If you’ve ever signed up at a gym, you’ll know that trainers do two things. They count your reps as you lift, and then they increase your weights, sometimes over your protests. Increasing weights is a sign that your body is comfortable with what you are doing right now, and that it’s now ready to take on more weights—all to add muscle, lose some pounds or to hit your goals.
Over the last few weeks, at The Ken, we’ve been training hard as well. We recently launched stunning products like visual stories, multiple newsletters, and new bundles like Borderless and Echelon, all of which have been lapped up by our subscribers. We piloted a narrative workshop for leaders at high-growth companies, and we’ve been overwhelmed by the response we’ve received. And our audio team has been silently building multiple products—which I can’t wait for you to discover over the next few weeks.
As our products grow at a rapid clip and gain traction, we’re doing what every trainer wants us to do.
We’re increasing the weights.
Say hello to the new hires in the engineering, audio, and learning teams at The Ken.
Pranesh
Pranesh is one of The Ken’s more unconventional hires.
When we set out to hire an additional front-end developer, we interviewed dozens of candidates, but Pranesh stood out for a single, overriding reason.
He was a completely self-taught developer.
In fact, he’s never been to college.
Instead, what he did was spend hours on online courses over several years learning coding, right from the basics, until he got better and better. It took him years. It was harder than it sounded. It was lonely. And during this time, he did some odd content creation gigs to pay the bills.
Today, Pranesh joins our growing engineering team as a front-end developer. And with his addition, we expect to increase the velocity and quality of our product launches.
When he’s not watching YouTube to learn coding, he enjoys cooking—he claims his signature dishes are pasta with classic béchamel sauce and any dish with paneer.
Send him your favourite recipes and bug reports to pranesh at the ken dot com
Habib
Right from the beginning, we’ve always built using WordPress.
There are many reasons for this. WordPress is great for content management systems; and with some smart integrations, it can be made to work for running subscriptions as well.
But our engineering team took it one level further at The Ken and built several custom frameworks, workflows, and code, which is the foundation on which all our products are built. This is what enabled us to launch a completely new edition in Southeast Asia, multiple newsletters, and complex products all through the year.
Habib joins us to make that muscle stronger.
Based in the small town of Samastipur, Bihar, Habib joins as a WordPress Developer to bolster our already formidable engineering team.
He also enjoys playing chess and carrom, and is a proud member of the pet brigade at The Ken. But unlike the rest of his colleagues, he has a pair of rabbits.
You can say hello to him at habib at the-ken dot com
Savio
All bad introductions start with the phrase ‘X needs no introduction’, followed by a long speech introducing the person.
But in this case, that’s literally true. Savio needs no introduction, because we’d already introduced him before.
In 2019, Savio joined us as The Ken’s first Training Editor. For the next 1.5 years, he meticulously hired, trained, and mentored fresh journalism school graduates and reporters into the stars they are today. Along with our editorial and desk team, he also consolidated our processes, styles, and storytelling techniques. This is a big reason why new hires and reporters were able to hit the ground running, and could write stories with the depth and style that subscribers have come to expect from us.
Savio moved on from The Ken for personal reasons in 2020 and has since been on a break, freelancing and working on specific projects.
So, when we set up a learning vertical with Ruhi, which is seeing significant traction, we thought—hey, who better to lead this team than than the person who’d already done it before.
And that’s how Savio joined us back.
Savio has a wealth of experience spanning nearly 15 years at Reuters, where he worked on a range of individual and managerial roles—reporting, writing, editing, managing, and training dozens of writers and reporters. He understands how persuasive stories and narratives are crafted, and what works, and what doesn’t.
Our pitch for the narrative workshop is simple—if the ability to think, craft, and deliver compelling narratives in a variety of circumstances is what differentiates great leaders and their companies, then who better to learn it from than some of the most experienced narrative experts at The Ken, India’s most respected business narrative storytelling platform?
Savio is one of them.
You can email him your thoughts at savio at the-ken dot com
Sneha
Sneha first applied to The Ken exactly a year back, in Feb 2021, when she had just finished working on an audio series on Big Data for Newslaundry. We had some conversations, but things didn’t quite click.
Sneha then applied to us again in August, when she found out we were hiring for the head of audio. She went through several rounds of interviews, and even sent in some great pitches.
Again, things didn’t quite click.
Throughout this period, Sneha continued to stay in touch, and continued to do excellent work as a freelancer.
In January, we once again opened hiring for a Podcast Host. And that’s why, today, a full year after she first wrote to us, I’m really thrilled to have her join us to produce and host one of our podcasts, which will be launched very soon. Sneha’s curiosity, sensitivity, and her personality will make this one of our most beloved shows, and will really strengthen our audio offering to our subscribers. She’s already demonstrated how persistent she can be when she really wants something, and is good at it.
This is also just the beginning. We have more hires in the pipeline, including another podcast host and producer who will be joining us in a couple of weeks. And there are more people, just like Sneha, who have been writing to us for months, really interested in the direction that we are going with audio. I’m really excited and I think we are becoming a magnet for some of the best audio talent in Asia.
Sneha studied Economics at UPenn and Singapore Management University, and has been a freelance journalist for the last four years. When she’s not producing audio shows, she spends her time reading, lounging and swimming. In her own words, she’s also a “struggling Instagram influencer” and a “devout fan of Tarla Dalal”. 😀
And if you were wondering, yes, she does have pets—two lovely doggos named Idli and Podi.
Say hello to her at sneha at the ken dot com
Oh, by the way, we are growing at a rapid clip, and we are still hiring across all functions like editorial, marketing, sales, and growth.
If you’d like to work alongside some of the sharpest, friendliest, funniest, and most ambitious people in India and Southeast Asia—whether journalists, engineers, podcasters or marketers—take a look at our Careers section.
If you can’t find what you are looking for, just drop us a nice email at [email protected] telling us what you’d like to do and why.
