How We Get the Job Done: The Buttermilk Company's Mitra Raman

South Asian cooking is complex, but hacks have been passed down through the community for years, whether it’s pre-cooking and freezing lentils, or preparing a one-stop masala mixture (like the five-spice Bengali panch phoron). The Buttermilk Company’s founder, Mitra Raman, wants to bring these hacks to the world through products like instant poha, upma, and khichdi — just add water.

Tell me about yourself. Where are you from?

I’m from Bellevue, Washington, where a lot of the Microsoft and Amazon people are. When I graduated, I didn’t know what I wanted to study, but I was good at math and physics, so my parents were like: ‘You will do computer science.’

So, of course, I did that. I applied to Carnegie Mellon. People from Washington don’t really know where Pittsburgh is, but I decided to go anyway. It was the best decision I’ve ever made. I made the best friends I could have had and I met my now-husband. All of the best things.

That’s a difficult school to get into. It’s a big name for computer science.

It was a very difficult degree. And before graduating, I was choosing between working at Amazon and Uber. Eventually, I went to Amazon Go.