Viral Kadakia

Viral Kadakia is currently Chief Product Officer at Merit (merits.com) Most recently, Viral was Vice President of Products at PlanGrid. PlanGrid product is used on more than one million projects across commercial, heavy civil and other industries in 90 countries. With over 100 million digital blueprints on its cloud-based platform, PlanGrid is also the largest digital blueprint repository in the world. As co-founder & CEO of 500 Miles, Viral's team built a data-driven recruiting product for college students and recent graduates that analyzed millions of data points to render insights and make hiring easier for job-seekers and recruiting teams. Previously, he was Vice President of Product Management at Hightail (formerly YouSendIt). In less than a year, his team transformed the legacy YouSendIt product into a brand new Hightail service and laid the foundation for a solid cloud storage platform. Prior to Hightail, Viral was Group Product Manager at LinkedIn where he managed products in the Core products group. In 2010, he founded TrustHop, a social marketplace for local services providers - a company that was acquired by LinkedIn. During his over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, Viral has been an entrepreneur and product strategist at companies such as LinkedIn, Hightail (YouSendIt), Yahoo and Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo). Viral earned his MS degree in Computer Engineering from University of Texas at Austin and MBA from Kellogg School of Management.