Meet PEM: Diya Nayar
In the Meet PEM series we introduce the brand builders & capital raisers across our community.
Head of Communications & Marketing, India
Eight Roads
Based in Mumbai
How did you get into marketing in the private markets?
It was definitely not by design. I started out in events and travel media - Showhouse Events, then Time Out Singapore - before moving client-side into banking, where I started off leading a rebranding exercise across multiple countries at RBS. That project was my crash course in one truth that's followed me ever since: change is uncomfortable, but it's the biggest opportunity you'll get to actually shape how people see a brand, not just maintain it.
When I joined Eight Roads in 2018, private markets gave me a version of that same challenge, but permanent, you're constantly translating complex, fast-moving stories (a new fund, a portfolio company's breakout moment, a founder's vision) for audiences who don't have time to be sold to. I stayed because nowhere else has brand work been so directly tied to trust, and trust to capital.
What's a piece of advice you wish you'd learned earlier in your career?
That change isn't something to survive, it's something to lead. Early in my career I treated big shifts — a rebrand, a new reporting line, a market I didn't know — as disruptions to manage around. It took a change project to teach me the opposite: the people who get remembered are the ones who step into the disruption and shape it, not the ones who wait for it to settle. I bring that same instinct into running (and now triathlons) as well — 15 years in, you learn pretty quickly that you don't get to wait for the conditions to be perfect. You adjust, and you keep moving.
What are you currently learning or experimenting with?
How to say more with less. Audiences today consume information completely differently than they did even a couple of years ago — attention is shorter, but appetite for substance hasn't actually gone away, people just want it delivered faster. So I've been deliberately studying short-form content: how you take something complex (a fund thesis, a market view, a founder story) and condense it without flattening it, so it's still interesting to read and not just easier to scroll past. It's a different muscle from long-form comms, and one I think every private markets marketer is going to need.
What tool or workflow upgrade has had the biggest impact on your day-to-day?
Granola. I didn't expect a note-taking tool to change how I work, but it has. It lets me stay fully present in a conversation instead of splitting my attention between the discussion and my notes, and I walk away with something structured I can act on. In a job that's built on relationships, that's not a small thing.
If you weren't in marketing/IR, what do you think you'd be doing?
Something in coaching or endurance sport, almost certainly. I've been running for 15 years - half marathons, then a full marathon - and more recently moved into triathlon, completing my first Ironman 70.3 in Turkey in 2024. What I love about it is how similar the discipline is to my day job: both are exercises in pacing yourself and the story you're telling, so people stay with you all the way to the finish, not just the start. If I weren't building brand narratives for founders and funds, I'd probably be helping someone else train for their own finish line.