Shaan Hathiramani and the things school forgot to teach

In the first months of Flockjay, Shaan Hathiramani filled his calendar with sales calls from eight in the morning until six in the evening. Between conversations, he scribbled down what he had learned. By evening, the talking was over. The next morning, he began again.

It is a useful place to meet him: working through a subject by listening to people who know something he needs to understand. His company would eventually build software to help sales teams do a version of that together. First, though, its founder had to learn the business one conversation at a time.

The interesting part of his career is how often teaching appears alongside something else. Finance and teaching. Selling and teaching. Software and teaching. There is also perfume, which requires a small detour. A biography ought to make room for the things that refuse to fit neatly on LinkedIn.

The perfume before the platform

In 2011, a few years after graduating from Harvard, Hathiramani was discussing an online perfumery called Harvey Prince. He and his brother had created their first scent as a Mother's Day gift. The gift became a business, with products that treated fragrance as an invitation to feel a little differently about yourself.

One of its offerings was Eau Flirt, a blend including lavender, pumpkin pie, citrus, and jasmine. The proposition was wonderfully direct: a perfume that would do some flirting on its wearer's behalf. Software founders have spent considerably more money explaining less understandable products.

Hathiramani talked about the messages he received from customers and the pleasure of making products with good ingredients. “We don't take ourselves too seriously,” he said. It is a welcome sentence in a founder biography, where even buying a stapler can acquire the dignity of a strategic inflection point.

The perfume chapter also complicates the tidy picture of a financier who woke up one morning with a technology company. He had already tried building something for customers, with his brother, starting from a family occasion. His interests were wider than the career title suggested.

An education in the missing curriculum

Hathiramani graduated from Harvard in 2008 with a degree in applied mathematics. He entered finance that summer, wanting financial independence and a practical understanding of money. His professional background includes Citadel, Balyasny Asset Management, and Alyeska Investment Group. Later, he also worked at the startup Thistle.

Alongside finance, he taught financial literacy. Over roughly a decade, that work took him into communities in Chicago and New York. He has described helping build nonprofit efforts from Chicago's South Side to Harlem. Learning the subject professionally and teaching it outside work were parts of the same undertaking.

That experience supplied a question with a long shelf life. Which skills help people make progress, and why are so many of them absent from formal education? A degree records a course of study. Knowing how to navigate a customer conversation, understand a workplace, or recognize an unfamiliar career opportunity is another sort of education.

“My favorite hours are before sunrise.”

Shaan Hathiramani, January 2021

His personal geography adds another dimension. In a 2021 interview, he said his mother was from Kobe and that he often spent summers in Japan. He expressed an interest in eventually doing business there, while recognizing that understanding local sales culture would matter. Familiarity with a place was a beginning, rather than a complete business plan.

The detail helps explain why his story reaches beyond a procession of American finance and technology firms. His education included different communities and settings. In his account of Flockjay's origins, the useful lessons often came from observing what people needed and what existing institutions failed to teach them.

Putting experience in the room

After moving to San Francisco, Hathiramani worked with startups and studied their hiring difficulties. Sales stood out. Companies needed people who could understand customers and communicate clearly, yet the customary educational signals offered him little confidence about who would perform well.

He argued that curiosity, optimism, communication, and persistence could be more useful indicators than the university on an application. It was a pointed observation from someone whose own university name rarely needs explaining. Harvard had served him well. He questioned how much it told an employer about somebody else's ability to sell.

Flockjay, founded in 2018, turned that observation into a sales academy for people seeking a route into technology. Its purpose centered on upward mobility and access, particularly for candidates from backgrounds underrepresented in the industry. The company joined Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch. That year, Hathiramani was also recognized with an ASU+GSV Venture Award.

In his early explanation of the program, he described an ambition extending beyond a first placement: continued learning, new skills, and a relationship that could last as a career developed. That promise would become central to the company's next chapter, and to the obligations created by its first one.

Some of the work was simply getting people into the same conversation. In May 2019, Hathiramani interviewed Airtable sales leader Liat Bycel at a Flockjay community event. She discussed relationships across departments, preparation, adapting to unfamiliar situations, and giving useful feedback.

The format mattered. People entering an industry could hear how somebody with experience made decisions. Knowledge that might otherwise circulate among established colleagues became available to a wider room. It was an early, human version of the knowledge sharing that Flockjay would later try to put into software.

A change with consequences

The academy did not remain the company's main model. In August 2021, Flockjay cut at least half its staff while shifting toward software. Behind that short sentence were people who had joined an organization built around expanding opportunity.

Hathiramani later discussed the difficulty of changing the product while trying to preserve the purpose. In a 2022 founder interview, he described the decision as a change of gears. The business was moving toward supporting people and teams inside companies, rather than concentrating on training people before they entered them.

The earlier education operation also faced regulatory action. In October 2020, California's Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education cited Flockjay for operating without the required approval. The bureau closed that citation in November 2021 after receiving a $10,000 payment and evidence of compliance. Its closure letter specified that payment did not constitute an admission of the charged violation.

A separate financial protection matter followed. In 2023, California's Department of Financial Protection and Innovation issued an order and entered into a settlement with Flockjay over the former program. Its account identified missing required notices in deferred tuition agreements and the lack of approval for the educational operation. The settlement was dated December 15, 2023.

These episodes belong in the story of an access mission. Inviting people to take a chance on a different career creates responsibilities that survive a change in product. A company's new direction and the experience of people who depended on its earlier promise have to be considered together.

Hathiramani has also spoken about humility as a working requirement. By 2022, he could describe having handled early business development, design, and some initial technical work at Flockjay, while acknowledging the limits of his expertise. As the company changed, so did the knowledge its founder needed from other people.

The lesson after the offer letter

Flockjay announced Elevate in May 2022. The platform organized lessons and experience from within sales and customer success teams: short videos, text posts, courses, feedback, and shared accounts of wins and losses. The premise was that useful knowledge already existed among colleagues and needed a better way to travel.

Consider the distinction in everyday terms. A new employee can finish an introductory course and still struggle with a particular customer question. Someone else on the team may have solved that problem last week. A learning system earns its place when it helps those two people benefit from the same experience.

In a May 2022 conversation about sales teams, Hathiramani emphasized learning from other sellers and helping managers deliver coaching more effectively. He also spoke about purpose as part of building a team. His interest remained the person developing a career, even as the buyer and delivery model changed.

Today, Flockjay describes a platform combining sales content, learning, deal insights, and coaching with generative AI. Its public leadership page still lists Hathiramani as founder and CEO. In January 2026, his earlier pivot appeared in Simone Stolzoff's discussion of leading through uncertainty, a later look at a decision whose consequences had unfolded over several years.

Outside work, his company biography offers one pleasantly specific fact: he enjoys swimming in San Francisco Bay. It is an activity with fewer opportunities for a slide deck. The perfume venture supplies another reminder that there is a person behind the platform and its vocabulary.

Across the classrooms, customer calls, and software, Hathiramani has kept returning to practical knowledge: how it is learned, who possesses it, and who gets left to discover it alone. His business has changed substantially while pursuing that question. The question itself remains demanding enough. What happens after you give somebody a chance?