Meet Atish, our new head of growth engineering

Our Growth team is constantly iterating and evolving as we build resources that help creators thrive, and we’re excited to welcome Atish Das Sarma on board to continue leading that mission. Before joining us as the Head of Growth Engineering, Atish held notable roles at Apple, Twitter, and Google. Get to know more about his experience, team, and thoughts on the creator economy:

Tell us about some of your previous roles.

Working at Apple, I was responsible for a few initiatives, including iCloud subscriptions growth. We drove significant growth to the iCloud subscription-based service, which is a key part of the growing services category of Apple that brought over $60B in annual revenue in 2021. During my time at Twitter, I was responsible for end-to-end optimization in the revenue world again and the business impact measurement.

You have an extensive background in data science and have pivoted to growth engineering. What drew you to this area?

Joining Google over a decade ago, I had a bit of a hangover from focusing on research and began developing a fascination with driving product impact. I found that Google was one of those companies that sat in between, where you could straddle both worlds. Now I focus on product impact but leverage my strong foundations in data and measurement. Growth engineering is the product-oriented impact that is anchored on combining intuition and data driven insights.

What excites you about the creator economy?

For me, it's more than just the mission. The whole creator economy is going through a fundamental evolution and is poised to grow substantially. From a technical standpoint, there’s great potential and space to address growth and retention challenges, and I wanted to participate.

I’m looking forward to building out initiatives and work streams over a period of time that can inflect both creator and member growth and retention. Essentially, we can help creators grow and scale their businesses in ways they may not know today and simply help members identify, subscribe to, retain, and derive value from creators they are interested in.

How would you describe your leadership style?

I like to foster a team of healthy debate and feedback. As a leader, it is essential for me to create a safe space for my team to share and receive feedback on a consistent basis — more frequently than an annual review — so that we can all learn from each other. I’m also interested in developing a diverse team in all areas. It’s been my experience that having different perspectives from various backgrounds creates a highly successful team.

What advice would you give to people looking to join your team?

I encourage people who come in to bring their perspectives. If they're new to Patreon, that first impression brings valuable insights because you only get one chance at a fresh perspective. Don’t be afraid to be ambitious. Folks who are deeply invested in their personal careers are people who are ambitious, and I feel like that always mirrors their impact on the company.