About
Twenty-eight years of writing, building and measuring, often at once.
I have worked as a journalist, a founder and an analyst, usually at the same time. Marain is the studio I do all three from now.
The three run side by side below, by year.
- Building · 1998
Pascal at thirteen, then a company.
My first program was in Pascal, at thirteen. I wrote C and Clipper for pocket money through school, and in 1998 I turned that into a company that built more than a hundred websites on a content management system I wrote by hand. That system was acquired. The dot-com crash took the rest.
- Writing · 2001
A newsroom, from conflict zones to dog shows.
I left my first company for a newsroom in 2001 and spent the next six years reporting on the human condition, from conflict zones to dog shows. 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.
- Writing
A science show, a national desk, a channel built from nothing.
At CNN-IBN I produced and anchored my own weekly science show, Connect, and worked the national desk covering politics and the political economy alongside science and technology. At NewsX I was one of the youngest executive producers in Indian television, part of the small team that planned and built the channel, hired into it, and put it on air.
- Writing
Three newsrooms joined into one.
At Mint I built the video desk and helped join the print, online and video newsrooms into one. Its founding editor, Raju Narisetti, calls that the world’s first print, online and video integrated newsroom.
A newsroom trains you to work out what a complicated thing means and say it plainly before the deadline. Most positioning problems need the same.
- Measuring · 2008
Numbers and people, read at the same time.
In 2008 I co-founded an analytics firm doing political and market research, quantitative and qualitative together, for politicians, property developers, consumer goods companies and funding agencies.
- Measuring
Search paths, reviews, a map of millions of articles.
Through the agency years I built measurement tools: search-path analysis that reconstructed what a buyer was actually trying to find out, review mining across the whole population of reviews instead of a sample, and a map of millions of articles built to show where nobody was talking.
- Measuring
A metric in every cell.
For the Gates Foundation in India I wrote a measurement framework with a named metric in every cell of it, and stated in the document that no benchmarking data existed yet, so the framework’s first job was to generate its own.
- Building · 2018
Where a gate decides.
When the Statue of Unity opened in 2018, its ticketing and gates ran on software I wrote in two days: C on a Raspberry Pi at every gate, each reporting to a central hub that recorded every transaction.
- Measuring · 2019
Twenty-nine countries, nothing sent to a server.
In 2019 my company was analyzing narrative across twenty-nine European countries, reducing concept space into maps a human analyst could read, with all the processing happening in the browser and no data transported to a server. I chose that in 2019, before clients asked for it.
- Measuring
The wrong call.
See below.
- Building · December 2023
A streaming platform, acquired.
Later I co-founded a streaming platform that let media companies launch a full service in weeks rather than years, and it was acquired in December 2023.
- Building · 2026
Building again, mostly in the open.
In 2026 I went back to building: products of my own, open-source tools, and first versions and fundraising stories for other companies. Fifteen pieces of work so far, most of them since September. They are on the front page.
The record
Four companies founded, two sold.
- 4
- companies founded
- 2
- sold: Laminar, Elephants & Monkeys
- 2009
- coaching early-stage founders since
- 10→100
- people in the India digital practice at Publicis, one office to four
- 2,000
- people across six Asian markets, in the integrated-planning remit I led
- $20M
- a year of P&L, run directly
Laminar, the streaming platform business, was acquired by APMC in December 2023. Elephants & Monkeys, the digital agency I founded in 2008, was acquired into 2020 Social and then into MSLGROUP, part of Publicis Groupe, in 2010.
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 the region, an organization of close to 2,000 people across six Asian markets. I have carried a P&L of roughly twenty million dollars a year, run directly. The clients were some of the largest brands in the world: P&G, Coca-Cola and Sony Mobile among them, across beauty, beverages, consumer electronics and beer in a dozen markets.
At Xynteo I was Chief Digital Officer, advising Unilever and Shell among others on how they went to market and how they talked about it.
The name
Marain is a designed language.
I do the same between the people who fund a thing and the people who build it.
The wrong call
I overrode the model.
That is why every system I build now logs a human override with a written reason.
When I’m wrong, I say so in public.
Narendra Nag. info@marain.space