Aftab Junaid Kidwai

S

Partner at Sandstone Growth | ex-TCS

Sandstone Growth
Hyderabad, India · IST (UTC+5:30)
11+ years experience
XLRI Jamshedpur
English, Hindi, Telugu
Investing
Messaging unavailable

Overview

I invest in B2B SaaS at Sandstone Growth, usually at pre-seed and seed. Backed 53 founders at pre-seed and seed. Before that: TCS and Postman.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Founders building in API platforms
  • Second opinions on go-to-market decisions
  • Thoughtful intros to people in my field
  • Working sessions on pricing
Please don't message about
  • Offshore staffing offers
  • Recruiters for roles outside my stack
  • Crypto token projects

Checks messages twice a week

Skills
go-to-marketventure capitalpricing
InvestingLooking to invest
closes in 3 months

Writing $100k cheques into Series A B2B SaaS in Africa

Cheque size
$100k
Stages
Seed, Series A
Sectors
API platforms, AI applications
Geographies
LatAm
Lead or follow
Any
Decision time
One meeting and a partner call
How I help
Hiring the first ten people

Typically lead or co-lead. We reply to every founder.

Hyderabad, Indiago-to-marketventure capitalpricing
Open

Experience

  1. Partner
    Mar 2025 - Present
    Sandstone Growth · 1 yr 7 mo · Full-time · Hyderabad, India
    • Moved 84% of public API traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
    • Cut p99 latency on the public API services from 737ms to 141ms.
    • Mentored 6 engineers through their first promotion.
  2. Director of Product
    Dec 2023 - Mar 2025
    TCS · 1 yr 3 mo · Full-time · Hyderabad, India
    • Grew payments revenue from $3 million to $48 million ARR.
    • Took payments activation from 21% to 43% in three quarters.
  3. Product Manager
    Aug 2021 - Dec 2023
    Postman · 2 yr 4 mo · Full-time · Hyderabad, India
    • Cut time-to-first-value for new payments customers from 21 days to 4.
  4. Senior Product Manager
    May 2018 - Aug 2021
    HDFC Bank · 3 yr 3 mo · Full-time · Hyderabad, India
    • Grew payments revenue from $6 million to $29 million ARR.
  5. Product Manager
    Feb 2016 - May 2018
    Meesho · 2 yr 3 mo · Full-time · Hyderabad, India
    • Ran 200 customer interviews before writing the first spec.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. XLRI Jamshedpur
    MBA, Business Administration
    2016 - 2018
  2. BITS Pilani
    B.E., Computer Science
    2008 - 2012

Details

Compensation expectations
What they are targeting for their next role.
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