Narendra Nag
I build products, open-source tools and first versions for other companies, and I advise the people who run them. I have been starting companies for twenty-eight years: four founded, two sold.
Available for advisory and part-time work. Marain is the name of my studio.
Why I am doing this
My thesis is simple: Everything is changing beyond recognition.
This is as seminal a moment in human history as the transition from medieval times to the industrial age. My rational self has made three bets:
- Building is the only thing that matters. So I will build, a lot.
- Taste, judgement and experience (in any order but not without each other) is the single most important thing I have to offer.
- There is no time like now to start something new melding Art, Code and Science.
Read the whole essay, which also explains the name.
I build because I can.
Fifteen pieces of work are below, and eleven of them date from September 2026 or later. Some are mine and open for anyone to use, some are products, and some were built or shaped for companies I cannot name.
Before this: twenty-eight years of writing, building and measuring
The second bet rests on this part. I have worked as a journalist, a founder and an analyst, usually at the same time.
- 4
- companies founded
- 2
- sold: Laminar, and Elephants & Monkeys
- 10 to 100
- people in the India digital practice I built at Publicis
- 2,000
- people across six Asian markets in the planning remit I led
- $20M
- a year of P&L, run directly
- 2009
- coaching early-stage founders since
2019 to 2026
- 2024 to 2026A Parent Media Co.
- Chief Strategy Officer, after it acquired Laminar. I worked on the commercial model, the distribution deals and the revenue-operations platform behind Victory+, its free-to-fan sports service, and helped the company cross $50MM in revenue in 18 months. The deal-authoring system is written up.
- 2019 to 2023Laminar
- Founder and CEO. A streaming platform that let media companies launch a global, full-featured service in weeks instead of years. Acquired in December 2023.
- 2018 to 2019Anthro
- Co-founder. Anthropologists, mathematicians, data scientists and market specialists working together on what large groups of people believe. It read narrative across twenty-nine European countries, with all the processing done in the browser and no data sent to a server.
Selected work, 2019 back to 2013
- 2019Europe Delivers: reading twenty-nine countries with machines and analysts togetherXynteo, Europe Delivers
- 2019Measuring hate speech in a language the machines could not readA global bank
- 2017Making a cross-sector coalition something a company could actually joinXynteo, India 2022
- 2016The counting failure underneath India's malaria failureMalaria No More, India
- 2016Connecting influence to sales, for a brand that had never been able toPampers (Procter & Gamble), China
- 2016An agency model rebuilt around influence, six weeks before the contract endedSK-II (Procter & Gamble), Singapore, Greater China, Japan and Korea
- 2015Seventy-four per cent of the complaints were not about the productsSnapdeal, India
- 2015A national communications architecture for a foundation's largest country programBill & Melinda Gates Foundation, India
- 2014Letting customers prove the product, when the brand had stopped being believedSony (Sony India), India
- 2014Making an American brand Indian, without pretending it was not AmericanCoca-Cola (Coca-Cola India), India
- 2013Sixty thousand organ donors in nine daysThe Times of India
Eleven of the eighteen studies written up. See all of them.
Earlier, 2018 back to 1998
- 2018Building
- The ticketing and gate software for the Statue of Unity, written in two days: C on a Raspberry Pi at every gate, each reporting to a central hub.
- 2017Advising
- Chief Digital Officer at Xynteo, advising Unilever and Shell among others on how they went to market and how they talked about it.
- 2010Running things
- At Publicis I took the India digital practice from ten people to more than a hundred and from one office to four, led a 200-person India team, and then led integrated planning across every Publicis agency in six Asian markets, close to 2,000 people. I carried a P&L of roughly twenty million dollars a year. Clients included P&G, Coca-Cola and Sony Mobile.
- 2008Building and measuring
- Two companies. Elephants & Monkeys, a digital agency, was acquired into 2020 Social and then into MSLGROUP, part of Publicis Groupe, in 2010. The other was an analytics firm doing political and market research for politicians, property developers, consumer goods companies and funding agencies.
- 2006Writing
- At CNN-IBN I produced and anchored a weekly science show, Connect, and worked the national desk. At NewsX I was part of the small team that planned the channel, hired into it and put it on air. At Mint I built the video desk and helped join the print, online and video newsrooms into one.
- 2001Writing
- Six years in newsrooms. At Hindustan Times I launched the first science-and-technology section in a mainstream Indian newspaper, and covered the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Nepal coup and the opening of the first road between the two halves of Kashmir.
- 1998Building
- A company at the end of school. It built more than a hundred websites on a content management system I wrote by hand. The system was acquired, and the dot-com crash took the rest.
What you can hire me for
- Build the first versionA working MVP or demo in weeks, with the AI feature in it, good enough to put in front of customers or investors.
- Shape the storyThe positioning, the fundraising narrative and the deck, and a hard read of the model and the materials before an investor gives one.
- Make introductionsFor companies whose story I have worked on, to the people who should hear it.
- Stay onMost of my work continues after the first version. I join part time, a day or two a week, and take responsibility for product, positioning or go-to-market until the company has someone to hand it to.
- One hard problemFor a large organization: one positioning or go-to-market problem the usual answer has not solved, taken on with a fixed scope.
I am mostly looking for advisory and part-time work. If you have something interesting that does not fit this list, tell me anyway.
About me
I learned Pascal at thirteen and have been writing code, on and off, ever since. In 2018 I wrote the gate software for the Statue of Unity in two days, in C, with a Raspberry Pi at each gate. In between I was a journalist, ran agency teams and started companies.
Marain is the language spoken in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. Its letters are three-by-three grids of dots, which is what the small marks beside each heading on this page are: the section’s number, in nine bits.
