Surya Chhabra
Growth for startups.
I figure things out by making them, moving between brand, video and product, picking up whatever tool each one needs.
01
Growth.
Three growth roles: a Bay Area startup, India's largest health movement, an early-stage craft studio. Completely different audiences, so completely different work each time.
Founding Growth · TwinMind
Jul – Aug 2026
San Francisco Bay Area
TwinMind has raised $9M from Streamlined Ventures, Sequoia and Wolfram, and serves 500,000 daily active users.
Ran user interviews and went through the data to identify patterns in how people actually saw the brand. That research drove everything I made there: the film that explains TwinMind, the founders' brief for the 2.0 launch, and a design prototype the team took straight into the product.
- user interviews on positioning
- 20user interviews on positioning
- from my prototype to live
- 12 hrsfrom my prototype to live
ContentBrandUser Research
Growth · Satvic Movement
May – Jul 2026
The Satvic Movement is India's largest community-driven health platform, with a subscriber base of over 8 million.
Went through analytics, click data and user interviews to find where the old pages were losing people, then wrote the design brief for the rebuild and built the pages in Replo and Shogun.
- pages live on their Shopify store
- 9pages live on their Shopify store
ShopifyReploShogunFigma
Business & Growth · Ocher Studio
Dec 2025 – Jan 2026
Landed the studio's biggest client in North America, a global sourcing house for Indian art forms, and ran the account myself. Their Dhokra, the lost-wax brass casting Bastar is known for, now comes entirely from Ocher. Made the case for revenue models that pay artisans rather than charity.
- brands in the outreach
- 60brands in the outreach
Market ResearchPartnershipsBrand Storytelling
02
AI video.
It started with one application video, made with tools I had never used. Now it is how I pitch things.
Made with
Runway
CapCut
ClaudeFrom one post: the OFF/BEAT application video.
- impressions
- 310Kimpressions
- people reached
- 208Kpeople reached
- video views
- 120Kvideo views
- of reach outside my network
- 99%of reach outside my network
TwinMind: animated short
TwinMind needed explaining in a way anyone could follow, a small child included. I took that on as an AI-animated short film. It follows Sam through a day that will change the course of his life, on one condition: he has to listen to what the people around him are saying. He doesn't, so the twin does.
OFF/BEAT: application video
My first experiment with AI video, and basically my portfolio in 55 seconds. OFF/BEAT asked for an application video and got a mini music-video. It is also how I found out how much I like doing this. It reached 208K people, 99% of them outside my network, and held an 18-second average watch time.
Permute: product demo
A UIUC alum's startup, and my first B2B SaaS video. It opens in a different style of AI animation, then becomes a product demo built with Claude: the right features, pitched with the right movements.
Soulful Vybes: car perfume
A spot for an Indian brand about to move into a new segment: car perfumes.
03
Things I've shipped.
First place at a product hackathon, and three personal projects. All of them built, deployed and live.
- Won a product hackathonCollectivGroup the orders on a street and last-mile delivery stops being the cost that keeps small local stores off the internet. Built in 24 hours with no code at UIUC Product Space, with two teammates I met the day before.~60%lower cost per order
04
Leading, and the rooms it happened in.
Antler Founders: Illinois Entrepreneurs
Head of Exploration, Founders · September 2025
Brought Antler to campus. Workshops and a fireside put 100+ students in direct contact with pre-seed VC. Ran it end to end: the programme, the investor office hours, the guest list for the dinner.
See the post ↗︎
Roles
Secretary, Hindu YUVA
UIUC · Sep 2024 – Aug 2026
500+at the Ganesha celebrationRan the year's internal and external communications, and led events start to finish: Ganesha, Hindu New Year and Guru Vandana.
Instructor
LAS 101, UIUC · Aug 2025 – Dec 2025
25students in my sectionTaught Design Your First-Year Experience, the one-credit graded course that gets new students through their first semester at Illinois.
Head of Exploration
Founders, Illinois Entrepreneurs · Sep 2024 – Dec 2025
4×in participationExploring Entrepreneurship grew from 50 people in the room to over 200. I built it to bring in founders from majors that do not usually start companies, so students in those majors could see it was an option. Also recruited a cross-disciplinary team to launch new projects each semester.
05
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
BS Liberal Arts & Sciences
Astronomy + Data Science · Statistics
- James ScholarIllinois' honours programme for undergraduates.
Statistics & data science
- Basics of Statistical Learning
- Statistical Modeling I & II
- Statistics and Probability I & II
- Modeling & Learning in Data Science
- Algorithms & Data Structures for Data Science
- Data Science Discovery & Exploration
- Statistical Data Management
- Ethics & Policy for Data Science
Astronomy
- Radio Astronomy
- Computing in Astronomy
- Introduction to Astrophysics
- Planetary Systems
- Galaxies and the Universe
- Individual Study
06
Astronomy.
Gravity predicts how gas should spin around a forming star. Subtract that from what the telescope sees, and whatever refuses to cancel out is the interesting part. I track that residual with Python and statistics, on ALMA radio-interferometry data for IRS3B, a triple protostar system.
