Kunal Sarkar had a peculiar problem in 2013: people liked the app. Lumosity’s first mobile version had attracted roughly 15 million users in two or three years. It had loyal players and favorable ratings. These are usually the ingredients of a congratulatory meeting. Sarkar wanted a different meeting. He wanted to rebuild the thing.
Some colleagues worried that a replacement would alienate existing fans. It was a reasonable objection. Familiarity has value, especially in a product people return to. A successful app accumulates habits as well as downloads. Move the furniture and someone will wonder what happened to their favorite chair.
The company went ahead with a redesigned experience and a new code base. Sarkar described the decision plainly: “We wanted to make fundamental changes, not just incremental improvements.” The episode is a useful doorway into his working life. His public career contains several changes of furniture: corporate strategy, private equity, a consumer subscription company, a move out of the CEO’s chair, and later ventures and partnerships.
“We wanted to make fundamental changes, not just incremental improvements.”
Kunal Sarkar, on the mobile rebuild, 2013
Before the games, the balance sheets
Sarkar graduated from Princeton in 2000, with an economics degree and a finance certificate. He began his career in the Walt Disney Company’s strategic planning and development group. The work involved evaluating acquisitions, joint ventures, and new business opportunities with senior management.
He subsequently became a vice president at McCown De Leeuw & Co., a private equity firm. His responsibilities included strategy and operations at portfolio companies. Before Lumosity, he also co-founded the American Infrastructure MLP Fund. This was a route through the business of businesses: examining how an organization worked, where capital went, and what might happen next.
Meanwhile, a Princeton friend, Michael Scanlon, had moved to California for graduate study at Stanford. The two met often. In 2005, Sarkar left his job and Scanlon took leave from his program. With David Drescher, they founded Lumos Labs. Lumosity.com launched in 2007.
The friendship matters to the story because the founding team brought different experience to a shared project. Sarkar’s background was economics and finance. Scanlon came from academic research. Drescher brought experience in games. A business built around playing required more than one way of thinking about the player.
The audience had other ideas
Initially, the founders expected older adults to be their principal audience. Then people in their twenties and thirties arrived too. Their actual customers were revising the plan. Sarkar treated understanding who wanted the product, and why, as part of the work of growing it.
By late 2013, Lumosity had reached 50 million users. The business had also recorded $23.7 million in revenue for 2012, placing it at No. 403 on the following year’s Inc. 5000. Free access and premium subscriptions gave people different ways to enter. The product could be tried before it became a recurring purchase.
Those figures describe different kinds of commitment. Registering expresses interest. Paying expresses a willingness to spend. Returning expresses something else again. A company can put them next to one another in a presentation, but a player does not experience them as adjacent columns. The player experiences a game, a screen, and a decision about whether to open it again.
There is humor in a customer refusing to resemble the customer imagined for them. Business plans are very well behaved. People have the discourtesy of being interesting. In Sarkar’s case, a broader audience made the original assumption something to revisit rather than something to defend.
A bigger number, a different job
In August 2012, Discovery Communications led a $31.5 million funding round. Lumosity then had more than 40 games, 25 million members, and paying subscribers in 180 countries. Its mobile app had been downloaded 10 million times since its 2010 debut. A media company was joining a group of investors already backing a web and mobile subscription business.
By January 2013, Lumosity was reporting 35 million users and about 100,000 new users a day. Its plans included an iPad app, Android expansion, and more languages. Sarkar pointed to an audience extending well beyond the technology community. The company had found consumers who did not need to consider themselves startup enthusiasts to become players.
International use creates a deceptively simple question: whose language does the product speak? A service can be available across borders while still asking people to meet it on someone else’s terms. Translation, interface design, and the explanation of a game all become part of the invitation.
For Sarkar, that invitation belonged in the expansion plan. The challenge becomes more personal when viewed from the other end of the screen. A company sees a new market. A prospective player sees instructions. The first must eventually become legible to the second.
The machinery behind the invitation
Sarkar described Lumosity’s early acquisition work as a sequence. Publicity brought an initial audience and a chance to understand the product’s funnel. Paid channels followed, first aimed at people already interested, then reaching more broadly through display, online video, and television. As the registered audience grew, bringing people back became another task.
“We were really focused on learning,” he said of the early phase. In a growth discussion alongside Rover’s Aaron Easterly and Poshmark’s Manish Chandra, he also described committing twenty percent of product capacity to analytics. Off-the-shelf tools could help, but the company needed some of its own.
of product capacity devoted to analytics, in Sarkar’s account of Lumosity’s growth work.
There is an unglamorous piece of the founder’s job here. Someone has to make sure the company can understand what happens after an advertisement is seen. Someone has to distinguish curiosity from purchase, and purchase from a habit that lasts. The chart in a meeting only helps if its underlying definitions make sense.
This is also where marketing meets its limits. A persuasive invitation can bring a person through the door. Once inside, that person has an experience. The experience carries the next part of the relationship. Buying more invitations cannot, by itself, answer every question about what happens in the room.
Books, colleagues, and another chair
The interest in learning extended into Lumosity’s workplace. In its 2015 workplace-ranking entry, the company described buying books employees needed for their jobs or subjects they wanted to explore. It reimbursed relevant classes and conferences, invited speakers, collected feedback, and supported team outings. There is something pleasingly practical about a company that makes room for another book on the desk.
These practices also put people into an otherwise numerical story. A registered audience can grow while a team still consists of colleagues with questions, interests, and opinions about lunch. Product decisions happen among those people. The company’s description of gathering feedback included both the product and the ordinary details of office life.
In November 2015, Steve Berkowitz succeeded Sarkar as CEO. Sarkar became chairman. He described having worked on succession for some time; the two would work together on leadership, strategy, and the longer view. Lumosity then had more than 70 million players.
The following January brought a less comfortable milestone. Lumos Labs agreed to pay $2 million to settle Federal Trade Commission deceptive advertising charges. Sarkar and Scanlon were also named as individual defendants. The complaint included allegations about undisclosed incentives behind testimonials. Subscribers were to receive notification and a way to cancel automatic renewal. Growth belonged in the company’s history alongside accountability for its advertising.
A founder’s biography becomes more useful when the record retains both kinds of event. Audience numbers explain reach. A leadership change explains who carries responsibility next. A settlement explains obligations that remain part of the business story.
The relationships that kept working
Sarkar’s later career includes a connection to the engineering behind consumer software. BDIT Engineering began in 2008 as an engineering consulting business for Lumosity. Its founder, Siniša Grgić, had worked as Lumosity’s lead data engineer. In August 2018, BDIT announced a partnership with Sarkar and the opening of a San Francisco office. The firm’s leadership page lists him as an advisor and partner.
That sequence gives a familiar business word, network, some actual people and history. Colleagues worked on one company’s technical needs. Later, their professional relationship took another form. The connection had a past before it had a new office.
Sarkar’s public advisor profile describes work with founders of consumer and SaaS businesses. It lists advisory associations with Manymoon, Homejoy, Methodology, Noom, and Basis. His LinkedIn profile now points to Better Ed Co. Recruiting material for that venture names him and Subramanya Sharma as founders and describes ambitions in skill learning. Pixical is the brand associated with that work.
The continuing interest is visible without inventing a private explanation for it. There is the earlier consumer product, the engineering partnership, and the later learning venture. His roles have changed; the public record keeps returning to products that ask people to choose an activity and come back.
A return visit is a small vote
Viewed this way, the 2013 rebuild becomes more than a mobile-app anecdote. It puts a difficult decision in a small frame: an established audience, a proposed change, and colleagues who could see the risk. Familiarity was valuable. So was what the team had learned since the original launch.
Sarkar’s career offers no need for an invented scene of sudden revelation. The documented choices are interesting enough. Leave a finance job. Build with friends. Discover a different audience. Change the app. Change the leadership. Work with former colleagues in a new setting.
The player’s side of this story remains wonderfully modest. After the funding rounds, marketing plans, and succession announcements, someone still decides whether to play another game. That little decision is where a consumer business gets its next chance. A founder can build toward it for years. The invitation has to work again tomorrow.