Reshma Nigam knows how to bring people together

Reshma Nigam’s expansion into the Philippines acquired an unexpected distinction: it became a small piece of corporate history. On August 8, 2019, Markable Solutions Phils, Inc. received its certificate of incorporation with three incorporators. Under the country’s revised rules, it was the first ordinary corporation registered with fewer than five. A marketing business had found itself making news about paperwork. Even bureaucracy occasionally offers a plot twist.

The names on the registration were Reshma Sinha Nigam, Anil Kumar Nigam, and Radhika Melethil Vivekanandan. For Reshma, the attraction of the Philippines had been practical: an English-speaking workforce, education, motivation, and attention to quality. The speed came as a pleasant surprise. Application to certification took seven days. Her reaction was that “what surprised me was how easy it was to do business here.”

That episode offers an unusually clear introduction to her working life. Nigam builds businesses that depend on people doing useful work for clients some distance away. Choosing a place means choosing the conditions in which those relationships can function. The certificate made the arrangement official; the team would have to make it work.

The education behind the pitch

Long before that registration, Nigam had assembled an education with several kinds of audience in mind. She studied English literature in India, earned a postgraduate diploma in communication and journalism at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, and completed BA and MBA degrees at San José State University. Literature, journalism, and business make a rather companionable reading list for someone whose eventual trade would involve getting people to pay attention.

Her career included work at RightWorks Corporation, Xporta, and nthOrbit during their startup years. The recurring professional subjects were marketing, research, sales operations, product launches, and business strategy. These are the activities around a product that determine whether anyone understands why they might want it. A clever invention still has to survive an explanation.

She went on to co-found and lead aMarketForce, working in business-to-business sales, marketing, and lead generation. By October 2014, as its CEO and president, she was leading three business centres in India serving technology clients internationally. Her remit included developing business strategies and the processes needed to deliver services. The geographical distance was already part of the job.

A classroom worth returning to

In 2014, San José State selected Nigam for the Global Leadership Council at its business school. The appointment formalized a relationship that already included visits to MBA classes, where she spoke about marketing in the technology industry. She also took part in judging business plans and discussing how the school could present itself more effectively.

“It is an honour to serve on the advisory board of my alma mater!” she said. The enthusiasm had a practical outlet. The council’s work included advising on strategy and programs, helping with fundraising, and connecting the business community with faculty and students. A graduate returning with contacts and experience can bring something to a classroom that is difficult to put in a course catalogue.

On March 16, 2015, she spoke at the university about building startups with offshore teams. The scheduled venue was the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library. By then, she was identified as founder and CEO of Markable Solutions. The talk placed a familiar operational challenge in front of a new audience: how to build a company when the people helping build it are elsewhere.

Another engagement followed in April 2017, when she joined Jay Fulcher and Richard Conniff for a discussion of values-driven leadership in entrepreneurial success. Moderated by Anu Basu, the event belonged to the university’s business ethics speaker series. The subjects had widened from the organization of a team to the principles behind its decisions. Both are questions an entrepreneur eventually has to answer.

A team, before the trophy

Nigam founded Markable Solutions in 2015. Its work included marketing services, customer engagement, and business processes for clients around the world. Her responsibilities encompassed strategy, client conversations, and selecting people for the team. A service company gives those choices particular weight: the people are central to what the client receives.

The Philippines office opened in 2018. Its services included finding potential customers through whitepapers, qualifying leads, arranging appointments, and handling inbound calls. Behind those tidy service descriptions are quite ordinary tests of usefulness. Did the right person receive the material? Is the prospect ready for a conversation? Can the customer get a helpful answer?

CEO Insights included Nigam in its 2021 selection of Indian leaders in the Philippines. When Markable announced the recognition in May 2022, she recalled first visiting the country in 2018 and spoke warmly about the team there. She shared the honor with her Manila team, praising their commitment and work ethic. The company also announced its move to the BGC Corporate Center in Taguig City.

“I am very proud of my team in Manila”

Reshma Nigam, on her leadership recognition, 2022

The company now describes her approach to marketing as human-centered. Its leadership roster pairs Nigam with Radhika Vivekanandan, vice president of operations, and an advisory board. The portrait is of a founder whose business depends on coordinating distinct responsibilities. Strategy needs delivery; a promise to a client needs somebody who can keep it.

The books have to reach the reader

There is another audience in Nigam’s life, one with less interest in sales pipelines and rather more in what to read next. Her community commitments include ArtForum SF, where she is an advisory board member. The organization supports South Asian arts and cultural conversations. Her biography there describes bringing organizational and marketing skills to volunteering, including professional and cultural events.

In September 2026, Nigam joined a conversation about SALA Bookshop, a new initiative associated with the South Asian Literature and Art festival. The sixth festival edition was scheduled for September 26 and 27 at Menlo College. The bookshop had launched earlier that month, initially concentrating on authors appearing at the festival.

The problem was wonderfully concrete. A bookselling arrangement that works for a large publisher can be awkward for a small press or an independently published writer. The team was dealing with procurement, inventory, a website, and shipments from several places, including India. Sometimes books had to be bought through Amazon when publishers were not actively selling them in the United States.

It is easy to celebrate literature while leaving the author stranded a few steps from a reader. A shop closes some of that distance. Nigam’s presence in the discussion connects her business biography with a cultural effort whose ambitions require the familiar discipline of making arrangements actually function.

Another kind of collective action

Nigam’s involvement with Indians for Collective Action places those organizational interests in a different setting. The Bay Area nonprofit supports work in India, and its records include her service as president. Education, women’s empowerment, and young people have been among the areas she has discussed in describing its work.

At the organization’s October 4, 2026 gala in Palo Alto, the focus was climate sustainability and community initiatives linking Northern California with rural India. Nigam recalled ICA’s beginnings among Berkeley and Stanford students, whose small monthly contributions supported early projects. One involved a bridge across a village canal in Bihar. An organization’s origin can be quite literal about the connections it hopes to make.

The gala honored Sankar Halder of Mukti Foundation for environmental restoration and community resilience work in the Sundarbans. Nigam emphasized the continuing relationship between ICA and Mukti. Her description of the next commitment was brisk: “Now we are taking on climate.” It gave her community work a current direction, with sustainable environments increasingly central to the organization’s plans.

Room for the mountains

Nigam’s public biography also makes room for reading, films, hiking, and frequent active trips to the Himalayas. These are pleasingly specific interests to find beside the language of marketing strategy. A person who spends working hours thinking about attention is allowed, after all, to give some of her own to a mountain.

Her recent professional conversations remain attentive to changes in the trade. In 2026, she has shared discussions of artificial intelligence in prospecting, the quality of leads, and the effect of AI-generated answers on search visibility. The vocabulary continues to change around the enduring question of reaching somebody who might actually be interested.

Her company’s public video offerings also feature her discussing offshore customer experience teams. That brings the story back to a subject she addressed at San José State in 2015: organizing work across distance. Between the classroom, the company, the bookshop conversation, and the community gala, Nigam keeps appearing where an idea needs people to carry it forward. The work takes several forms. Each requires someone to make the next connection.