Akash Mukherjee has a big-tech resume and hustles over the weekends with fun, unique & opinionated side quests and passion projects

There is a version of this profile that is just the resume, and it is a good resume. Fraud detection for banks at PwC. Executive analytics at Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix, three companies with no excuse for guessing. Product at WeWork and Wayfair. A startup of his own, Graphiti, built on metadata governance, which is the least glamorous problem in software and the one everything else quietly stands on. Fifteen years, ending up as Chief Product Officer at Chartmetric, where labels, managers, and unsigned artists all read the same numbers.

That version is accurate and it misses the point, because the same fifteen years also produced a long, unbroken run of things he built because he wanted them to exist.

A long trail of side projects

The first was Numbers of India: data stories about Indian politics, business, entertainment, news and sports, at a point when almost nobody was doing that. He had been reading FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times graphics desk and noticed the format did not exist for Indian data, so he built it. Startup Tales, from December 2015, charts all hundred startups of the Indian scene by category, roughly a decade before mapping ecosystems became a genre. TVF retweeted the project, which in that era was the Indian internet's version of a knighthood.

The site's own description of itself is the tell: data breathes life into these narratives, and hopefully filters out our collective, colossal, and cosmic stupidity. Its public to-do list asks readers to be kind if the publishing is irregular and brutal if it is not useful or delightful. He no longer runs it day to day; Vivek Aithal maintains it now, which is a rarer ending than shutting it down.

Then Visual Portfolios, which turned a long article into an Instagram or LinkedIn carousel in one click. It worked, it went around LinkedIn, and then he switched it off, which is the least common ending in the entire genre of side projects that worked. And underneath all of it, years of writing: essays on Medium in Bootcamp and elsewhere, the most-read of which argues that build a product that solves a real pain point is roughly correct but not actually accurate, and proposes something sharper. It has 1,600 claps and a comment section still arguing about it.

The habit never stopped; it just changed tools. He now ships a small vibe-coded project most Sundays, built on Replit, on the theory that spinning up your own tool beats putting up with a janky one somebody else abandoned. The current one is What an ETF, which takes the math behind an exchange-traded fund and reports it in plain English against the S&P 500. Its scoreboard says ON FIRE, MEH, and SLIPPING. The homepage counts 33 ETFs tracked and zero finance degrees required. He built it because he wanted it, which puts him in the same club as Joseph Carlson who built his own stock analysis tool for the same reason.

The one he is running now

Pataka Times is a free newsletter that lands every Sunday from New York, described as the week in American culture explained for desis: food, money, status, and the things nobody translates for you. That last clause is the entire product. One of its posts is a single image of two elevators, labelled ELEVATOR in America and LIFT back home, which tells you more about the register than any mission statement could. It is funny rather than earnest, which is the harder setting, and it treats assimilation and nostalgia as the same feeling instead of opposite ones.

Which is the thread, if you want one. Numbers of India took data that already existed and made it legible to the people it was about. Chartmetric hands an unsigned artist the numbers that used to live inside a record label. Pataka Times translates a country to the people arriving in it. His own bio says he is making boring data apps fun again, which is the small version of the same instinct: he keeps building a way in, for whoever is on the outside of the information.

Making boring data apps fun again.

Akash's own bio, and a fair summary of a fifteen-year career