Afshan Dosani and the Art of Making a Better Case

The word “co” is doing quite a lot of work in Afshan Dosani’s title. She became Kindra’s co-CEO in May 2024, four years after joining as its first hire. It is a compact description of a much longer education: learning a company from the inside, then accepting responsibility for where it goes.

Beside her is Hasti Nazem, another early employee, whose background at Kindra included product development and education. Dosani’s route came through growth. Their appointment put two people who had helped build the business into its leadership. The announcement was a milestone. The more interesting story begins before anyone had a new title to announce.

A different kind of early education

Dosani studied politics at New York University, with an interest in international human rights. An introductory marketing class caught her attention. Creativity, strategy, and brand building gave her something she wanted to keep doing. She followed that interest into a startup internship.

At Fab, her responsibilities expanded as the team contracted. Later, at Getaway, she learned to work across functions and argue for resources. One lesson stayed with her: a refusal could be an invitation to improve the argument. “It just means like make a better case,” she said.

It is a useful line because it contains an obligation. Making a better case requires more than repeating the request with greater volume. There must be a reason another person should change a decision. The cost, the customer, and the consequence all have to enter the conversation. Persistence gets more interesting when it comes with homework.

Dosani worked at Fab.com as marketing manager from 2015 to 2017. She moved to Getaway in December 2017, first as senior marketing manager, then as senior growth manager from December 2018. By September 2020, she was beginning the Kindra chapter.

Those titles describe a widening remit. Marketing asks how a business reaches people. Growth adds questions about the mechanisms that make that reach sustainable. Company leadership adds responsibility for the people making the decisions. A résumé compresses all of this into a few lines. The work occupies rather more space.

The first hire gets a second title

Dosani joined Kindra in 2020. Catherine Balsam-Schwaber brought her in as the first hire in 2020, with the title Head of Growth. When Dosani announced her promotion, she thanked Balsam-Schwaber, the team, and the investors who had supported the company.

That list of acknowledgments gives the promotion its proper setting. A company has employees, backers, customers, and people who helped someone get started. An executive announcement can make a career look solitary. Dosani’s announcement made room for the other people in it.

She also named the next undertaking: leading Kindra’s next phase of growth and innovation with Nazem. The ambition was commercial and collaborative, with more customers and partners ahead. It was a statement about continuing work already underway, now with a broader responsibility attached.

Nazem’s announcement supplied the companion view. She described Balsam-Schwaber bringing the pair on as the first two hires. She had worked on product development and education before stepping into the shared role. Their histories at the company began in different functions and arrived at the same title.

A shared chief executive role puts an unusual amount of meaning into a conjunction. Two people have to turn “and” into decisions. Their earlier responsibilities offer different places from which to examine the same business. Whether a question begins with a product or a customer, it eventually needs an answer the company can act on.

Balsam-Schwaber announced the transition alongside Victoria Tatar’s appointment as COO, saying she would remain an adviser. The change therefore involved more than a replacement name at the top. It established a leadership arrangement with two chief executives, an operating chief, and continuity with the preceding leader.

“It just means like make a better case.”

Afshan Dosani, on what she learned about hearing “no”

The room beyond the spreadsheet

There is a photograph from a DTC Experts event in New York in which an enormous wall announces that the city is for entrepreneurs. Below it, a screen introduces a growth panel. Dosani’s name appears beside Hemant Varshney’s and Danielle Dror’s. The typography is large enough to give entrepreneurship its own postcode.

Varshney shared the photograph after their conversation at Shopify in May 2023. It places Dosani in a room discussing growth with other practitioners, before the co-CEO appointment. The subject was already something she did in public as well as inside the companies where she worked.

She was also listed among speakers for Affiliate Summit West 2024, held at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas that January. The lineup included executives from Future, Forbes, and Vox Media. Her title was still Head of Growth at Kindra. The promotion would follow later that spring.

These appearances give her career another setting: the conversation among people facing similar commercial questions. A campaign, a partnership, or a customer experience problem can look peculiar from inside one company. Discussing it with peers makes the question available for scrutiny. Someone else has probably tried something, regretted something, or discovered a detail worth borrowing.

Her work outside the commercial sphere includes volunteering with Defy Ventures from January 2021 and reintegration volunteering with ACE Programs for the Homeless. In 2015, she volunteered through the International Rescue Committee at Brooklyn International High School, supporting newly arrived refugees in a learning environment.

That is a separate part of the record, with its own purpose. It belongs beside the career rather than being pressed into service as an explanation for every business decision. A person’s working life contains more than the latest position. Here, it includes time spent helping others enter unfamiliar institutions and environments.

A price can be a question

At Kindra, the commercial questions have included what customers pay. Nazem publicly described a pricing test with Intelligems that preceded a reduction of nearly 30%. The company reported higher conversion and higher profitability per site visitor in that experiment.

Those two measurements matter together. A lower price can make a purchase easier to consider. The commercial question is what happens to the business after that change. Looking at profitability per visitor alongside conversion keeps the discussion connected to both the transaction and its economics.

A later company update announced another reduction, averaging 22% across products, and described an average conversion lift of 20% across channels. These are company-reported results. They belong to Kindra’s team rather than to a single executive’s personal scorecard.

For a profile of Dosani, their relevance is the kind of business she now helps lead. Price becomes something to examine through customer behavior. The company makes a change, measures the response, and has to decide what that response means. The answer has consequences beyond the appearance of a discount on a page.

April 2026 brought a different kind of expansion. Kindra and PHE announced a commercial partnership covering distribution and co-branded marketing. A minority equity stake was part of the arrangement. Dosani publicly acknowledged the people on the PHE side with whom the team was building.

A distribution agreement widens the practical meaning of growth. The work reaches beyond getting someone to a company’s own website. It includes the channels through which products become available and the relationships needed to make those channels function. The executive’s remit expands with the route to the customer.

Learning the people, sooner

Another April 2026 account turns inward. Kindra made colleagues’ communication preferences visible during onboarding. New hires received profiles explaining how members of the team approached discussion, context, and decisions.

The company had found that newcomers needed time to understand the people around them, even when the functional onboarding was in place. The profiles gave that less visible learning a concrete form. Existing colleagues were expected to adjust, too.

The account compared one recent hire’s roughly two-week adjustment with the six to eight weeks seen previously. It is a specific company example. Its appeal is easy to understand: fewer weeks spent interpreting colleagues means more attention available for the work itself.

“Our last hire was contributing like a six-month employee within two weeks,” Dosani said. The comparison is hers, and its enthusiasm is about another person finding their footing. After the campaigns, the career steps, and the promotion, this is a revealing place to find the co-CEO: concerned with how quickly someone else can join in.

The exercise also makes an ordinary management demand more explicit. New employees are often expected to ask questions, take initiative, and fit into a team at the same time. Those instructions can pull in different directions when the team’s habits are still a mystery. Giving people an agreed way to discuss their preferences offers a starting point. A colleague can ask for written context without making it a referendum on someone else’s meeting style. Someone can explain that they are exploring an idea before the room begins treating it as an instruction. Small clarifications can save a surprisingly large amount of translation.

A better case needs people who can understand it. A growing company needs people who can understand one another. Dosani’s career has brought those two practical problems into the same room.