Mala's Podcast

In this episode, Mala sits down with Kshama Swamy, VP of Customer Engineering and Success at CircleCI, for a practical conversation on customer engineering, AI adoption, enterprise software, and what it takes to build customer-centric teams at scale. Kshama’s career spans consulting, the Department of Defence, Cognos, IBM, Intapp, PAR, and now CircleCI. Across these roles, she has led support, ser...

In this episode, Mala sits down with Sumit Johar, CIO of BlackLine, for an insightful conversation on AI transformation, enterprise IT, finance technology, cybersecurity, and what it takes to drive change inside highly regulated organizations. Sumit leads technology at BlackLine, a SaaS company serving finance organizations across the world. In this conversation, he shares why AI adoption in finan...

What does AI strategy look like inside industries that are still catching up to cloud? In this episode, Mala speaks with Madhavi Rajan, Head of Product Strategy for Rackspace’s Private Cloud business, about her journey from NASA-funded research to enterprise infrastructure and AI strategy. Madhavi shares hard-earned lessons from 20+ years in deep tech, including how to move from engineering to pro...

In this episode of Mala’s Podcast, Mala sits down with Duncan Grazier, a seasoned technology leader who has helped scale companies from early-stage teams to major exits, including ShopKeep’s $550M sale to Lightspeed Commerce and Weedmaps’ public-market journey. Duncan is now Chief AI Officer at BuildOps, a unicorn transforming the commercial contracting industry with software and AI.   This conver...

Shannon Power started in a bunny suit doing semiconductor manufacturing at Motorola and Intel. An industrial engineer turned finance executive, today she's a fractional CFO and COO who gets called in at inflection points — when companies are changing business models, scaling after a big raise, or preparing for an exit. In this fireside chat with Mala Ramakrishnan, Shannon breaks down why CFO t...

Scott Sundvor is a three-time founder with a path most people don't take. He started Nima at MIT — a sensor that lets you test food for allergens in under two minutes — built it, scaled it, sold it. Then he pivoted into cannabis, ran that company through a regulated landscape with no banking access, and exited again. Now he's the Chief Product Officer at Instrumental, a Series C company he...

Tammy Schuring is a fourth-generation Bay Area native whose great-grandfather pushed a wheelbarrow from South Dakota to help build the Golden Gate Bridge. She was the first in her family to go to college, and went on to become a math major and a CRO who's generated hundreds of millions in revenue for cybersecurity and enterprise companies. In this fireside chat, Tammy sits down with Mala Ramak...

Phil Taylor, CTO  ⁨@CDW⁩  , built a 250-person services company from the ground up, sold it to CDW, and now runs their Digital Velocity business unit. But what makes his story compelling isn't the exit — it's how he got there. At 21, he was distributing half a billion dollars in checks. One error could've bankrupted the company. Years later, he learned the hard way that being right mat...

Ash Parikh, CMO @Absolute Security, 3x B2B CMO (Informatica, Druva, Trellix), sits down with Mala Ramakrishnan to talk about what most marketers get wrong — and what the best ones obsess over. Spoiler: it's not MQLs. Ash breaks down the "dark funnel" — the invisible buying journey where 70% of decisions are made before a vendor even knows a prospect exists. He walks through how pre-i...

Ravi Shankar, CMO & SVP at Denodo , joins Mala Ramakrishnan to unpack how enterprise go-to-market has evolved in the age of AI—and why differentiation is no longer about deep tech, but about how you take it to market. With over a decade at Denodo and prior experience at Oracle and Informatica, Ravi shares how he scaled a global data company across 25+ countries and why product marketing sits a...

Sunzay Passari, Director and Global Head of AI and Innovation at UPS, joins Mala Ramakrishnan to unpack what it really means to drive AI inside a 118-year-old global enterprise operating in 200 countries. From route optimization and warehouse automation to AI-driven pricing models generating measurable ROI, Sunzay explains how UPS applies both operational AI (“physical AI”) and business AI at enor...

Michael Avrahamov, VP of Engineering at ServiceNow , joins Mala Ramakrishnan to discuss what it really takes to lead large engineering teams in the age of AI. From early startup work building developer platforms to leadership roles at Siebel, Oracle, and now ServiceNow, Michael shares how he built a niche in observability and reliability engineering—and why falling in love with hard technical prob...

Abhinav Asthana, CTO of Redwood Trust , joins Mala Ramakrishnan to share his unconventional journey from early data science in Formula 1 to leading technology at a publicly traded real estate investment trust (REIT). In this candid conversation, Abhinav breaks down how technology drives real business outcomes in financial services, how private credit and non-qualified mortgages work, and why AI mu...

Puneet Gupta, Founder & CEO of Amberflo , joins Mala Ramakrishnan to unpack one of the biggest blind spots in AI adoption: cost, governance, and tying LLM usage to real business value. A former General Manager at Amazon Web Services and founding member of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Puneet brings deep cloud infrastructure experience to the AI era. In this conversation, he explains why token u...

Rajeev Sethi, SVP of Emerging Technologies at ServiceNow , joins Mala Ramakrishnan for a candid conversation on how large enterprises actually adopt AI, automation, and agentic systems. With nearly four decades across engineering, IT, consulting, and enterprise platforms, Rajeev shares how ServiceNow evolved from a workflow engine into a category-defining company, why automation matters more than...

Parisa Naseralavi, COO of XOPS , joins Mala Ramakrishnan for a candid conversation on operations, leadership, and what it really takes to scale companies from early traction to enterprise adoption. Starting her career as a chemical engineer, Parisa shares how thinking in process and scale shaped her journey across Monsanto, Cisco, VMware, ServiceNow, and now a fast-growing startup. She explains wh...

Pankaj Garg, Corporate Vice President at  Microsoft , joins Mala Ramakrishnan for a deep, candid conversation on how Azure was built, how infrastructure innovation really happens at scale, and why AI represents the biggest platform shift of our lifetime. From writing kernel code and building Hyper-V to helping grow Azure from an early internal project into a global cloud platform, Pankaj shares fi...

Shanti Iyer, CIO of DocuSign, joins Mala Ramakrishnan to share a candid, inside look at how large enterprises adopt AI with discipline, responsibility, and real business impact. From growing up in Chennai to spending two decades at Cisco and now leading technology at DocuSign, Shanti explains why great CIOs think business first, technology second. She breaks down how DocuSign approaches AI adoptio...

Allen Taylor, Managing Director at  Endeavor , joins Mala Ramakrishnan to unpack how Endeavor has spent nearly three decades building high-impact entrepreneurs across emerging and underserved markets. From Latin America to Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, Allen explains why talent is evenly distributed but access to networks, capital, and trust is not. He shares how Endeavor identifies...

Aysha Khan, CIO and CISO of Treasure Data , joins Mala Ramakrishnan to share a deeply practical view on leadership, cybersecurity, and using AI as a business accelerator—not a distraction. From growing up across Pakistan, Canada, and the US to leading global security and technology transformations at Oracle, Symantec, and major financial institutions, Aysha explains why exposure builds resilience,...

Rohit Jain, CIO and Chief AI Officer, challenges one of the most common fears about AI. That it will eliminate jobs. In this clip, Rohit explains why history tells a different story. From the Industrial Revolution to the digital era, roles evolve but responsibility remains. AI doesn’t erase human work. It reshapes how work gets done and where humans add the most value. His message to leaders is cl...

Shibani Sanan, veteran engineering leader and CTO, shares a grounded take on how leaders should approach AI without losing focus on the business. In this clip, Shibani explains why small and mid-sized companies can’t afford to chase AI trends blindly. With limited bandwidth, revenue goals, and product roadmaps to manage, AI must earn its place. It should strengthen the company’s mission, unlock re...

Aysha Khan , technology executive and strategic advisor, explains why AI transformation without security-first thinking is a leadership blind spot. With AI accelerating across enterprises, Aysha breaks down why cybersecurity can’t be an afterthought . It must be built into strategy, governance, and operating models from day one. From compliance to trust frameworks, she shares what leaders must get...

Sriram Chakravarthy , Founder & CTO of  Avaamo , explains why modern leaders shouldn’t spend time chasing updates like AWS spend, hiring numbers, or operational metrics. Instead, he’s building an AI-powered dashboard and personal agent. A system that surfaces real-time insights across spend, resources, and operations. So leadership energy goes into decisions, not status checks. _______________...

Amr Awadallah, Former Founder & CEO of Vectara, explains why he uses two AI agents in parallel, to compare results, catch hallucinations, and make better decisions. Amr shares a practical mindset for working with AI today: don’t treat it as magic. Learn the tools deeply, understand their limits, and use structure to get more reliable outcomes. A simple tactic with big implications for leaders,...