Insights

Celebrating Diwali at Canoe

Featuring Aman Soni, VP of Data Strategy

At Canoe, diversity enriches our culture and drives innovation. Our employees celebrate various cultural festivals and traditions throughout the year, bringing unique perspectives and experiences to our workplace. This month, we’re celebrating Diwali, the Festival of Lights, which symbolizes the triumph of light over darkness and knowledge over ignorance. 

We recently had the opportunity to reconnect with Aman Soni, VP of Data Strategy at Canoe. Last year, he shared insights about his role and journey, which you can explore here. This time, we’re excited to learn more about his cultural background, his Diwali traditions, and how his heritage influences his approach to leadership and innovation in data strategy.

The festival of lights holds special meaning for many. As you prepare to celebrate Diwali this year, could you share with us what this celebration means to you personally? 

Diwali is the festival of light. It symbolizes the spiritual victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance. It is a time for family togetherness, prayers and celebrations. This year is also a super special one for me personally as it is the first Diwali I welcome together with my wife!

We’d love to learn more about your Diwali celebrations. What are your favorite Diwali traditions or memories from past years? 

Diwali in the Soni household is always a big affair! It is traditional to start the day cleaning everything in the house to welcome the God Lakshmi who symbolizes peace, prosperity and wealth. As the sun sets, we all come together to light divas (tea lights and candles) throughout the house in every room. This is to remove all negative energies that may try to enter the house. We then perform prayers and make offerings of Indian sweets (called mitai) to God. At this point, the evening’s fun begins. 

We start with the three course Indian feast with dishes ranging from chaats to chickpeas to paneer. The drinking and gambling then begins. It is family tradition to always gamble – something Goddess Parvati did with Lord Shiva where she decreed that whoever gambled on Diwali would prosper with wealth throughout the year. We typically play card games like Flash or Rummy! As we head later into the night we finish off with a home fireworks display. Now I should tell you all that by the point we get to the fireworks there is a special family tradition of something going wrong. One year the fence ended up on fire from a failed Catherine wheel. Another year, the rockets decided to go sideways instead of up. I’d love to blame the faulty fireworks, but there definitely is a correlation based on when we started drinking! 

How does your cultural background shape your approach to work and life?

The way I have been raised is core to defining my values, my goals and my approach. My culture has taught me to be positive and optimistic in everything I undertake. Too often we come across blockers and challenges in life – admitting defeat is never the answer. Being resilient and always pushing to find the light in a dark tunnel is the only way I believe that we can succeed. My cultural background also emphasizes the power of togetherness. I have been brought up to value loyalty, teamwork and support. The runs strongly in the way I approach work. I will fight for our team to win, and expect nothing less in return.  

In your previous Employee Spotlight interview, you spoke about challenging yourself outside your comfort zone. Looking back at the past year of growth and innovation at Canoe, can you reflect on a challenge you faced and what you took away from that experience?

The private market world is riddled with opaqueness. We have made strides to unlocking transparency but still have a journey to go on. It has been challenging to change the way market participants feel about providing this. We have spent time with GPs, LPs, consultants, data providers, asset servicers and so on, but continue to find challenges in driving adoption of change within organizations. It pushed me to take a step back and consider what the best strategic approach is to be successful here. That landed me to work on providing the right incentives for change and enabling transition to be fast, efficient and economical. We now focus our time and efforts to better understand how to accomplish this. It involves the ideas and views of our collective team, and regular engagement with market participants for feedback. We want to overcome this challenge collectively and will continue to ideate and execute appropriately. 

Last year, you also spoke passionately about increasing transparency in private markets. You know better than anyone that it’s been an exciting year with the expansion of Canoe’s solutions and the launch of Asset Data in particular. Can you share how our new offerings are helping achieve that vision you referenced last year and the impact you’re seeing it have on our clients?

It is incredible to think of where we have come to within a year! Looking back 12 months, we simply had an idea and a group of design partners willing to support us through the process of building. Fast forward to today and we have over 20 clients in the program, servicing thousands of funds. 

The key feedback we receive from our clients is the ease at which we are able to enable them to conduct deeper analysis on their investment portfolios. We have unlocked use cases ranging from exposure analysis to investment due diligence. By not only extracting and standardizing asset level data, but offering enrichments, entity matching and resolution, and transparency to the workflow with full auditability to where the data points are derived from, we have been able to build client confidence and trust in the integrity and completeness of data that we provide.

We also have incredible partners like Prime Buchholz who have built downstream visualizations and enrichments to manage the data we extract and form valuable insights.  

As you think about Canoe’s continued evolution and our growing global presence, what emerging opportunities are you most excited about exploring in the coming year?

To continue winning. We have built an incredible culture of success here at Canoe. We are market leaders, innovators and disruptors. As we head into 2025, we have the opportunity to not only build exciting new machine learning solutions, but to also bring the private market ecosystem closer together with Canoe powering the flow of data between market participants and deriving insights and trends. We have the best investors in the market, the strongest team across each functional group and a focused leadership team to collectively win. 

FEATURING:

Aman Soni, Vice President of Data Strategy, Canoe.

Aman is currently employed at Canoe as Vice President of Data Strategy. He is responsible for innovating and delivering unique data products for the private market investment landscape.