Big‑tech product leader and three‑time start‑up exit veteran Anu Shah—profiled by Forbes India for turning forty dollars into a multi‑continent career—launches The Talk Lane, a handcrafted pilot podcast blending boardroom strategy, civic nuance and mental‑health realism through guests such as Lord Karan Bilimoria, Baroness Usha Prashar and futurist Brett King.
MUMBAI, India, July 21, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Three‑time entrepreneur and big‑tech product leader Anu Shah is swapping pitch decks for pop filters. After boot‑strapping and exiting three ventures across Asia and North America, the Mumbai‑born operator is testing a fresh sandbox: a podcast called The Talk Lane.
The show's first season is intentionally lean—six episodes tracked across four continents, recorded after work and on red‑eye layovers. Shah balances recording with her full‑time product role at Amazon and treats the series as a live product experiment that asks a single question: Can boardroom wisdom, civic nuance and mental‑health realism coexist in one actionable conversation? All of it happens outside nine‑to‑five: script drafts spill into lunch breaks, and editing sessions wrap just before dawn calls with development teams.
Early guests suggest the answer is yes:
- Lord Karan Bilimoria, Cobra Beer founder and House‑of‑Lords cross‑bencher, dissects the real cost of post‑Brexit trade for scale‑ups.
- Baroness Usha Prashar unmasks blind spots in social‑justice policy.
- Aseem Puri, chief executive of Unilever International, reveals emerging‑market growth hacks.
- Telecom veteran Manoj Kohli, former chief executive of SoftBank India, frames India's digital playbook.
- Futurist Brett King explores generative‑AI disruption cycles.
- Dhruvil Sanghvi and Lipi Patel unpack the founder‑family tightrope.
The production workflow is equally nimble: a single USB microphone, a cloud‑based editing stack, and a rotating volunteer crew of friends who serve as audio engineers, fact‑checkers and motion‑graphics editors. Episodes are storyboarded in Figma, reviewed in Notion and shipped on a fortnight cadence—a rhythm Shah borrowed from the agile sprints she runs inside Amazon's ads console team. Each episode returns to three threads Shah calls her north‑star metrics: scaling vision into institutions, safeguarding mental health when ambition burns hot, and borrowing emerging‑market ingenuity to reset global norms.
Small on Purpose, Resonant by Design:
The Talk Lane keeps promotion deliberately light; its community of core subscribers posts consistent five‑star feedback, and an internal poll shows an overwhelmingly positive recommend rate after the pilot trio. Echoing her start‑up playbook, Shah starts small to pressure‑test assumptions, iterate rapidly and then scale only what resonates.
From Forty Dollars to Four Continents—and Counting:
Shah left Mumbai with forty dollars, rose from call‑centre agent to brand manager, and earned a master's degree on full scholarship at the University of Leeds. Before her entrepreneurial run she sharpened problem‑solving skills at EY and AT Kearney, then served as chief executive for Rocket Internet in South‑East Asia, where she launched e‑commerce ventures in three markets. She later led product management for Meta Platforms' advertising portfolio before joining Amazon.
Her career now spans consulting, mergers and acquisitions, private equity and product leadership in big tech. Venture exits financed a multimillion‑dollar pledge to the United Nations refugee agency, plus advisory work for Barclays RISE and a venture fund co‑founded by GitLab's chief executive.
Across every chapter she has turned small proofs of concept into disproportionate impact, and The Talk Lane follows that pattern. Episodes close with mini‑workshops—hiring rubrics, investor‑memo templates or three‑minute breathing drills—so listeners leave with a concrete tool, not just inspiration.
What's Next?
Season one streams on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and YouTube. A recap newsletter lands in August, and a second season is pencilled for late twenty‑twenty‑five with a longer run of episodes, multilingual highlight reels and a micro‑grant program for listener‑led civic projects. Universities and accelerators have begun requesting on‑site recordings, and a live‑panel roadshow is under discussion.
Beyond audio, Shah channels start‑up proceeds into philanthropy: refugee housing, school‑based counselling in Mumbai and Kigali, and an upcoming girls‑in‑STEM scholarship in the Bronx. The podcast will dedicate a share of future sponsorship revenue to that scholarship fund, tying every download to a measurable social outcome.
Media Contact
Vedang, Sharjeel Ahmed, 1 9177682481, [email protected]
SOURCE The Talk Lane
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