LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/basudebchatterjee/
Current Projects + Work
My latest work is focused on entrepreneurship and getting back into creation of things (mainly software) while wearing more of the product development & engineering hats than I have in the recent past. Most of my time right now is focused on launching a consumer fintech company designed to simplify personal finance. I know it's a crowded space, but I think there's an opportunity to leverage AI and automation to flip the script on consumer finance and take much of the typical burden off of the end-user. My hypothesis is that there is value to be captured as most of the status-quo solutions out there today aggregate data, but don't do much beyond that in terms of a call to action. My goal would be to aggregate data as the baseline, but more importantly, take action on that data on behalf of the user to automate things like creating a personal budget, monitoring spend, making payments, managing debt, and even underwriting micro lines of credit. Think of personal finance on complete auto-pilot. We'll see if there are any legs to the idea. More to come later!
Investments
I also spend about 20-25% of my time managing the investment portfolio at Omnus Holdings. I would describe it as a closed-loop, "poor man's" hedge fund where I deploy my own capital to test various quant strategies. It's done well enough historically to warrant my continued attention. These days, the vast majority of my time for investments is spent researching equity/index derivatives and using single or multi-leg option strategies. My primary goal in these strategies is to generate income of ~$25-40k monthly against a base of ~$600k in the account. I invest 50% of the proceeds into long-term stock positions and recycle the remainder for the next round of income generation. I cycle this at around a 4-5 week cadence i.e. basically monthly.
Academic & Professional Background
From an academic perspective, I have an undergrad degree in engineering and followed that up with a MBA several years later (if interested in the specifics of school, dates, etc. , check my LI profile above). Ironically, I always thought I would end up doing digital circuit design or otherwise end up on the hardware side of the EE/CE equation when in school. I interned at NASA's United Space Alliance (since dissolved in 2019) and followed that up with a co-op at Analog Devices (AD) in Austin, TX. AD was starting its foray into digital chip design back in those days via DSPs (Digital Signal Processors). Lots of hype surrounded DSP computing in support of consumer electronic applications, particularly as a foundational HDTV technology. In any case, I observed the insane hours and production schedules that these companies had to conform to and ended up doing a u-turn to pursue an embedded software engineering gig out of school; the name of that company was Fujitsu Network Technologies (FNC) and that's what brought me to the DFW area.
I was still fairly close to hardware at FNC, writing low-level firmware code for embedded telecommunication systems (think multiplexers, repeaters, etc). Post-2008 financial crisis, I switched gears and ended up more in the enterprise software / technology consulting space working for a boutique firm named Pariveda Solutions. Great company; I'll write a blog post about the experience at some point. The next dozen years at Pariveda were quite the inflection point in my career; lots of exposure to different industries, company cultures, and problem spaces. Suffice it to say, consulting can accelerate one's career considerably. In 2021, the networking opportunities at one of my prior clients led me to hopping back into industry in a technology leadership role for a mid-market IoT (Internet of Things) company named CalAmp. While I learned a ton while there, I reached a mutual agreement to move on earlier this year (March 2023 to be exact). And that's a wrap and brings us to present day!