Yezdi Lashkari Email & Phone Number

Mumbai, Maharashtra, In

Busy at work on my next venture to provide frictionless digital consumer credit to a new generation of young, aspirational online consumers in India and SE Asia by providing "credit as a service" with an ecosystem of partners. We're hiring! Looking for passionate, motivated ninjas with experience across back end platforms, payments, risk, data analytics and consumer UX. Come join our young team and be part of what we hope is one of the most exciting new companies to come out of India over the next 10 years

Mumbai, Maharashtra, In

Strategic Advisor and member, BOD

Redmond, Washington, Us

Mentor to startups at the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator

Us

Chennai, Tamilnadu, In

Stanford, Ca, Us

San Francisco, California, Us

P&L Management & Operating Experience• Responsible for Mafia Wars and Café World, two global social game P&Ls • Mafia Wars: Grew 2012 revenue to double projected revenue (projection by US team in Dec ‘11). Have grown key P&L metrics every quarter since taking ownership of P&L in Dec 2011. Called out by CEO as “best in company (P&L execution)” • Café World: Drove 6x net margin growth (QoQ) in Q1 2013High Impact Innovation• First team across Zynga to launch subscriptions as new revenue stream. Demonstrated significant revenue lift for game P&Ls. Led creation of Zynga-wide “Subscriptions Playbook” for all game studios • Conceptualized, designed and launched Fight Arena, a significant new PvP fighting system in Mafia Wars. Has re-energized player community and won praise from CEO, COO and senior design leaders. Fight Arena now contributes ~20% of total revenue of the business Strategic and Organizational Leadership• Helped create and drive strategy with India management team to transform Zynga India from just another remote office to a critical location, by taking calculated risks on high impact innovation, focusing on world class P&L execution and building a winning organizational culture. • Managed ~100 people across multiple teams and all product functions (PMs, Producers, Game Designers, CTOs, Engineers, QA, Artists, UI Designers, Analysts, Community/CS) The Mafia Wars India team has won 3 Zynga global awards since taking ownership in Dec 2011 reflecting the impact of the team's achievements companywide:1) Zynga CEO Special Feature Award, Q1 2013 2) Zynga Design Award, Q4 20123) Zynga Innovators Award, Q1 2012

Advised, angel invested and mentored various entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley

Mumbai, Maharashtra, In

Member of senior management team reporting directly to founder/CEO Rajesh Jain (one of India’s most successful early internet entrepreneurs):o Defined consumer strategy, roadmap, GTM for mobile premium content (VAS) marketplaceo Delivered board and investor presentations in partnership with CEOLed team to design and launch India’s first direct to consumer mobile content marketplace o Successful pitched, signed up and on-boarded diverse group of content publishers for launcho Hired and groomed successor prior to returning to the US

Co-founded mXact, a cross-media, contextual marketing and lead gen platform for publishers of classifieds (newspapers, yellow pages)

Redmond, Washington, Us

Worked on special assignment directly for CEO Steve Ballmer• Chartered to make business case and influence next gen Windows roadmap to embrace cloud computing trend based on learning from Microsoft’s most advanced customers. Role entailed understanding customers’ innovations, then successfully partnering with and convincing key executives and product leaders across all of Microsoft’s platform businesses • Helped shape new platform roadmap, key parts of which are now shipping in live products. Championed successful acquisition of Softricity ($100M+) as part of new platform strategy Chief of Staff to senior executive in charge of all Microsoft storage platforms and businesses• Chartered to align business and product roadmaps of multiple business groups reporting to executive• Helped drive alignment of high availability strategy across Windows, SQL and Exchange divisions

Redmond, Washington, Us

Led product team for Data Protection Manager (a new product category in enterprise storage) • Data Protection Manager signaled Microsoft’s entry into the enterprise storage market• One of the few Microsoft v1 products to be hailed as ‘game-changer’ by analysts • Data Protection Manager is still a core pillar of Microsoft System Center software suiteLed divisional internet infrastructure PM team for Microsoft’s first SaaS apps offering for SMBs

*** Acquired by Microsoft in 1998 ****Co-founded Firefly, the Internet leader in collaborative filtering, personalization and user profiling technologies for e-commerce and content discovery. Co-authored business plan, raised financing and helped grow company to ~100 peopleFirefly led the creation of the first Internet Privacy standard with Netscape, Microsoft and the W3CHelped negotiate deal with Yahoo!, Firefly’s first major customer o Pitched proposal to board, built initial relationship, defined offering and customer experienceo Led team to integrate Firefly technology into successful launch of the My Yahoo! portalMicrosoft acquired Firefly in 1998. Firefly’s technology is still deployed across Microsoft’s cloud and mobile services as Microsoft Account (previously branded as Windows LiveID and Microsoft Passport )

M. S., Mit Media Lab

M.S., Computer Sciences

B. Tech, Computer Science & Engineering