My first office had no address.
It had a bar stool, a wooden cabin, the smell of something being consumed nearby, and merchants who came in to drink and left having signed printing orders. It was called Three Aces, and it was in Hubli, and it was where my partner and I met our customers — businessmen and shop owners who would sit with their drinks and discuss what they needed printed while two college students explained, with as much authority as they could credibly project, what was now possible with a computer and a screen printing frame.
I was studying for a Bachelor's degree in Electronics at Kadsidehewar Science College, transitioning to PC Jabin's Science Institute. I understood circuits. I knew what a motherboard was not as a consumer but as a student of the thing itself — the pathways, the components, the logic of how electricity moved through designed channels to produce specific outcomes. This background will matter in a moment. First, let me describe the computer.
We did not own one. Not exactly.
An assembled computer in the late 1990s was not a product you bought in a box. It was a collection of decisions — motherboard, hard disk, processor, monitor — each sourced separately, each carrying its own cost and compatibility consideration. My colleagues understood this. Several of them contributed components. One had a part that could be spared. Another had something that was sitting unused. The machine that became the foundation of our business was built from the generosity of people who believed, or were willing to act as though they believed, in what we were trying to do.
I want to sit with this detail for a moment because I think it says something important about how things actually begin, as opposed to how we later describe their beginnings. The stories we tell about starting businesses tend to emphasise the founder's vision and the founder's sacrifice. What they underplay is the network of small contributions — the colleague who lends a component, the partner who offers his house as the primary workspace, the friend who doesn't ask when you'll pay them back because the currency you're trading in is not yet money but possibility.
The computer was assembled. My partner's house was the primary office. And Three Aces was where the deals got done.
The choice of Three Aces was not accidental, though it might look like it from the outside.
Think about who our customers were: merchants, shopkeepers, small business owners in Hubli who had spent their working lives doing business in a particular way — over tea, over meals, in the informal spaces where trust was built through proximity and shared time rather than through formal presentations and signed proposals. These were not people who responded to offices and appointments and the bureaucratic architecture of professional engagement. They responded to conversation. To the unhurried exchange of two people who had time for each other.
A bar provided exactly this. A man having a drink was a man in a state of relative openness — not in a hurry, not performing the compressed efficiency of a busy professional, but present and available in a way that a shop floor or an office rarely permitted. The cabin inside Three Aces gave us a semi-private space within a social one. And the slight incongruity of two college students meeting merchants there — the youth of us, the informality of the setting, the drinks on the table that were theirs and not ours — created a dynamic that worked in our favour. We were interesting. We were doing something they hadn't seen before. And we were meeting them where they actually were rather than asking them to come to us.
I did not theorise any of this at the time. I just noticed that it worked.
Now let me explain what we were actually selling, because this is where the Electronics degree becomes relevant.
Screen printing is a process of transfer. You create a design — originally by hand, now increasingly on a computer — and you push ink through a mesh screen onto a surface, leaving the design behind. The mesh blocks ink everywhere except where the design is open. The surface receives exactly what the screen allows through, nothing more.
I had studied printed circuit boards as an Electronics student. A PCB is made through a version of this same process — a design transferred to copper through a chemical process that etches away everything the design does not protect, leaving behind the pathways that will carry current. The visiting card and the circuit board were, at their most fundamental level, the same operation: a pattern applied to a surface with precision, carrying information from one place to another.
Nobody had pointed this out to me. I had simply looked at both things and seen what they shared.
This is, I think, the clearest early example of the way my mind works — not within categories but across them, looking for the underlying principle that connects things that appear to be different. The merchant wanted a visiting card. The electronics engineer wanted a circuit board. I could see that these were the same request wearing different clothes, and that the process serving one was the same process serving the other.
This kind of seeing — across categories, beneath surfaces, to the structural principle underneath — is something I have spent thirty years developing and applying to increasingly complex problems. It started in Hubli with a screen printing frame and a computer assembled from borrowed parts.
I should say where this knowledge came from, because it did not arrive from a textbook.
My father was an electronics engineer. His business was in electronics — designing circuit boards, understanding the logic of how electrical pathways were laid out on copper, how current was directed and controlled through the precise architecture of a printed design. I grew up watching this. Not formally taught, not sat down and instructed, but present in the way that children are present in the work of parents they are paying attention to — absorbing the vocabulary, the process, the underlying assumption that the world is made of systems that can be understood if you look at them carefully enough.
When I set up the screen printing press in Hubli and began printing circuit boards alongside visiting cards and pamphlets, I was not branching out into electronics as a new territory. I was continuing something. The business was mine and my partner's. The instinct behind the circuit board work — the understanding that a design transferred to a surface could carry information and enable function — that was my father's, passed on in the quiet way that the most important things are passed on: not through instruction, but through proximity to someone doing the work.
This is something I have noticed consistently across my life: the things that came most naturally to me were usually things I had first seen someone I trusted do without making a fuss about it. My father designed circuit boards. I printed them. The technology changed. The underlying act — taking an idea and making it physically real in a form that carries and enables something — remained the same.
The first customer I can specifically recall was a clothing merchant. He came to Three Aces, sat in the cabin, described what he wanted — something professional, something that would represent his shop credibly when handed to a customer or a supplier — and we designed it and printed it and delivered it.
When he held the finished card in his hand, there was a moment I have seen many times since in many different contexts: the moment when something abstract becomes real, when the idea of a thing becomes the thing itself. He looked at his name, his shop name, his contact information, arranged on a small rectangle of hard paper — and something in his expression changed slightly. Not dramatically. Just the quiet satisfaction of someone who had been handed a version of themselves that was more formal, more permanent, more presentable than the version that existed in his head.
That is what a visiting card does. It makes an identity portable. It says: here is a person and a business, compressed into something you can hold and keep and refer to. Here is proof that this exists.
I printed hundreds of them in Hubli. Each one was a small act of the same thing — taking something that existed in someone's mind and making it exist in the world, in a form that others could hold.
Maari Kannu was playing somewhere that year. Upendra's film A had arrived in Karnataka with the force that great Kannada cinema sometimes arrives — not just as entertainment but as a cultural event, something that people talked about and referenced and carried with them. The song was melancholic and beautiful and it understood something about longing that I recognised without being able to name it.
I was longing for something. Not unhappily — hungrily. I was in a city that had not yet been told what it was about to become, running a business out of a bar cabin and a borrowed computer, printing visiting cards for clothing merchants and pamphlets for shop fronts and circuit boards for people who needed the physical infrastructure of electronic devices. I was operating slightly ahead of what the world around me had figured out, and I found this more natural than strange. It felt like being in the right place at the right time with the right question — which is, I have come to understand, the only condition a founder actually needs.
Bangalore was two years away. Fusion Technologies was two years away. TendersSouth, First Ring, ITPL, HSBC, Position2 — all of it was two years away and further.
In Hubli, in a bar called Three Aces, I was printing visiting cards for people who wanted to say: I exist. I am here. This is what I do.
I didn't know yet that I was also writing that sentence about myself.