With over twenty years in marketing, curiosity has been my most consistent trait.
It all started with an Introduction to E-commerce class at the University of Illinois, where I first learned about Customer Lifetime Value and how e-commerce was booming because of the tracking and measurement possible online that brick and mortar stores could never replicate. The concept and the technology fascinated me.
Where the Rules Haven't Been Written
That fascination turned into a career, starting in 2004 at Digitas, building digital programs for brands like FedEx, Eli Lilly, and Allstate. At the time, digital marketing was largely undefined. There were no best practices because there was barely a practice. Questions like "How to measure performance?" or "How to build experiences that actually convert?" didn't have clear answers. That uncertainty didn't intimidate me: it pulled me in.
In 2008, as I joined OMD, I led the first behavioral targeting campaign for Dell, using Yahoo! search data to identify potential buyers. From the outside, it looked like magic. I worked closely with the Yahoo! team to unpack how search signals connected to display at the user level. That experience shaped a core belief of mine: the greatest opportunities exist where the rules haven't been written yet.
Intel then challenged me to optimize media weekly against awareness data that only came in quarterly. I partnered with Google's DoubleClick and Omniture to build a measurement system that closed that gap. The Advertising Research Foundation recognized it with a David Ogilvy award.
A Decade of Unanswered Questions at AWS
I carried that mindset to AWS, where I spent nearly a decade asking unanswered questions. In 2012, cloud computing was a concept most people hadn't heard of. I developed the company's first customer lifetime value model, which became the foundation for a $40M paid search program. I built the marketing analytics function from the ground up, ensured AWS ranked #1 for "What is Cloud Computing?" on Google, and contributed to the first AWS TV campaign.
I worked to understand why EC2 customers adopt RDS, and why ElasticSearch and S3 sell together. Each initiative started with a question no one could confidently answer, which is exactly what made it worth pursuing.
Cloudflare, SurveyMonkey, and the Power of Customer Behavior
At Cloudflare, that same curiosity drove successful trigger-based expansion programs. Instead of focusing on outcomes, I focused on understanding customer behavior. Why do customers grow their usage? How do they actually use the product day to day? How can the company show up as a trusted partner rather than just a vendor? Those questions, more than any tool or budget, drove meaningful results.
At SurveyMonkey, as CMO, that approach led to rethinking long-standing assumptions. Bringing media in-house and eliminating millions in agency spend wasn't a cost-cutting decision — it was the result of questioning why the status quo existed in the first place.
The AI Boom and the Hardest Questions Yet
At DigitalOcean, I entered the next wave: the AI boom. The questions got harder fast: "How do you launch an AI product in a market that is still forming?" "How do you continuously introduce new LLM models without overwhelming customers?" "How do you help developers choose the right infrastructure when even experts are still learning?"
I worked closely with AMD and Nvidia to understand their technology, collaborated with engineers, wrote content, and went deep enough to fully understand both the product and the customer. The work wasn't outsourced. The learning wasn't abstract.
Why I Built CurioInsight
That's what led me to build CurioInsight.
In the age of AI and an extremely fast-changing environment, I want to learn by rolling up my sleeves and working with AI-native companies. I want to understand how founders are building their businesses from scratch using this revolutionary technology. This is the third revolution I have been part of: digital advertising, cloud computing, and now AI. The best way to learn it is to be inside it, working with multiple businesses, helping them grow while I grow too.
CurioInsight is designed for exactly that environment. It allows me to work across multiple AI-native companies, at different stages, solving different problems. The breadth accelerates learning in a way a single role cannot.
After years of asking better questions, this feels like the right place to focus.
If you're thinking about what growth looks like for your business, reach out: amit@curioinsight.com