More About Me
More About Me
Hi! I'm Aran Ansari and I'm currently and living a Digital Nomad lifestyle (currently in Somerville, MA). I was born and raised in Belmont, MA with two older sisters and amazing parents.
My father is an Iranian-born psychiatrist, and is the most logical thinker I've ever known. My mother is a Venezuelan-born translator/paralegal/painter, who happens to be the most creative person I've ever known! Being brought up in this unique and eclectic household meant I developed a balance of rationale and intuition. A perfect split down the middle of left-brain and right-brain.
I love being outside, listening to music, cooking, being active (frisbee, basketball, soccer, golf) and spending time with my lifelong friends and girlfriend. I'm currently planning to build a tiny home in the woods of Vermont! 🌲
For college I attended University of Massachusetts, Amherst for the Isenberg School of Business. There I majored in Finance, learning the ins-and-outs of Excel spreadsheets and Income Statements. I was also able to pursue a minor in Economics - where I was radicalized into Marxism and Capitalism equally - and Information Technology - where I began my habit of being the worst coder in a room full of great engineers. I knew I didn't want to pursue the conventional path my business school was nudging me towards, Big 4 Accounting school and gruntwork in cubicles, which meant many of the roles I found were outside of school.
My first notable internship was an unpaid one at a NYC startup called Gigzolo (acq. Glia), which was a marketplace for live event entertainment booking. Hosts could come on Gigzolo and book a wedding band, hoola hooper, or breakdancing troupe, and my role at the company was to onboard these bands - the supply side of the marketplace.
Next, I went on to work with my sister at YearUp where I was simply tasked with researching and collecting data on relevant foundations that the grantwriting team could reach out to and pitch. I got a taste of what working for a large (albeit philanthropic) organization in the city was like - wore a tie and uncomfortable shoes everyday and spent ~$20 for lunch daily (twice as much as I'd make in an hour!).
Post graduation in 2019, I was set on startups and working in a high-growth/high-impact position. For a while, the job search was tough. It seemed like early-stage companies didn't want to take a risk on an inexperienced grad. In parallel, I was toying with the idea of launching my own product (which, now knowing how hard a product launch is, is very laughable in retrospect) and trying my hand at entrepreneurship. The idea was simple - a way for local people to chip in and support a business they care about. Like a GoFundMe but exclusively for SMBs. Early into my market research for a product like this, I discovered a firm called Mainvest that was doing something very similar, and infact extended the idea from being a donation to an actual investment. As a finance major, this really excited me and I dug in. Imagine my surprise when 2/3 of the cofounders had studied at UMass Amherst, and one was a Finance Major. I immediately reached out and the rest is history.
Now, 3 years later, and I've helped build the company from sub-500 person userbase to the tens of thousands of users it has today. Touching every facet of the business I have been lucky enough to see how the sausage is made in the Ops/Sales processes, finance and accounting, marketing, and especially the product development cycle. As a Product Manager, my team and I experimented with virtually every User Experience on the site, and made data-informed decisions and strategies.
I also like to tinker on the side with a few projects I'm hoping to launch as full-fledged products one day. See Anywhere and Mixtape. Although I'm an amateur coder, I'd like to think my ideas are pretty good. :)
If you've made it this far, I love you. Please reach out and say hello 💙.