growth

In the last 7-8 years of our entrepreneurial journey, I have seen many of my friends’ startups peak and go bust. While the founders did make some personal wealth, the company suffered.

Building a company is like raising a baby; it has its journey and shape. One cannot overfeed it to walk faster. The momentum is short-lived. People who join you are for the wrong reasons and alignment hangs towards their incentives.

It is easy to ruin something with culture not getting preserved and in most instances with growth, it takes a back seat.

Fragile

We are living in a fragile world. What can happen to us in the next moment, we don’t know. The actions of others can leave a lasting impact on us. Keeping ourselves close to our loved ones is what will keep us sane.

Our time on this planet is limited and full of uncertainty. What matters is what we can do to the world around us and keep a lasting impact. Taking small steps every day and leaving a lasting, impactful footprint helps civilization move forward.

We are ruined by the externalities of the world, our desires, and our quest to find meaning out of the smallest things.

Story

We tell our brains stories, some of which are real, and many are imaginative. It is self-created and, on several occasions, self-destructive.

We create a world within our thoughts. What we think and how we lead life goes hand in hand. The story defines our interaction with the world. It can be as we would like to see.

Many successful people surrender themselves to positive stories, it keeps them calmer. They craft positives out of any miserable stories. They craft their world within and empower joy around the world.

Creative Destruction

Creative Destruction is all around us. Our old industries are being replaced with efficient, cheap alternatives. In the case of technology, this happens more often. There has been a cycle, and the entire industry has been adapting itself—those that did not, disappeared or shrank in size.

Who would have thought Amazon e-commerce sellers would also displace the paradigm of infrastructure with cloud computing?

Who would have imagined running an entire organization without hosting any infrastructure, tech tools, or software developers in-house? The launch of Salesforce displaced the old notion of hosting clunky software and fighting with multiple vendors.

How many Gen Z even care about Nokia phones anymore? They did not adapt to the Android ecosystem and lost the race.

How many of us know that you could courier and get DVDs delivered, like Blockbuster? With the emergence of the Internet, some players changed their business models, while market leaders disappeared. We have numerous examples, like Kodak not adapting to digital photography, while competitors innovated and swept away their leadership.

The Artificial Intelligence era we are currently in is going to have similar repercussions. Software developers and organizations that do not adapt will cease to exist or lose significant market share to newer incumbents in no time.

This is not my AI anxiety speaking, but rather the realization brought on by the advancement and rapid pace at which it’s moving.

value system

Your value system plays a huge role in defining your vices and virtues. How you see the world, how you react to certain situations in life, your emotions — all of it is interwoven with your value system. Our value system starts with our parents, then comes society, books, and our friend circle.

As we grow older, we get closer to looking back at life. The scars, cheers, and jubilation of the past reside with us in our mental closet. So, the earlier we fix our value system, the more peacefully we die — having lived a virtuous life for ourselves and those around us.

change

I have been part of many hype cycles in the past. I would say I built my career during these periods and benefited from them. Technological shifts often begin with a blip, but the cascading effects take time to surface.

A notable example is Reliance Jio’s data plans, which triggered a surge in smartphone adoption in India. Another major enabler has been cloud computing, which allows a small team like ours to operate remotely with guaranteed uptime, without the burden of managing infrastructure.

The AI wave will reset civilization and fundamentally change how we live, work, and consume content. This transformation is inevitable, and the transfer of wealth will favor the winners.

Within my organization, I’m already witnessing changes in workflows. Content creation, code deployment, and the development of new features are all being accelerated with AI tools, automation, co-coders, and co-creators integrated into the process.

New job seekers will struggle to adapt to this paradigm shift, and those currently unwilling to embrace it will be left behind. The change is inevitable.

Attitude

Building a successful company requires a team with a great attitude. Sometimes, between a winner and a loser comes a sense of who will outlast the other in the market. In most scenarios, the battle is won by those who are assembled with the attitude to win.

If your team has people whose attitudes are not aligned with organizational virtues, the plague will not take long to hit and affect the entire organization.

As a leader, it is your role to focus more on the right attitude than on skill sets. Also, time and again, if needed, course-correct—even if it requires making tough decisions.

As a founder, you are responsible for failure. Success will have many leaders.

strength

A founder’s life is a joyride. It is no less than a movie script. It has everything—joy, failure, happiness, and sadness. Every moment of the journey is filled with excitement.

One thing, apart from luck, that defines a winning or quitting founder is their mental strength. Most startups die when founders give up. All auxiliary reasons—about the team, funding, and competitors—are immaterial.
If you have the quest and determination to build, you will find a way. Nobody can stop you. It requires a lot of determination, forgiveness, and not being discouraged by the naysayers.

I still remember pitching to our early customers when building Taghash. A lot of them said tools like ours were not needed at all in their workflow. A few told us about our competitors and how much funding they had raised.

curious

A young child is curious. He has many questions—sometimes so many that even we adults get agitated. A child is fearless, and their mind is not yet corrupted by society. All they care about is food, sleep, and affection from their parents.

We grew up and got onto the treadmill of life. What was right and what was not came from the invisible hand—our superiors, teachers, or the government. We aimed to be productive everywhere, so much so that we started counting calories in everything.

We killed our curiosity with a never-ending urge for productivity. As a result, we are running, panting, and restless—and every break starts to feel unfulfilling.

pace

As a founder, one additional task for me is keeping up with the rapid advancement of AI and what the future holds—both internally and externally. The pace of advancement is skyrocketing. This is unfolding even more rapidly than the open-source cloud wars, the PaaS wars, or the evolution of DevOps tools. I’m not sure who the ultimate winner will be or what standards will emerge, but it’s keeping all of us on our toes.

Early signs suggest that many automation and low-level coding tasks are being replaced. At the same time, areas like content, marketing, legal, and finance are experiencing a major upheaval.

I believe the way we use software is going to change dramatically. We’re already seeing people turn to ChatGPT and similar tools instead of Google or Bing for search.

Will we still need SaaS platforms, web apps, mobile apps, or Alexa-like interfaces? Or will everything consolidate into a unified LLM prompt? Does this mean we’ll no longer need to invest heavily in front-end development?

It seems like every piece of software might eventually evolve into an assistant, operating primarily through voice.