Nilay Thakkar, Practice Director
Like many young people these days, Nilay can’t seem to sit still. The man is perpetually in motion. The only time he stops moving is when a client is talking or he’s hunched over on a chairlift in a howling wind. To be honest, Nilay has slowed down a bit over the past year – and we can thank his 7-month old daughter, Maya, for that. Let’s hope she likes to snowboard…and hike, ride bikes, play outside and travel with her parents to faraway places.
Nilay grew up in the Washington DC area and graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.S. in Systems Engineering. After college, he moved to San Francisco and immediately fell in love – with snowboarding. Soon after that he met the second love of his life – his wife (on a snowboarding trip to Canada, naturally). His first love took him all the way to Chile for a mountain adventure in the Andes. His second love committed him to living in the Northwest. And that’s how Nilay ended up at ACME pursuing his third love: large-scale business consulting.
In his 10-year career climb, Nilay has amassed a wide range of experience (maybe not Andes in breadth, but close). Like so many others, he went the “Internet start-up go bust route”. When the dot-com he worked for went south, Nilay signed on at Wells Fargo where he focused on customer information management during the day and studied for an MBA in the evening (Santa Clara University). From there he went to HSBC, the self-proclaimed world’s largest bank, where he engaged in product marketing, operations, strategic planning, analytics, forecasting, and system implementation. The valuable experience included an international project that took him to London and Dubai.
At ACME, Nilay is a Practice Director who is constantly thinking, advising and working on behalf of our clients. And when he’s not doing that, he’s at home playing with his baby girl. Hoping she’ll hurry up and grow so he can take her everywhere, like up a mountain on a wind-blown chairlift. Knowing Nilay, it won’t be long.
