O R N Karthik.

I'm O R N Karthik, an engineer who learned to sell, and a seller who never stopped taking things apart.

I started as an engineer in India, building and fixing things before I sold anything. That order matters. Once you know how a product really works, you stop pitching features and start solving the customer's actual problem.

From there I did a master's at a business school across Paris and Berlin, then spent four months on corporate strategy inside a global company's headquarters in Bonn, Germany. After that, a rotation programme put me where the work was:

• Key accounts in Hyderabad, India
• Go-to-market for large, complex customers in Delhi NCR, India
• Product strategy across the APAC region, in Singapore
• Field software, up close, in Manchester, UK

Five countries lived in, twenty-one travelled through. Selling looks different in every market and works the same in all of them: understand the people, understand the product, close the gap between them.

What ties it together is curiosity. I read constantly, with a shelf of fifty-plus books that keeps growing, and I'm always learning something I'm not yet good at. I also build things to learn by doing. The one I'm proudest of is Sovenn, a private, keep-in-touch CRM that helps you remember the people who matter without handing your contacts to the cloud.

I believe access to education and knowledge is how hard problems get solved. Someone once made room for me, and I try to do the same.

If there's something I can add value to, I'm always up for a coffee chat. The fastest way to reach me is email, and I'm on LinkedIn.

My writing is published under the name Karthik Onteddu at karthikonteddu.com: the essays, the field notes, the shelf.

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