Becoming 'An Orchestra of You'
with Aditi Ramesh of ADITI® and Anzu.io
Welcome back to I’m Between Things, a Substack series that explores the lives and stories of people and the unique paths they follow, exploring the intersections of skills and passions and finding new and interesting ways to balance life and work in harmony.
This month I spoke with Aditi Ramesh, Director of Partnerships & Programmatic at Anzu, an ad tech company focusing on in-game advertising, and the founder of ADITI®, a candle business she started in 2020 during the height of the COVID pandemic. While balancing these two roles would be more than enough for most, Aditi shares about her continuous pursuit of self discovery, momentum, and growth, and her journey to understand the multitude of passions and aspirations she contains and finding ways to honor them fully in both her life and professional career.
‘SHE BLINDED ME WITH [CANDLE] SCIENCE’
When we look back on this time in history, it’s going to be hard to find a story that doesn’t include the year 2020 and the COVID pandemic as a major plot point. It was a transformative time for all of us, and while some of its impacts — such as the rapid onset of furloughs and layoffs — were significantly negative for most, there were some who found ways to transform those experiences into new opportunities for themselves. Aditi’s story falls firmly in the latter camp, and in a lot of ways, she’d set herself up for it long before the phrase “COVID-19” had passed anyone’s lips.
Over the past couple of years, Aditi and her roommate Steph had established a tradition of getting together for DIY crafting sessions while enjoying a glass or two of wine. One of their more recent experiments had been candle-making, which had left their modest-sized Brooklyn apartment with an excess of candles that they didn't plan to burn. With Valentine's Day approaching, Aditi saw an opportunity to sell the candles at a reasonable price to friends and co-workers in need of a last-minute gift for their significant other. (Author's Note: I was lucky enough to be one of Aditi's first customers!).
With this experience fresh in her mind, Aditi would spend the latter part of February traveling to Bali, a trip she had been looking forward to. The trip had been an absolute highlight to the start of the year, but many of you might recognize “late February 2020” as a pretty significant moment: the eve of the pandemic. Whispers of COVID had started while she was abroad, and by the time she was set to head back to the US, there were growing concerns about masking, supply chain disruptions, and lockdowns.
So, on a bit of a whim during her travels back home, Aditi ordered herself a crate full of glass jars, soy wax, wicks, and other supplies, all of which were shipped right to her parents’ house in New Jersey. Not long after this, the other foot dropped, and Aditi found herself on the receiving end of a furlough notice from her Partner Management role at a New York-based programmatic ad tech startup she’d been working at just shy of a year. While the news was difficult to take, Aditi had found herself in an incredibly fortuitous situation: she was ready.
“I realized that I like doing things hands-on,” she explained, “and I was like, ‘I have time and space away from the city, away from people. This is an opportunity to deep work.” With these newly-freed up hours of unstructured time in front of her and nowhere to go, Aditi went full-on into ‘mad scientist’ mode. “Candle science is what I was doing … [I spent] days in my parents’ basement burning wax and watching candles melt over and over again, and I’d tweet about the combinations.” Within just a few months, Aditi had significantly upskilled her craft, to the point that she felt ready to take the product and process she’d been perfecting and turn it into a proper business.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
For Aditi, a major part of establishing that business was creating its brand identity. As someone who had been working in the advertising industry for several years at that point, she was aware of how important those elements were to creating a connection with her future customers. Seeing where she netted out – a brand carrying her name – it would be easy to assume that the process of coming up with the brand was simple. “It’s just her name,” you might think. And while that is true at face value, the story of how she arrived there, and where that exercise took her, carries some surprising and important lessons in it.
The journey started that summer while she was toiling away in her parents’ basement. As she was taking a break and perusing social media, she happened upon the work of an artist named Anagha Narayanan, a typeface designer who specializes in the Tamil language. “I’d never seen that,” Aditi reflected, “I speak Tamil, it’s my mother tongue.” The novelty of this, paired with Aditi’s general fascination with Anagha’s work, led her to reach out in a twitter DM and inquire about designing a logo for this new business venture she was embarking on. Anagha got back quickly and agreed, so the two set up time to connect virtually. Things (the candles aside) were really starting to heat up.
What Aditi didn’t realize was that Anagha wasn’t coming alone — she invited a friend of hers, Shrishti Srinivasan, a communications designer — and before she knew it, this “five minute transactional exercise” to create a logo graphic transformed into a full-on brand identity design, three long months reflecting on the question, “Who is Aditi?”
“You start out with ‘identify Aditi in three ways’,” she explains, “and what are the different Aditis that exist between these things?” She worked it down to three distinct persons — the super-creative, the skillful laborer, and the rough/dramatic teenage ‘Avril Lavigne’ type. From there, Anagha and Shrishti envisioned what each of those personas would look like as a brand, and after some deliberation, the Skillful Aditi was victorious. But even then, the design honors those other personas, reflecting the diversity Aditi discovered about herself.
The logo includes Aditi’s name (now also an officially registered brand) in both Roman and Tamil script, anchoring either side of a graphic designed by Anagha depicting two women pouring a candle. “Originally, those were two versions of myself,” Aditi told me, “[but later] my sister started working with me, [and] now my mom works on [the business] with me.” These additional layers add meaning and depth to the entire enterprise, and as we reflected on this point, it raised to mind the importance of making these types of decisions with intention. “It’s all about incremental learning. I think when you do things really quickly, you might get the ROI you’re looking for. But maybe in the long term, that’s not something that could build [towards] happiness or those incremental gains that make something fulfilling.”
In a way, this journey of finding her business’ brand identity in herself mirrored transformations Aditi was experiencing in herself, both in her personal and professional journeys. The process had unearthed in her a recognition of the many different aspects of her person — her work, her passions, the roles she takes on — and the importance of honoring each of those parts for what they contribute to the whole. As she puts it, “I think that, for me, I am multiple in nature. I am an orchestra of Aditis, waiting to play the instrument at hand for the audience that exists.”
A PHILOSOPHY OF ‘YES’
One of those important parts of herself, outside of her candle business, is her role and career in the advertising industry. As you may recall, at the time Aditi started her candle making enterprise in 2020, she was on furlough from her Partner Management role. Prior to her time working in ad tech, Aditi had started out as an Office Manager and Community Development lead in the fintech industry. Finding herself intrigued by the folks she saw working in marketing, she pivoted into a position at AdRoll, working first in Ad Ops focusing on performance, followed by a period managing onboarding and retention as part of the Customer Operations team.
As she put it, her time at AdRoll is where she figured out “the basic stuff,” the building blocks that make up the ad tech industry. But after a couple years working for a DSP (a “demand-side” platform), Aditi started wondering about the other side of the industry, the SSPs (or “supply-side” platforms). That question would ultimately lead her to her next role, first as a Partner Manager (working with DSPs) and later shifting into Yield Analysis (a more “supply-side” role) only months before the furlough went into effect.
So, as things go, while the ADITI® brand was officially off-the-ground as of September 2020, there was not yet quite enough business there to keep food on the table. And Aditi was hungry — her journey in ad tech was only just getting started.
Her next major role would come only a month or so later. After spending the past several months of her last role getting to understand publisher economics and motivations, Aditi found herself wanting to work more closely with Publishers and landed a role as a Publisher Account Manager at IPONWEB. By this point, Aditi had worked in several major aspects of the ad tech industry, and had become incredibly knowledgeable and well-rounded in her understanding of the trends, processes, and technologies that made this industry tick. So when she was approached by Anzu.io about a role directing programmatic partnerships in a new space — in-game advertising — that she hadn’t yet explored in the industry, there was only one answer she could give: yes.
That, it turns out, is the philosophy that keeps Aditi going. “I want to say ‘yes’ … [and] if you want to gain momentum, saying ‘yes’ helps,” she explains. “I like momentum, [so when] there’s something going on there, I want to be a part of that party. That definitely helps with keeping the learning going, continuously learning.” She credits this philosophy with helping her progress her career at her own pace and into the areas she finds most interesting and challenging. Each step along her path so far — even as far back as her Office Management and Community Development roles in FinTech — was one “yes” in a series of many, each one giving her new challenges to tackle, new things to learn, and new people to work alongside and learn from. And ultimately, that “say yes” philosophy helped her recognize the major thread she found consistently throughout every one of those roles: connectivity.
JUST DO IT!
Something Aditi reflected on frequently was the value she placed on the people she worked with and the opportunities she had to learn from them. Speaking about her current role at Anzu, she noted that “being in a unique role like this, you get to be in the room with people who are innovating and trying to understand how these different things work together.” These are the people, both inside and outside of her organization, that she’s drawn to as mentors, people she can rely on to expose her to parts of the business she hasn’t yet experienced or had an opportunity to understand. “I think it’s really important to find mentors who are able to give you [that] exposure… You’ve gotta find who’s going to teach you, and make a deal with them, hold them accountable, [and] vice-versa.”
In order to develop that level of accountability and rapport, one also needs to develop their ability to communicate. From her perspective, each role she’d been in along the way had made a contribution to that end. “[Each] role is the same… [you] communicate what is needed between the internal parties to the external parties, [and once] you understand that, and you can see the ecosystem… it’s easier to come in and play the game.” That meant not only being able to convey information others had to say to each other, but making sure others understood her as well — and that isn’t something that happened overnight. “I think I’ve seen massive growth in myself where people listen to me when I talk because I’ve become a lot more effective at communicating what I need.”
Pairing this with her natural curiosity and passion for problem-solving, Aditi has positioned herself as both the student and the teacher, both a contributor and a leader. As she reflected earlier, she is “multiple in nature,” and each of those multitudes contributes to what she brings to the table as a complete person and professional. And that integration of self is something that seems critical to Aditi’s continued growth and success. “The main thing isn’t about who these parts are and what each one wants… but that they communicate and negotiate with one another.” And when those parts aren’t in conversation, navigating through negotiation and conflict? “Then you’re probably doing something wrong.”
In one example she shared, Aditi recalls a friend who shared a passion for doing floral designs and installations, and had been looking for a way to incorporate that into the work she was already doing. “I think one of the things that she’s doing,” Aditi called out, “is she’s actually doing something. She’s not just talking about it, she’s not just thinking about it. She’s just doing it.” And much like Aditi, in doing so, her friend is discovering whether or not this is something she enjoys doing on top of her 9-to-5 job, whether it’s worth the investment to commit to this side-hustle, to put the effort in to grow and improve at it. Said differently, she’s putting that part of herself into conversation with the rest of her, and working together to determine how to make space for this important part of herself.
So then, in practical terms, what’s the right approach for someone trying to get into this dialogue within themself? From Aditi’s point of view, the first step is simple. “Go to the park… sit down with a notebook, and write your idea down.” Don’t just talk about it, or about wanting to do it. “I find a lot of people talking about the idea to go to a comedy class, or the idea to start a business, or their idea for an app.” Don’t just have an idea — write it down, make it concrete, so you can figure out the next steps to making it happen. Those steps can get more complicated, but “once you start doing [it]… and doing it consistently every single day, then eventually you can get to the stage of understanding what it is that you’re doing… and if you don’t start, then you won’t find out.”
STRIKE UP THE BAND!
It should go without saying, having read this far along, that Aditi isn’t one to rest on her laurels. So even with as much as she has going on right now between ADITI® and her role at Anzu.io, that pursuit of motivation and momentum hasn’t stopped on either front. Aditi recently started teaching herself mold-making, and has started experimenting with sculpture and pillar candles, expanding her product portfolio beyond the jar candles she’s become well-known for in certain circles. She continues to run this business alongside her full-time role as Director of Programmatic at Anzu, where she retains high aspirations for herself as she works on selling through major deals on programmatic in-game advertising, focusing in particular on breaking through into the console gaming market.
Critical to managing all of this is her orchestra analogy and what it represents to her — being whole. “I would love to get to a point where I’m not thinking of this as parts [of myself], but I am actually in a whole.” The orchestra is made up of many players, each one playing their part. But those parts don’t each play at their own tempo, their own key, their own rhythm. They play together, working with and sometimes even against each other, to create harmony. Musicality — connectivity — that transcends any one player or instrument to make something fuller and more complete.
“It’s great to be like, ‘Hi, my name’s Aditi and I am a candle maker, and I’m Director of Programmatic for a leading in-game ad tech company. This is me!’” And yes, being both of those things, along with many others (sister, daughter, roommate, mentor, coworker — just to name a few) takes a lot of time and a lot of work to do well. For Aditi, that answer lies in integration and negotiation. “You have to go back… and negotiate with yourself, and really think about, ‘What is my goal? What is my want and need? What are my obligations? What do I spend my time on?’” That might mean a total integration of your various selves — Aditi half-jokingly describes her pillar candles being advertised inside of a temple in a metaverse game — but there are many more possibilities that may make sense for you. “There’s possibilities I think to make these things make sense,” she says knowingly, “but first you have to do [it]. And if you do, then you can understand where you stand.”
But, as the title of this series suggests, we’re not all there yet. And if you, dear reader, are among that crowd, you’re in good company. “Whether we like to admit it or not, I think that everyone is probably in between things,” Aditi noted at the end of our conversation, equating this liminal space to a “second coming-of-age” for those navigating through these questions and uncertainty. “I think that people who are in between things, who are identifying with multiple different job aspects… that’s kind of like finding your inner child, or finding yourself in a part where you didn’t know that they exist. That can be a very beautiful [experience] for a lot of us.” So, to borrow the analogy once more: don’t be afraid to pick up the instrument before you, to play something new for the audience assembled around you. It just might be the part you needed to bring the band together.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Huge thanks go out to this month’s guest, Aditi Ramesh! She has been an absolute saint as I took my sweet time getting this piece together, and I can’t express enough how glad I was to get to talk to her more about her experiences and adventures in candle-making and ad tech. You can find her tweeting regularly over at @shopaditi and sharing gorgeous photos of her candles and other “candle science” experiments at @shop_aditi on Instagram. If you’re interested in learning more about the ADITI® brand and checking out her wares, you can find those at shopaditi.com where loyal readers who got to the end of this article can receive 20% off their first order with the promo code “IBT23” (Disclaimer: Just to clarify, no — this isn’t a sponsored article, Aditi is just awesome like that!)
As is now customary, I also asked Aditi for any shout-outs she wanted to give to other personalities, businesses, or voices she’s been following. First up was Nick Gray, author of The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings, whose book and most of his other work are focused on teaching the world how to “schedule, manage, and host two-hour cocktail parties to help enhance the lives of people who are struggling to meet and make new friends and connections.” For anyone living in the New York area, Aditi noted Nick regularly hosts events in the city, and highly encourages either attending those events or picking up the book to host your own where you live.
In addition to Nick, Aditi also gave a signal boost to Rishikesh Tirumala, an educator and “co-active” coach who explores the intersections of art, improvisation, and performance to help empower “creative misfits, like himself” to be radically transparent, pursue beauty, and actively connect and explore with each other. You can find him writing on his Substack, Full Power, and cultivating his experiences at rishi.garden.
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