Medha Parlikar is a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer of CasperLabs, the company behind the Casper Network. Prior to her venture into the blockchain space, she worked with enterprise software as a service (SaaS) in the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) sectors. ^[1][2]

Education

Medha Parlikar began her higher education at Western University from 1989 to 1991, graduating with a Bachelor of Science Biology. In 1995 enrolled at Coleman College and pursued a BCIS, Programming until 1997. ^[3]

Career

Medha Parlikar began her professional journey in January 1997, as a Software Engineer at Compass Learning, where she played a role in maintaining and developing features for their Learning Management System. Additionally, she performed build verification and package creation for delivery to the Quality team for testing until June 1999. ^[4]

Afterward, Medha joined MP3.com as the Director of Quality Assurance from June 1999 to December 2001. During her tenure, she built the entire QA department from scratch, emphasizing cross-functional collaboration and setting up effective QA processes. She worked closely with peer directors in Engineering to prevent cross-project conflicts and integrated QA into the design phase of projects. Medha led successful execution of numerous highly scalable internet infrastructure projects, including e-commerce systems, eCRM systems, and content management systems. ^[4][5]

“We were trying to legitimize what Napster was doing illegally”

Following her time at MP3.com, Medha served as the Managing Partner at Cactus, where she provided software services to small and medium businesses from January 2002 to March 2006. She collaborated with an offshore team based in India to develop custom web applications for US-based customers. Additionally, Medha worked on testing services for BEA Liquid Data XQuery integration platform and an AI Natural Language parser for Resume Scanning at Burning Glass Technologies. ^[4]

Medha then took on the role of Quality Assurance Engineer at DivX, where she initially focused on testing the Macintosh player and SDK. Her responsibilities expanded as she was promoted to manage the API QA team. During this time, she built the team and implemented an iterative development, testing, and release process. She held this position from May 2005 to April 2006. ^[4]

From March 2006 to April 2010, Medha joined Omniture/Adobe Systems as the Senior Manager of Quality Control. She led three global engineering teams and created a charter for strategic quality initiatives and processes. Medha also helped develop an automated testing strategy and integrate it into iterative engineering processes. She also collaborated with Engineering Directors to expand the use of unit testing, standardize build environments, and improve release packaging. Medha's contributions earned her recognition as a President's Club recipient.  ^[4]

During her time at Adobe, she also worked at Visual Sciences Inc. from April 2006 to January 2008. She was responsible for testing the HBX platform and managed a team of quality engineers. During her tenure she implemented a defect tracking system, a test case management system, reporting processes and more. ^[4]

From April 2010 to May 2011, Medha joined Temboo, Inc. as the Director of Product Management. In this role, she performed strategic planning for the organization and developed product requirements from a customer experience perspective. Medha's role was to ensure that each team member understood their role in delivering a superior customer experience and identified gaps in the customer journey to guide product roadmap adjustments. Additionally, she defined, planned, and shipped the first two major releases and created a three-year strategic roadmap for the product. ^[4]

Her next role was as the Senior Director of Product and Engineering at Avalara, where she was responsible for several product lines from May 2011 to August 2016. Medha guided multi-disciplinary teams through product launches, solving complex technology and business challenges. She spearheaded the development of a QA team and continuous integration strategy, revitalized a key acquisition, and significantly improved customer issue resolution times. Medha also played a role in preserving a strategic partnership by delivering an offering for VAT calculation and optimizing operational expenses through the porting of a document collection system to AWS. She implemented machine learning for SKU matching, resulting in a substantial reduction in SKU research costs. Throughout her time at Avalara, Medha managed programs to budget and delivered exceptional value per dollar spent. ^[4]

Blockchain Career

Medha discovered the cryptocurrency and blockchain space in 2017. She met Mrinal Manohar while working on an open-source project that she was managing where she found out that Mrinal was actively seeking investment opportunities in a blockchain company that catered to enterprises. Unable to find an existing company that fulfilled Mrinal’s vision, he observed Medha’s work and saw her as a capable blockchain builder. Seeing her potential, he proposed the idea of co-founding a company that would develop an open-source blockchain protocol, with the aim of becoming the leading provider of enterprise blockchain solutions. Drawing inspiration from Red Hat's role as a core contributor to the Linux operating system, they envisioned CasperLabs as a sherpa, guiding the development of an enterprise-grade blockchain protocol. ^[4][5]

“My co-founder and I met on the open source project I was managing in 2017 and he was actually looking to invest in a Red Hat type of company in the blockchain space.“

“He saw the work that I was doing he's like okay, she's already built a blockchain let's have her co-found this company that will be the sherpa that will build the open source blockchain just like red hat was a core contributor in Linux let's do the same thing with a blockchain protocol and it'll be an Enterprise blockchain protocol”

In November 2018, Medha co-founded CasperLabs and assumed the role of Chief Technology Officer. At CasperLabs, she leads the development of Casper Network's blockchain platform, aiming to create scalable blockchain applications. Her responsibilities encompass strategic planning, collaboration with founders and stakeholders, and overseeing the overall development process.^[4]