Main Takeaways
Meet our multi-talented growth manager, Chitral Patel. Chitral’s journey from an aspiring Indian Air Force pilot to Binance’s Growth Manager in MENA shows her adaptability in relentless pursuit of challenges.
At Binance, Chitral excels in a dynamic environment, managing diverse tasks across business units. Her work aligns with Binance's rapid growth and user-focused approach, keeping her constantly engaged.
Chitral maintains her energy through strict discipline and self-care, balancing extracurricular activities with her demanding role, ensuring sustained creativity and productivity – an approach greatly facilitated by Binance’s fully remote and flexible workplace culture.
Chitral Patel is a force to be reckoned with. She speaks in a deep and confident manner that commands attention to focus, while her brilliant smile lends her immediate approachability. As the Growth Manager of Binance’s Peer-to-Peer (P2P) platform in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Chitral has been called “energetic,” “hardcore,” and “user-focused.”
Whenever there is any issue that crops up, colleagues and managers can rely on Chitral to think fast on her feet and come up with collaborative solutions. Always ready to pick up the slack, Chitral works seamlessly across the board: from merchant onboarding to marketing to security monitoring.
Outside of Binance, her energy remains boundless, as evidenced by her myriad extracurricular activities that involve weekly regular practices at the gym, yoga classes, pole dancing, aerial hoops, partner dancing sessions, weekend swims, and numerous outdoor hikes abroad. And oh, she paints beautifully too! How can a person seem to have it all and do it all? Chitral shares what keeps her upbeat and motivated as a Web3 all-rounder.
Try Everything Until You Find “the One”
Being multi-talented, hyperactive, and curious from a young age, Chitral’s journey has been eclectic and colorful. Born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, Chitral had diverse passions and interests from a young age. Initially she majored in Physics and Math because she wanted to be an Indian Air Force (IAF) pilot. She underwent 3 years of rigorous pre-military training (passing the National Cadet Corps certification with an A grade) and undertook a master’s in Physics to prepare for this career. Failing at landing admission to the IAF, she pivoted 180 degrees to a master’s degree in Marketing, after which she spent some years in academia teaching marketing. This was followed by another course in digital marketing and a job managing digital marketing students.
Eventually, these roles proved to be too laid-back for her. She yearned for more challenge and adrenaline rush, and that was when the crypto industry knocked at her door.
In 2015, Zebpay, India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, recruited her to become the seventh member and first female member to join this early-stage, exciting, venture. “Initially I thought crypto was a scam,” Chitral reminisced with a laugh. “But the founder looked genuine, and I decided to take the leap of faith. Before long, I got obsessed with this industry.”
A Roller-Coaster Crypto Career
After Zebpay, Chitral joined another crypto ship in India that proved to be “a sinking Titanic,” in her words. She was then recruited by a bigger global exchange, Huobi, and moved to their office in Dubai in late 2019. Due to the pandemic, Huobi closed its Dubai operations, and she applied for an opening at Binance, a company she had secretly thought to be her “dream company” for some three years at that point.
Finally, the stars were aligned! Once she joined Binance, she never looked back.
At Binance, it seems very intuitive for Chitral to be on top of the fast-paced daily demands that keep her on her toes. She works to maintain the P2P platform’s liquidity and security by onboarding and managing quality merchants, executing block trades and bulk deals, launching regional and localized marketing campaigns to attract new users, and diligently monitoring any signs of fraudulent activity. At Binance, no day is ever the same, and this has kept her curious and active mind fully engaged.
Binance: a Crypto Exchange on Steroids
Chitral fits perfectly with Binance’s user-focused and growth-oriented culture.
She is also proud to be part of a dream team that has engineered the fastest-growing cryptocurrency exchange on the planet. Binance has changed so much over the time that she worked here, and she has never seen a company shape-shifting so quickly as Binance has done.
“It has felt like we are always on this rapid move since day one.” Chitral views Binance’s P2P platform in the MENA region as her baby. In June 2020, when she joined, it was hardly six months since it launched, and now it has expanded to 22 different countries, onboarded over 3500+ merchants and counting, transacted 20 unique fiat currencies and served users in five different languages (English, Arabic, Urdu, Turkish and Bengali).
According to Chitral, the key value that Binance offers lies in personalization. Localization in different languages signifies how Binance values their users' distinct needs and preferences and realizes its core mission to democratize finance so that people from all walks of life, in all corners of the globe, enjoy the freedom of money.
Keeping the Creative Flow Alive
The other side of a coin of working so hard for a hardcore global team is the risk of burnout. To mitigate this, Chitral pays close attention to strict discipline, proper time management and commitment to self care.
In the early days, it was not unusual for Chitral to keep working to answer merchant calls until midnight or even 1 am. She was just working all the time, with no time for herself. Quickly she realized that this mode of working was not sustainable for her mental wellbeing. Now, thankfully, as the team has grown, she has more support to take night shifts and irregular hours.
Today Chitral makes sure that she has enough time for her many extracurricular activities and social life by waking up at 5:30 am in the morning every day so she can hit the gym or yoga class before starting the work. After work, she would make time for her dancing, acrobatics, painting and socializing with friends. On the weekends, she goes swimming and traveling.
She is grateful that Binance is supportive of employees’ wellbeing by giving reimbursement for gym and physical exercise activities. The nature of remote work also means she can travel often and work from anywhere, thus giving her the change of environment sorely needed to keep her creative and inspired.
Enjoying the Ride
Chitral thinks that Binance is a perfect place for anyone crypto curious with a dash of daredevil, who wants to constantly learn, adapt and grow. She explains: “Our work here is not very relaxing. Things are constantly changing, so you need to have the knack to check the pulse of the market at the right time, to be in touch with market insight providers and problem-solve quickly in the volatile market, policy changes, criminal incidents, social media scandals, and so on.”
Yes, Binance is a great fit for those who like to live life to the fullest like Chitral. If you are passionate about growing the future of the financial industry together, check out our open roles here.
