“My dad was really interested in startups. He started doing startups in the ’90s, so he wanted to move to Silicon Valley,” Rajiv Ayyangar ’05 said. Following in his father’s footsteps, Ayyangar has built a career in the tech world and is currently the CEO of Product Hunt, a website that acts as a leaderboard for startups.
Ayyangar grew up in Menlo Park, attending Las Lomitas Elementary School and La Entrada Middle School. He began playing piano at four years old, continuing to hone his skills through elementary school, middle school, and at M-A.
As a member of M-A’s Jazz Band, Ayyanger played piano all four years, dedicating a large amount of his time in high school to music. He regularly drove to San Francisco to take lessons and performed in Europe with the Jazz Band. “It was pretty intense, but it was something special,” he said.
Longtime Band teacher Frank Moura made a notable impression on Ayyangar. “He was very hands-off. He just wanted us to understand the music, and he wasn’t very performance-oriented,” Ayyangar said. “He wasn’t like, ‘We’re gonna win these competitions,’ it was like, ‘Look, show up on time and try and be creative.’”
Additionally, Ayyangar took AP Biology with Patrick Roisen, beginning a project that would inspire him to explore the field of biotechnology. For the class, Ayyangar created a simulation mirroring the process of evolution with yeast in a test tube. He was encouraged by Roisen to pursue research, and subsequently joined a Stanford University biology lab led by David Botstein, the chairman of Stanford’s Genetics department at the time.
Botstein moved from Stanford to Princeton University while Ayyangar was still at M-A. Interested in a program spearheaded by Botstein at Princeton, Ayyangar was determined to follow him. “David Botstein moved to Princeton, and he was starting this integrated science program where they teach all of the sciences in the same course. I think this is more common now, but at the time, it was really unusual,” Ayyangar explained.
After graduating from M-A, Ayyangar attended Princeton. Once there, he took Botstein’s integrative biology course and found it fascinating. “I thought, ‘This seems like a really new and sensible approach to putting all the pieces together, because all of these sciences are very related.’ It’s the same pattern again and again and again,” he said. “While it wasn’t easy, those classes, I just thought it was such a beautiful lens as to how the world could work.”
“It was not easy academically—I kind of struggled for the first time and had to learn how to study,” Ayyangar said when describing his coursework at Princeton. “It was both very difficult and really inspiring.”
At Princeton, Ayyangar explored rock climbing, modern dancing, played piano for an Afrobeat ensemble and a flamenco group, and wrote music for school plays. “I did a lot more extracurricular things at Princeton, maybe because I was having a difficult time in actual school,” he said.
Following graduation, Ayyangar became a Project Lead at Fairchild Semiconductor. “It was a very general role. We would talk with different groups inside the company, map out what they were doing, and then work with them to improve it,” Ayyangar said. “We were like internal consultants.”
“The whole time I felt this pull of the Bay Area and startups, and I kind of always thought I wanted to start a company, but didn’t really have a path,” he added. After his group at the semiconductor company dissolved in 2013, Ayyangar moved to the Bay Area.
“Initially, I was doing data science. I just kind of taught myself how to do statistical analysis, run experiments,” he said. Ayyangar then began working as a data scientist for Aviate, a startup that simplified the Android interface, in 2013.
Shortly after Ayyangar joined Aviate in 2014, it was acquired by Yahoo, ultimately changing the company’s work environment. However, through the acquisition’s tumult, Ayyangar forged bonds with his coworkers. “The company was in chaos, but I made some really good friends, two of them I later started a company with,” he said.
After leaving Aviate, Ayyangar worked for a few unsuccessful startups, but eventually started a company with his friends from Aviate. “We pivoted so many times—we were building stuff for cryptocurrency, we did stuff for personal finance, but I kind of felt like it was just really inspiring to work with those two people,” he said.
In 2019, Ayyangar’s partners had children, and the trio began working from home. “We didn’t feel like a team anymore, so we started working on tools for that to try and bridge the gap,” Ayyangar said.
The group designed Tandem, a virtual office for remote workers. “It was sort of like Discord, but for work,” Ayyangar said. “It lets you see which of your colleagues are online, and what they’re doing, some information about what they’re doing, and then you can, like, jump in and talk with them in a really low-friction way. That really exploded during the pandemic.”
“We had quite a journey that was ultimately unsuccessful. The company did not make it, but we built a lot of stuff and got to help a lot of companies work better while they were remote,” he said. Following Tandem, Ayyangar built products for Dropbox.
In 2023, Ayyangar was contacted by Product Hunt, where he began as CEO. The company was seeking to change their product, which compelled them to find new leadership. “The founder called me and said, ‘Hey, we’re looking for somebody to figure out the next chapter for this company. Would you want to take over as CEO?’” he said.
“I’m trying to figure out what the next chapter of Product Hunt is,” Ayyangar said. “Sigma, Notion, Airtable, they all launched on Product Hunt, so it’s got this long history. There are millions of people who look at Product Hunt, rely on it. There are dozens of companies that launch every single day. We get to help people build the future and see that happen.”
Ayyangar attributes his passion for startups to the opportunity they provide him to work with and help others. “I get to solve problems with people. We get to learn with each other, for each other,” he said. “We get to do things that nobody’s tried to do before. Every company’s product is different, and we’re trying to solve problems that nobody else is solving in quite the same way. It’s somewhere in between, like art, science, and engineering.”
Ayyangar’s advice to current M-A students: “Think in terms of vantage points, not long-term goals or paths. What you want to do with your life doesn’t have to be the thing forever, you can do it, and then maybe from that vantage point, see something else that’s more inspiring. Some people find it early. For some people, it takes a while.”
To those interested in launching startups: “Build something that solves a problem and try to get people to use it. And if you’re launching something on Product Hunt, shoot me an email. Big things start really, really small. They start as an app that maybe seems rough, but that solves a problem really, really well.”
