Podcast: Scaling a TMC built on modern infrastructure
Spotnana leadership team
Redefining travel for the 21st century
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Steve SinghExecutive Chairman & CEOSteve SinghExecutive Chairman & CEO
Steve serves as Spotnana’s Executive Chairman and CEO in addition to his role as Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, a Spotnana investor. Steve was the founder and CEO of Concur, and he served on the Executive Board of SAP running SAP’s cloud business group.
Steve also serves as the Chairman of IDG, the Executive Chairman of Troop, Magnify, Center, Archway, and Direct Travel, and he serves on the board of Clari and Leaf Logistics.
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Sarosh WaghmarFounder, Co-Chairman, & Chief Product OfficerSarosh WaghmarFounder, Co-Chairman, & Chief Product Officer
Sarosh has spent over 20 years building successful businesses in the travel space. As the Founder, Co-Chairman, and Chief Product Officer of Spotnana, he leads the company’s efforts to build the industry’s first Travel-as-a-Service Platform. His passion is to provide the travel industry with a modern technology stack that opens the door to a new generation of traveler experiences.
Before Spotnana, Sarosh founded WTMC, which was the first travel management company to build direct connections to global airlines at the highest possible level of certification. Outside of Spotnana, Sarosh loves cooking and sharing meals with colleagues, friends, and family.
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Vikram BhambriSVP ProductVikram BhambriSVP Product
With over 25 years of experience as a business and product management leader, Vikram has a proven track record of creating and delivering successful products from inception to launch for companies like DataStax, Microsoft, Dell EMC, and IBM. Holding 7 US and 2 international patents, he has driven significant revenue growth and led large global teams to build scalable product portfolios. His expertise spans Cloud, data platforms, and storage solutions, with notable achievements including the launch of AstraDB at DataStax, managing over $2B in revenue at Dell EMC, and leading the highly successful launch of the Microsoft Azure Platform. Vikram is known for building strong teams, making data-driven decisions, solving complex problems, and aligning products with business objectives.
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Shilpi NarangVP Customer ExperienceShilpi NarangVP Customer Experience
Shilpi leads Spotnana’s Customer Success and Travel Operations teams. She ensures Spotnana delivers exceptional experiences to customers and travelers while accelerating customer adoption, growth, and value. With over 20 years of experience in customer-centric leadership roles, Shilpi is known for delivering customer-driven growth, driving operational effectiveness, and building high-performance organizations that scale.
Prior to Spotnana, Shilpi was the Chief Customer Officer at Bolt. She also worked at Meta’s first enterprise SaaS business, spearheading the growth of their largest and most complex customers. She earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degree from USC and an MBA from UCLA. Outside of Spotnana, Shilpi loves to travel the globe with her family, and she is excited to work at a company that combines her professional and personal passions.
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Ashish ChaudharyVP EngineeringAshish ChaudharyVP Engineering
Ashish Chaudhary is dedicated to shaping product strategy, envisioning innovative ideas, and leading a team of product and design experts to create products that both align with customer needs and drive business growth.
Ashish brings extensive experience in scaling companies, having held leadership roles at American Express, Microsoft, PayPal, Blackhawk Network, Twilio, and most recently at Weave Communications, where he took the company public on the NYSE. Ashish holds a Master’s degree in machine design from Indian Institute of Technology – Madras.
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Johnny ThorsenVP Business Development for Content DistributionJohnny ThorsenVP Business Development for Content Distribution
Johnny is a global technology evangelist in the corporate travel and mobile world with proven ability to start new business and develop new services within large companies. His experience includes negotiating and closing “impossible deals” between global enterprise buyers, start-up suppliers, and major established industry players.
Johnny’s extensive travel technology background ranges from writing code, to marketing new products and services, to creating completely new business models that drive disruptive innovation. He has held senior positions in companies such as GetThere, Sabre, Travelport, conTgo, Concur, SAP, Mezi and American Express Digital Labs prior to joining Spotnana.
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Jessica BartlettVP PeopleJessica BartlettVP People
Jessica leads the Global People Team at Spotnana who focuses on recruiting, retaining and developing Spotnana’s most valuable asset, its people. She strives to cultivate an environment where employees thrive, grow and develop, feel valued, respected and included, and have the best moments of their career.
Jessica has led people teams at tech companies through high growth stages, including IPOs, as well as ownership and leadership changes. Prior to Spotnana, Jessica was Head of People at Braze leading them through a successful IPO in November 2021 (Nasdaq: BRZE) and GroundTruth (formerly xAd)
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Bill BrindleVP Content & CommercialsBill BrindleVP Content & Commercials
Bill is responsible for Spotnana’s supplier relationships. Prior to Spotnana, Bill served as COO of American Express Global Business Travel, where he led the company’s global operational delivery teams. He also served for many years as COO of HRG, where he led innovations in HRG’s technology, distribution, product development, and client data, as well as leading the growth and ultimate sale of its Fraedom payments business to Visa.
Starting his career in the Civil Service, Bill moved into the travel industry in 1980, holding various positions in distribution technology with British Caledonian Airways and Amadeus Global Travel Distribution before joining HRG.
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Bill TillmanVP Revenue & GrowthBill TillmanVP Revenue & Growth
Bill oversees Spotnana’s go-to-market strategy globally and leads Spotnana’s sales organization. Bill was the first sales hire at Outtask, where he led the launch of Cliqbook Travel in the US before relocating to London to build Outtask’s European business. After Concur acquired Outtask in 2006, Bill held multiple leadership roles across Concur’s Global and SMB Travel & Expense business units, helping grow revenue from $50M to $2B.
Bill spent six years with SAP after Concur was acquired in 2014 and led SMB sales. Before joining Spotnana, Bill led sales and customer success for Thrive Global.
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Jugdeep BalVP PartnershipsJugdeep BalVP Partnerships
Jugdeep leads Spotnana’s partnership strategy and execution. With over 25 years of experience as a business and partnerships leader, Jugdeep has a proven track record of building industry-leading partnership ecosystems for companies like SAP Concur (Nasdaq: SAP), TripIt (acquired by Concur in 2011), Amperity (Series C Customer Data Platform) and Amplitude (Nasdaq: AMPL). He is passionate about building durable and scalable partnerships that drive value for Spotnana, our customers, and our partners.
After SAP acquired Concur in 2014, Jugdeep spent six years with SAP and led the partnerships team for the Concur Platform App Center, consisting of 300+ ISV/Tech partners globally. Outside of Spotnana, Jugdeep enjoys traveling and dining at restaurants with family and friends and is excited to work at a company that merges his professional and personal interests.
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Jessica LewisVP FinanceJessica LewisVP Finance
Jessica is responsible for overseeing company financial operations and projecting future investments and plans.
Prior to Spotnana, Jessica spent over a decade at Concur and SAP where she held multiple leadership roles throughout the finance and accounting organizations. In addition, she worked at Ernst & Young providing audit and assurance services. Jessica holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Accounting and Financial Management from the University of San Diego and is a Certified Public Accountant.
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Justin SchusterVP MarketingJustin SchusterVP Marketing
Justin leads the Spotnana marketing team, which is responsible for the company’s brand, communications, product marketing, and demand generation. He most recently led marketing at Blend as it grew from a startup through to a successful IPO.
Prior to joining Blend, Justin spent nearly 5 years in ad tech serving as Corporate CMO at Acxiom and Head of Marketing at LiveRamp. Earlier in his career, Justin held leadership positions at Lithium, MarketTools, and Symantec. He is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego, and holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business.
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Jini ChatterjeeVP LegalJini ChatterjeeVP Legal
Jini Chatterjee is Head of Legal at Spotnana. She oversees Spotnana’s legal function, working closely with business and technology teams across the business. Prior to Spotnana, she represented technology companies on commercial, corporate and IP transactions at WSGR, Skadden, and Disney/Pixar.
As a “global citizen” who grew up in India, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore and the United States, Jini is a passionate advocate of Spotnana’s mission to bring communities together through travel. When she’s not knee-deep in contracts, you can find her climbing or running near her (current) home in San Francisco, California. Jini completed her undergraduate degree at Brown University and her JD at University of Pennsylvania.
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Tiffany WoodardSenior Director, Travel OperationsTiffany WoodardSenior Director, Travel Operations
Tiffany leads Spotnana’s Travel Operations team. She helps streamline and improve current operational processes, while ensuring Spotnana remains a critical part of product development for our TMC partners. With over 30+ years in the travel industry, Tiffany is known for having extensive operational expertise and experience with travel technology.
Prior to joining Spotnana, Tiffany was the Chief Operating Officer at Mantic Point Solutions. She also held leadership roles at PSNGR1, Ovation Travel Group, and HRG (Hogg Robinson Group). She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Hospitality and Tourism Management from Rochester Institute of Technology. Outside of Spotnana, Tiffany loves to travel the world with her family and friends and is an avid college football fan.
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Michelle LewisDirector, Travel OperationsMichelle LewisDirector, Travel Operations
Michelle brings over 25 years of travel industry experience to Spotnana. She started her career as a travel agent and has since held numerous back-end and front-end roles. Prior to Spotnana, Michelle worked for industry giants such as Diplomat Tours, Globalstar, Casto Travel, and Navan; she facilitated travel for Oakland A’s, Discovery Network, San Jose Earthquakes, and Netflix.
Under the direction of Shilpi Narang, Michelle manages the Customer Experience Agents, Testing, Training and QC teams. -
Cynthia BeldnerHead of Customer Experience Operations & StrategyCynthia BeldnerHead of Customer Experience Operations & Strategy
Cynthia leads the Implementation and Customer Success teams for all customer segments across the life-cycle. She is an accomplished tech start-up leader, focused on digitizing the customer journey to drive value at scale.
Throughout her 10+ years in B2B SaaS at companies like Yammer, Microsoft, and Gloat, she has built and led global, hybrid teams tasked with implementation, onboarding, community, consulting services, change management, support, renewals, and operations. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Florida in Political Science with a concentration in Public Administration. -
Shilpi SalariaHead of People, IndiaShilpi SalariaHead of People, India
As the Head of Spotnana’s People Team in India, Shilpi is dedicated to enhancing organizational capabilities and fostering a culture of excellence and continuous improvement. Her focus revolves around nurturing and developing high performance teams that consistently achieve exceptional results. In her role, she manages a wide spectrum of responsibilities, including overseeing India’s HR operations, learning and development initiatives, compensation, payroll and benefits administration, talent acquisition, diversity & inclusion efforts, and performance management.
Prior to Spotnana, Shilpi held key leadership roles at companies like GroundTruth, Rackspace, and NTT Data, where she successfully scaled HR practices and crafted robust people strategies to achieve organizational excellence.
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Savannah LeeHead of CommunicationsSavannah LeeHead of Communications
Savannah leads communications and public relations to elevate Spotnana’s profile in the marketplace. Prior to Spotnana, Savannah managed communications at high-growth SaaS companies ClickUp and Iterable, overseeing announcements, media relations, executive speaking engagements, and awards. In her agency days, Savannah worked at a boutique communications agency called cred where she built and managed speaking programs for high-level tech executives at companies like Instacart, Rippling, and Flexport.
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Manish NagpalHead of Engineering - AirManish NagpalHead of Engineering - Air
Manish leads the Engineering team for Air, driving the development of a best-in-class flight booking experience and establishing deep direct integrations, including NDCs, with some of the world’s top airlines. His focus is on solving long-standing industry challenges and revolutionizing the travel landscape through Spotnana’s Travel as a Service platform.
Prior to Spotnana, Manish helped build Accelya/Farelogix’s core NDC product, encompassing offer and order management. Throughout his career, Manish has excelled in various capacities, including overseeing technology, sales engineering, and product portfolios. His unwavering passion for bringing innovation to airline technology remains at the forefront of his endeavors.
Manish is a prominent industry contributor and influencer, recognized as a leading voice in NDC and airline retailing. -
Matthew Riccio, PHDHead of Data Analytics & ReportingMatthew Riccio, PHDHead of Data Analytics & Reporting
Dr. Matthew T. Riccio, MA, MPhil, PhD, is Head of Data Analytics & Reporting at Spotnana. With more than 15 years experience in private, public, industry and academic settings, Matt specializes in the applied use of data and advanced analytics for actionable insights and recommendations.
A former National Science Foundation research fellow and faculty member at both New York and Columbia University, Matt now spearheads Spotnana’s data-related initiatives. In his role, he liaises between key internal and external stakeholders to meaningfully capture, track, visualize and report on critical metrics to, ultimately, positively impact KPIs via data-driven decision making.
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Sheryl NeutuchHead of Product MarketingSheryl NeutuchHead of Product Marketing
Sheryl leads Spotnana’s Product Marketing team and is responsible for communicating Spotnana’s value to customers and internal teams alike. This means articulating what customers are struggling with, how Spotnana can solve their problems, and what sets Spotnana apart in the market.
Prior to Spotnana, Sheryl spent the last decade within the advertising technology space. She has most recently served as a product marketing leader at Spotify – joining prior to their IPO – and Amazon Ads. Earlier in her career, Sheryl worked on the advertiser supply side, including publisher USA Today, and also on the advertising agency side at world leading holding companies, including Publicis, Interpublic Group, and WPP. Sheryl holds a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Rutgers College, Rutgers University.
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Saleem FaneebandSenior Director, EngineeringSaleem FaneebandSenior Director, Engineering
Saleem Faneeband is a visionary Technology Executive bringing 25 years of expertise in powering engineering for multibillion-dollar growth, building and scaling systems with roughly one billion requests per day, leading a global team of 250+ employees, streamlining acquisitions, optimizing operations, and enhancing partnerships. His experience in PayPal, NetApp, Symantec & Accenture showcases a unique blend of strategic thinking, organizational development, and technology expertise.
Saleem is leading multiple engineering functions including Data & AI, Customer setup & lifecycle and Agent Enablement
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Kevin ChengSenior Director, DevOpsKevin ChengSenior Director, DevOps
Kevin leads platform infrastructure, Devops, SRE and Quality teams with focus on building enterprise grade of reliability, scalability and quality of Spotnana travel platform.
Prior to Spotnana, Kevin was an engineering leader at Meta supporting company-wide compute, pipeline and workload management platforms. Before that, Kevin was in senior leadership roles at Adobe Systems, HPE and high growth startups. Kevin holds a Bachelor’s degree in EECS from University of California, Berkeley and MBA from Santa Clara University.
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Steven EngleDirector, ITSteven EngleDirector, IT
Steven leads Spotnana’s global IT organization, managing the IT Operations, Enterprise Applications, and Business Analytics and Reporting teams. With 20 years of experience in the technology industry, Steven is dedicated to building high-performance teams that deliver business technology solutions.
Prior to joining Spotnana, Steven held several technology leadership roles at Amazon, UnitedHealth Group, Medica, and EMC focused on delivering reliable, performant, scalable infrastructure and enterprise architectures and leading teams delivering on-prem and cloud infrastructure solutions for Fortune 100 customers. He holds Bachelor of Arts degrees from St. Olaf College in Mathematics and English with a concentration in Computer Science.
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Apurva PrakashDirector Engineering, IndiaApurva PrakashDirector Engineering, India
Apurva Prakash brings 24 years of experience to the forefront of Networking, Observability, and Security domain. Known for building a 200-strong team from the ground up and holding multiple patents, Apurva’s expertise in 4G/5G and cybersecurity is unparalleled.
At Spotnana, he leads the development of a revolutionary Travel Platform framework and API integration, merging travel needs with advanced SaaS technology.
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Angeles YugdarDirector, Global Community ServiceAngeles YugdarDirector, Global Community Service
Angeles has dedicated the last 20 years to building strong connections with TMC and Multinationals around the world, focusing on each country’s cultural uniqueness, and creating Global solutions by acknowledging local challenges and differences. She Joined Spotnana in February 2022 to facilitate the creation of the Spotnana Global Community.
Prior to Spotnana, she acted as Strategic Advisor for companies like Dnata from Emirates Group and SVP for Travel Leaders Group. Angeles was responsible for the strategic direction, development and execution of Travel Leaders’ international growth strategy. Earlier in her career, Angeles worked with the World Tourism Organization in Africa on a variety of special projects.
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Avideep AnandDirector, GrowthAvideep AnandDirector, Growth
As the Head of Growth at Spotnana, Avi is responsible for driving revenue through analytical decisioning, creating a data-driven culture to drive strategic decision-making, and defining growth-oriented playbooks across product and business teams.
Avi is a seasoned growth leader with a passion for scaling companies. She has over 15 years of experience in product and business roles at Meta, Oracle as well as advisory and board positions with startups and small businesses across various industries. Avi’s proven success lies in driving business growth through a keen grasp of market dynamics and customer requirements, ensuring exceptional customer satisfaction. Notably, she spearheaded seller growth at Facebook Marketplace by developing the market expansion playbook and pioneering product led strategies for global expansion. Her impact propelled Facebook Marketplace to scale to over 250 M monthly active sellers and greater than 1B monthly active users. Avi holds a Bachelor’s degree in Design from Apeejay Institute of Design, India and an MBA from University of San Francisco.
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Andrew SheivachmanDirector, EditorialAndrew SheivachmanDirector, Editorial
Andrew leads content marketing at Spotnana. He works with internal stakeholders and external partners to develop and execute content strategies that support Spotnana’s marketing efforts throughout the customer journey.
Prior to Spotnana he served in senior editorial roles at travel industry publication Skift and as an editor at Travel Market Report and Questex Hospitality & Travel Group. Andrew holds a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
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Sean JarettDirector, Learning & DevelopmentSean JarettDirector, Learning & Development
Sean leads the Learning & Development function, which primarily focuses on employee skill development and the application of learning that contributes to the accomplishment of business objectives. With over a decade in the corporate training space, Sean has been responsible for leading core L&D elements including Learning Analysis & Strategy, Learning Experience Design, Facilitation, and Learning Program Design & Management.
Prior to Spotnana, Sean led internal L&D teams at several high-growth tech companies, most recently Braze, where he built and led the L&D team contributing to the organization’s growth from private company through IPO to successful public company.
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Claire BladesHead of Enterprise Customer SuccessClaire BladesHead of Enterprise Customer Success
Claire Blades is a seasoned corporate travel and expense professional with almost three decades of experience. For 19 years, she was the Director of Travel and Expense for Symantec and Veritas. In this role, she developed comprehensive travel policies, confidently led her team through changes, and achieved significant cost savings and efficiency improvements, leading to a heightened traveler experience.
Claire holds a higher diploma in Leadership and several travel management certifications. She actively participates in professional associations, advancing industry best practices. Claire is excited to guide our customers through the evolving corporate travel landscape.
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Denby BruzasDirector of ImplementationsDenby BruzasDirector of Implementations
Denby has a robust background in the travel industry, spanning 25 years with significant expertise in TMC (Travel Management Company) relationships, technical management, and online booking tool deployment. At Spotnana, she serves as the Director of Implementation and TMC Success, leading a team dedicated to ensuring efficient and high-performance customer deployments across various market segments. Her role involves closely coordinating with product and engineering teams to prioritize the delivery of features and functionalities that enhance operational effectiveness.
Before joining Spotnana in 2022, Denby was Head of the Travel Solutions organization at Concur Travel. In this role, she oversaw implementations, configuration management, and fostered strong relations with TMC partners, demonstrating her leadership in driving successful travel solutions and deployment strategies.