Vijay Chattha would like a word. Six, preferably.

Vijay Chattha has a small assignment for anyone trying to explain a company: get it down to six words. VSC calls this the escalator pitch. You can see the appeal of the setting. The other person is moving. Your opportunity has machinery attached to it. Somewhere between the first step and the landing, you need to make yourself worth another question.

Chattha’s own explanation takes longer. He founded VSC, the San Francisco communications firm where his title includes Chief Talker. He invests through VSC Ventures. He is also the founder and frontman of BlackMahal, a band that puts Punjabi music in the company of funk and hip-hop. Any attempt to put the whole career on one business card would require exceptionally small type.

Yet the different jobs have a family resemblance. Again and again, he has found people with something to offer and a problem reaching the people who might appreciate it. His earliest business audience had a particularly straightforward requirement: somewhere to go that night.

Philadelphia, after dark

At the University of Pennsylvania, Chattha and Nihal Mehta noticed that Philadelphia lacked a comprehensive guide to its events. The information existed, but assembling an evening from scattered listings was a project of its own. They co-founded UrbanGroove Networks, whose properties included philly2nite.com. They began by promoting the service to friends on campus.

By November 2000, the two were explaining their business to high school students at a Wharton entrepreneurship event. It is a pleasing early picture of Chattha: already building something around music, already finding an audience, already explaining the method to the next group coming through.

The guide gave information a useful shape. A listing could help someone make a plan. A network could help venues reach people beyond their usual crowd. Before the startup pitch decks and technology launches, Chattha had a practical education in the distance between having something available and getting someone to choose it.

A different reason to be understood

In 2001, Chattha took leave from UrbanGroove to help a nonprofit preserve and display Sikh cultural artifacts through the Smithsonian Sikh Heritage Project. After September 11, the work acquired an immediate urgency. Sikh Americans were being targeted because people misunderstood their appearance and religion.

Chattha was born and raised in the United States. His parents lived in West Virginia. He wanted other Americans to understand the community he came from. “As an American, you want to share with other Americans who you are,” he said at the time.

The project puts a different weight on the subject of visibility. An audience can misunderstand you before you have said a word. A display of art and heritage creates an opportunity to look again, ask a question and learn something that an assumption had concealed.

His cultural work also extended into Project Ahimsa, which he co-founded to support young people through music. Instruments and music education gave that interest a practical outlet. The connection with his commercial career is a concern with who gets heard. The purposes, and the consequences, are very different.

The mango has entered the meeting

BlackMahal, formed in 2004, gave Chattha another way to share the culture. The band brought together Punjabi traditions, hip-hop and funk, with Ustad Lal Singh Bhatti’s singing and dhol playing alongside turntables, horns, keyboards and rap. Venture investor Tim Chang played bass. Silicon Valley has produced stranger combinations, but few come with such a reasonable rhythm section.

Bhatti’s improvisation mattered to Chattha. Punjabi lyrical traditions could meet the freestyle habits of hip-hop without either becoming a decorative extra. In the band, an old form could find fresh company.

The repertoire allowed for silliness. Mangos started with the idea of teaching bhangra through a familiar movement: reaching to pick fruit. An explanation became a dance instruction, then a song. Chattha described the group’s temperament plainly: “We’re way more playful and lighthearted.”

His hometown loyalties made it into the music, too. A native of Weirton, West Virginia, near Pittsburgh, he helped create Black, Gold and Silver, a Punjabi-influenced Steelers anthem. The silver referred to the Lombardi Trophy. Football devotion had found a new arrangement; nobody was being asked to leave their background at the stadium gate.

Give the plumbing a personality

Chattha founded VSC in 2002. Its initials stand for Visibility, Strategy and Creativity, three words that leave plenty of room for argument about execution. His account of starting the firm begins with experience as a technology founder: companies could become so absorbed in making their products that explaining them received too little attention.

By 2019, he was describing success in terms that stretched beyond the initial burst of publicity. Recruiting interest, investor attention and business development belonged in the calculation. An article had a job to do after someone finished reading it.

The range of products also gave his creativity somewhere demanding to go. In a public appeal to marketers, he recommended working on what he called internet plumbing: developer operations, server architecture, chips and the systems most people use without considering. Their difficulty was part of the attraction. The explanation needed more imagination precisely because the subject did not arrive with an obvious emotional hook.

One example he offered was a Highway 101 billboard for H2O.ai wishing Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella a happy Diwali. It brought a cultural greeting and recognizable people into the discussion of an AI company. A billboard has little patience for an architecture diagram. A buyer cannot carry the whole technical specification into the next meeting. A clear reason to care travels more easily.

“Honesty is a disruptive communications strategy”

Vijay Chattha · on building AI brands, 2024

His advice on AI branding adds a restraint to that appetite for attention. In 2024, he argued for accuracy, clear differentiation and explanations centered on people. Simply attaching AI to a description would become less useful as the technology spread. A company still needed to say what it did and why that mattered. For a professional talker, leaving out an impressive-sounding word can be a worthwhile piece of work.

Promises need somewhere to live

In 2020, Chattha joined Paras Shah and his old UrbanGroove collaborator Mehta to conceive The100kPledge. The platform recorded public commitments to improving economic opportunities for Black communities, including hiring, investing and donating. Its question came after the announcement: how could anyone check what had been promised?

Participants remained responsible for delivering their own commitments. The registry supplied somewhere for those commitments to remain visible. That distinction gives this chapter of Chattha’s career its interest. Publicity could attract attention to a promise; a ledger could make the promise easier to examine later.

There is a useful tension here for someone whose profession deals in announcements. The exciting moment is often the unveiling. Accountability has a less theatrical schedule. It returns when the room has emptied and asks what happened next. Chattha’s involvement shows an interest in giving that later question a public address.

A place on the cap table

VSC Ventures made the relationship with founders more direct. Announced in 2021, the investment business paired early-stage capital with access to communications and multimedia support. Chattha and general partner Jay Kapoor brought the work of explaining a company closer to the decision to own part of it.

The original announcement described a fund targeting $20 million, with $7 million secured at that stage. Those were fundraising figures at the time of launch. The more enduring detail is the proposed combination: money and help getting the company understood.

Today, the firm’s stated interests include AI applied to physical industries, with companies working on recycling, infrastructure, laundry and other tasks that happen outside a browser window. These are settings where customers have established processes and concrete reasons to hesitate before changing them.

The communications challenge becomes wonderfully specific. Who will use the machine? What changes in the working day? What does the buyer need to see before agreeing? Chattha’s role connects those questions to the work of investing. Explaining a product requires finding out what its audience actually needs to know.

The next room

On September 23, 2026, Chattha interviewed Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha at the Dirty Jobs Summit in San Francisco. The event, hosted by VSC Ventures, gathered founders and investors working on physical AI. Chattha asked about the change in appetite for hardware and robotics, and whether the enthusiasm would last.

It was a fitting question from someone whose career has crossed several waves of technology. Interest can move quickly. Factories, infrastructure and the people buying equipment have their own timetables. A room full of enthusiasm still needs to ask what will survive outside the room.

There is a long route from philly2nite.com to that conversation, with a museum project, a funk band and a communications firm along the way. The settings have changed more dramatically than the underlying curiosity. Chattha keeps returning to the encounter between an idea and somebody who has other things to think about.

The six-word exercise gives that encounter a useful limit. Start somewhere another person can enter. Leave enough room for a question. Anyone can arrive with a complete explanation. Chattha has made a career out of considering why someone would want to hear the rest.