SCALER POD 12 ft.Sanjeev Barnwal, Founder, Meesho | Scaling India’s True E-commerce Marketplace

In this episode of Scaler Pod, we have Sanjeev Barnwal, the Founder and CTO of Meesho - India’s True E-commerce Marketplace. An Electrical Engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) Delhi, Sanjeev worked as a software engineer with Sony, contributing to the camera technology for DSLRs and Sony Mobile. He takes us through his journey as an entrepreneur and the challenges he faced in building Meesho from scratch. Under Sanjeev’s leadership, they have created a simple yet robust tech stack to handle scale and give users a seamless shopping experience across the country. Sanjeev shares his thoughts on the importance of user empathy and how Meesho is using the social commerce boom to target the right set of audiences for delivering millions of requests per day. Also, he highlights the mega sales and what preparation it takes to get the platform ready for handling scale and maintain a loyal customer base by prioritizing customer satisfaction. ScalerPod by Scaler is a one-of-a-kind podcast for engineers and tech enthusiasts. Our host Arnav Gupta talks to the leaders of the biggest tech companies from India and around the globe about the software engineering challenges they are solving and the products they are building for scale! #meesho #socialcommerce #ScalerPod #Podcast #Scaler #ArnavGupta #meeshoshopping #ecommerce Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction

00:23 Day in his life as Meesho's CTO and Founder

04:10 Connecting with Team and Involvement in Core Tech

06:57 His Journey from IIT to Japan

12:43 Arnav's thoughts on taking Electrical Engineering

15:48 Decoding Software vs Hardware and his learnings from Sony

21:00 Starting Fashnear and Meesho's early days

24:32 The Social Commerce Trend

26:43 Integrating with platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook etc and challenges

29:15 User Empathy and Meesho's Listen or Die(LoD) Ritual

32:25 Meesho's tech stack to handle scale and diversification

38:11 Various Tech Challenges while scaling

41:22 Importance of keeping things simple

43:33 Perf Testing, Sales and Distributed ownership

46:32 Preparing for Mega Sales and handling Traffic

53:47 Data Engineering and its Uses at Meesho

58:04 organising teams and understanding the Pods structure

1:02:09 Future Plans for Meesho and the Use of AI for better predictions

1:04:45 Advice for Young Engineers

1:07:01 Outro