitHub, JIRA, Lokalize, Figma, TestRails, CI, …)
- ⏱ Testing Frameworks: Consulting on testing strategies (project testability, balance between Unit/UI/Snapshot/manual tests, interaction with QA…)
- ✨ And much more 🙂
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