Founders
Dinner in SF
IIT alumni in SF

Hey, I'm Tejas Tejas Gawande. For the last decade and a half, I've been obsessed with a single idea: the design determines the way something works. Design isn't decoration. Taste isn't a luxury. They're the competitive advantage.

The story so far

The 2020s

Founder at , an AI-native presentation tool. Think Cursor, but for slides. The thesis is simple: how you present something matters as much as what you're presenting. You bring the thinking, Chronicle handles the structure and design.

Accel led one of the largest rounds () of its time, and we brought on stellar angels from Google, Slack, Stripe, and Atlassian. We've since grown the team to 20 across San Francisco 🇺🇸, Australia 🇦🇺, and India 🇮🇳, and the next chapter of Chronicle is taking shape.

On GTM and product, I'm obsessed with the First 60 seconds of a user's experience. They need to feel the difference immediately, enough to place Chronicle in their workflow so that the next time a high-stakes deck comes up, it's the first tool they reach for. Not a marginal improvement. A 10x upgrade over whatever they were using. That bar didn't come from intuition alone. It came from a set of product principles ↓ we refined through years of shipping and watching what actually stuck.

That obsession showed up in the results. We went viral with our , then again with , and earned on Product Hunt, up against products like Notion, Cursor and Lovable. Hundreds of thousands of users and thousands of world-class teams now rely on Chronicle for their highest-stakes work.

On the side, I'm constantly tinkering. I spent 20 years playing competitive football, traveling to watch the sport at its highest level: the in Russia, the 2024 EUROs in Germany, and plenty in between. Eventually the competitive energy found a new outlet in distance running. I've been running half marathons since, with a personal best at Oakland in 2026. The obsession got specific enough that I designed and built my own marathon tracking app from scratch: . Solo project, every pixel and line of code.

Coffee runs in the family. Generations of my extended family have been in the sugar and coffee business, so the ritual came before the obsession. That familiarity turned into something more intentional over the years: seeking out roasteries across , geeking out over how different regions approach everything from sourcing to serving. At home, we have a full espresso and drip setup. And I keep a running log plus rating of every spot we visit. That habit eventually became this SF bakery and , a guide to every corner of the city worth stopping in.

The mid-2010s

Before Chronicle, I was in Singapore at , Asia Pacific's #1 luxury company, operating across 15 countries from Singapore to Vietnam, with a portfolio of over 120 brands including Hermès, Dior, Bvlgari, and Chanel. With the Group CEO, I worked on the strategic bets that would define the company's next chapter: luxury ecommerce. Decks were bread and butter. Storytelling was essential to convince.

My career started in strategy. Three years at , working directly with the APAC Chairman. The work was high-stakes but what surprised me was how often the outcome lived or died in the deck. At Luxasia, that pattern intensified. Teams across 15 countries would ask for my slide templates after workshops. My slide library quietly became the unofficial standard across the region. That was the thread I couldn't ignore: Storytelling weren't soft skills bolted on at the end. They were how decisions actually got made.

Board games have been my way of building community wherever I've lived. The obsession with board games ran deep enough that I eventually designed my own deck: . It started as a side project and turned into a proper design exercise. Typography, color, card weight.

The early 2010s

Rewind further: , where I did a bachelor's in Computational Physics. Simulations and mathematical models by day. Typography, layout, and color theory by night, entirely self-taught. Two worlds that had no reason to overlap. But that intersection, analytical rigour meeting visual instinct, turned out to be the foundation for everything.

At 16, I put design to work for the first time. I built an online store selling . Every seller had access to the same inventory. The difference was the storefront: cleaner design, better visuals, customization that made each purchase feel considered. People paid more and came back because the experience felt a cut above. Same product, different packaging, different result entirely. That lesson has held up for fifteen years: taste is leverage, and the way something is presented changes whether it sells.

The 2000s

Design showed up before I had a word for it. I collected and and spent more time redrawing them than trading them: studying the colours, the layouts, the craft of a good illustration. That discipline of looking closely spilled into everything, including academics. I in the 10th grade board exams, which made my parents proud and opened doors.

Two decades of living and working across seven cities in six countries later, that instinct still runs the show. Every product I've built, every deck I've designed, every bet I've made on taste over convention traces back to a kid hunched over a stamp collection, trying to figure out why one design felt right and another didn't.

What I Believe

01. Most decisions are two-way doors. Treat them that way. The best product teams classify every task as Leverage, Neutral, or Overhead, then pour perfectionist energy only into what actually moves retention. Everything else ships fast, stays reversible, and gets labeled "Alpha" until it earns permanence.

02. Better interfaces beat better models. Raw intelligence without discoverable, delightful flows is just noise. The highest-leverage AI work is often in the UX layer: context imports, progressive reveals, empty states that actually guide. These experiments compound into stickiness faster than any LLM upgrade.

03. Never assume users will figure it out. The best products educate from minute one and never stop. Guided onboarding, daily tips, in-product experiments that reward curiosity. Then keep raising the bar: match growing skill with fresh challenge so people stay in flow, not frustration.

04. Data without taste produces soulless products. Every metric is a proxy. The question is always: a proxy for what? When retention is flat, don't chase session length. Ask what the numbers are missing about delight, trust, and the moments users describe in interviews but never show up in dashboards.

05. Build the conditions, not the answers. The PM's job isn't to be the smartest person in the room. It's to run the process that surfaces the smartest ideas from everywhere in the org. Steel-man exercises, structured workshops, genuine dissent. Products built this way feel inevitable because they are: they carry the fingerprints of the entire team.

Media

Connect

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or say hello at tejas@tejgw.com.

Crafted on the sunny shores of San Francisco