Meet Kartik, an agile, driven, and curious thinker who has made a fascinating journey from biotechnology research to advertising and performance marketing. At RocketShip HQ, he brings a sharp eye for numbers, a love for understanding how businesses work, and a healthy obsession with figuring out what makes the machine tick.
Whether he’s digging into spend, preparing for client calls, or following the performance marketing funnel end to end, he enjoys understanding the decisions behind the numbers. Outside of work, you’ll find him cooking, playing chess, exploring GeoGuessr, reading about history and linguistics, or planning his next adventure through Central Asia.
The work at Rocketship HQ
Q1. What are three 3 words that you would use to describe yourself?
Agile. Driven. Curious
Q2. What do you like about your job?
I have always worked with games, either on the user acquisition side or on the monetization side. The nice side effect is that once you understand the business dynamics of what it takes to run a game/app and actually make it profitable, playing games becomes more fun, not less. You start seeing the decisions behind every ad break and every offer.
Performance marketing is the part I find genuinely interesting. You can watch the entire funnel travel end to end, and you can see, in numbers, how attention and time get bought and monetized. Very few jobs let you look at that machinery closely. Also you can see the money being spent and made almost in real-time, I find that really fun to observe.
Q3. What is a typical workday like for you?
It starts with checking how spends are behaving and whether anything looks off from the previous day. Then I go through the tasks lined up for the day, and a good chunk of time after that goes into prepping for client calls. Whatever the morning numbers and that day’s designated tasks threw up usually fills the rest. I try to manage it in a big 2-3 hours block in the morning when I’m best cognitively, and then progressively lighter blocks and planning.
CAREER JOURNEY
Q4. What was a key inflection/turning point in your career?
Eight years ago I was in biotechnology research (I used to work in a lab where we did research on drug delivery through gold nanoparticles which were bioengineered with the help of a fungi genus, no joke) and I was fairly certain I wanted out. There was a UPSC series of attempts after that and I wanted out of that as well. Then I came across an unpaid internship at an advertising company and took it. It turned into a paid internship, then a full time job, then my first proper company, and five years down the line I am here working with all of you.
Q5. Tell us about a mentor or a person who has inspired or influenced you significantly.
Two people, for completely opposite reasons.
My grandfather was a priest, and a deeply religious man. What stayed with me was not just the religion. It was that he did not practice it as something separate from himself. His daily rituals, the way he approached them, the seriousness he brought to the smallest parts of his day: he was not performing any of it, he simply was the thing he spoke about. I took the idea that you should be serious and strict about at least one thing in your life, and that it should run deep enough to be part of who you are.
My first boss taught me the opposite lesson. He is a chemical engineer who did a stint at Dow Jones in the US, got bored, prepared for UPSC, got bored of that too, and eventually landed in advertising. Today he is a full blown LinkedIn guru and an options trader. He never accepted the idea that one person can only do one thing. He preached agility constantly, and that has stayed with me: stay agile, stay coachable, stay willing to learn. I watched him do a lot of very different things well, and I wanted that for myself.
Depth in one thing, agility in everything else. I am always trying to work out the balance.
Q6. What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned over the course of your career?
Most “algorithm” problems turn out to be config problems.
This industry is smaller than it looks. The person you are negotiating with today is your reference next year.
Always try to solve problems and make money for your bosses and peers, no losses and only profits in the long run.
BEYOND WORK
Q7. Tell us about your favorite travel & food spots or experiences
I love food, so this list is much longer in my head than what fits here.
A proper Turkish breakfast is the best meal format ever invented, and it is almost entirely vegetarian by default, which helps me greatly. Van Kahvaltı Evi in Cihangir, Istanbul, was superb.
Closer to home, Bengaluru Cafe in Bengaluru does the best vada in the world. If you care about variety, no other city comes close.
Paneer Lababdar, Garlic Naan at Pavo, Jaipur, beautiful place in the beautiful city where I was born and brought up.
But my actual recommendation is Kashmir where my family comes from, specifically the Pandit side of Kashmiri food, which almost nobody outside the valley has eaten. No onion, no garlic, built on asafoetida and fennel instead, and it tastes like nothing else in Indian food. In Srinagar, Niramish near the Dalgate footbridge have nadru monje (lotus stem fritters) , nadru yakhni (Lotus stem stew) and khatta baingan.
Q8. What do you do for fun?
Chess, which I am still very much learning. Cooking, which I love. A lot of GeoGuessr, and Quizzing/Trivia. Otherwise I read about history and linguistics, and sometimes I make content around it.
Q9. What are the top 3 items on your bucket list?
Travel across Central Asia.
Reach reading and writing fluency in Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, so I can read the originals instead of translations.
Learn to drive a car. Still have not.
Q10. What is a fun fact about yourself that not many people might know?
I run an Instagram page where I make history and political content. It is opinionated and fairly hard hitting, so it is not to everyone’s taste, but that is the point of it.
Connect with Kartik Ojha on LinkedIn
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