He competed in Broadcasting and Impromptu at State. Now he runs a company that puts millions of people to work.

Sumir Meghani of West Bloomfield High School competed in Broadcasting and Impromptu Speaking at the MIFA State Finals before a path through Stanford, Harvard Business School, Yahoo!'s early digital-library partnerships and Groupon, to founding Instawork, the flexible-staffing platform he now runs as CEO, and, as of 2026, "Chief Robot Officer."

Sumir Meghani

West Bloomfield

Broadcasting
Impromptu

Sumir Meghani represented West Bloomfield at the State Finals in Broadcasting and Impromptu Speaking. Both events ask for a version of the same skill: understand what's happening, organize it fast, and say it clearly before the clock runs out.

Stanford, Harvard, and a library card for the internet

Meghani, the son of Indian immigrants who became American citizens, studied economics and computer science at Stanford before a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship (awarded to children of immigrants) funded an MBA at Harvard Business School.

His first job out of business school put him inside one of the odder corners of early internet history. As a business development manager at Yahoo! Search, Meghani helped negotiate the company's 2005 partnership with the Internet Archive to build the Open Content Alliance, a joint effort, alongside the Library of Congress and several universities, to build a free, publicly accessible library of digitized books. "We feel that it is increasingly important to ensure that users get access to the vast content in the public domain," he wrote at the time, describing Yahoo's approach to the project.

He later spent five years at Groupon as Vice President of Email and Relevance, running one of the highest-volume consumer email operations on the internet. "From my time at Groupon, I learned that although there are many businesses that exist to help hospitality businesses get more customers, tools to help them with staffing are few and far between," he has said, the observation that became the company he founded next.

Sumir Meghani gesturing while speaking during a television interview, mugs on the counter in front of him — In a television interview · Courtesy of CNBC

Instawork

Meghani co-founded Instawork in 2015, through Y Combinator, as a marketplace connecting local businesses with hourly workers. It has since raised more than $160 million and grown to reach, by the company's own count, several million workers across North America. In 2023, Meghani won EY's Entrepreneur of the Year award for the Bay Area.

"The main bottleneck in robotics today isn't hardware. It's the skilled workers who can train, deploy, and troubleshoot these systems in the real world," Meghani said in 2026, announcing the Instawork Robotics Lab, a program connecting Instawork's hourly workforce to the robotics industry, training people to collect the real-world data robots learn from and to service robot fleets in the field. He has taken to calling himself, alongside CEO, Instawork's Chief Robot Officer.