The first thing I ever printed was a visiting card.
This was Hubli, Karnataka, early 1990s. I was doing my bachelor's degree in a city that was smaller and quieter than Bangalore — a city that had not yet been told what was coming, had not yet felt the first tremors of the technology transformation that was beginning to reshape the larger places. And perhaps because of that, because the gap between what technology could already do and what most businesses in Hubli were doing with it was still so wide, the opportunity was more visible than it might have been somewhere more sophisticated.
The personal computer had arrived. Not everywhere — not in most homes, not in most offices — but it had arrived, and I had looked at it with the particular attention of someone who was trying to understand not just what it was but what it meant. What I understood, in the incomplete but urgent way that young entrepreneurs understand things, was that this machine could make things. Designed things. Printed things. Things that previously required specialists and equipment and time and money now required — with the right machine and the right person — just the idea and the willingness to execute it.
So I started a screen printing business. And I printed visiting cards.
Hard paper, plastic, different textures and finishes and creative treatments for merchants in Hubli who wanted to hand something to a stranger and say: I exist. I am here. This is what I do. A small rectangle that carried an entire identity. I also printed pamphlets — advertisements stuck across shop fronts and premises, the physical internet of a pre-internet city, information moving through space rather than through wire. And I printed circuit boards — actual printed circuit boards, where the screen printing process transferred a design that could then be etched into copper to create connectors and pathways. The nervous system of an electronic device, produced by the same fundamental process as a merchant's identity card.
Nobody told me these three things were connected. I just kept printing, in a city that was watching the future arrive from a comfortable distance, and learning — without calling it learning — everything I would need for what came next.
The 486 processor arrived. Then Intel's Pentium. Then AMD made it competitive and prices dropped and suddenly the personal computer was not a specialist's tool but something you could build a business around, something a college student in a Karnataka city could acquire and use to run a desktop publishing operation that competed with established print shops on quality and on time.
I taught myself HTML. Took courses in Fortran and C++. Not because I intended to become a programmer — I never did, not in the formal sense — but because I needed to understand the principles of what the machine was doing. The same instinct that had made me study bicycle gears before attempting to drive a car was now making me study code before attempting to build products around it. I was not learning technology to become a technologist. I was learning it to understand what was possible, so that I could build things in the space between what existed and what should exist.
That instinct was formed in Hubli. The execution moved to Bangalore.
Fusion Technologies was the first proper company — built after I moved from Hubli to Bangalore, carrying everything I had learned from the screen printing press into a city that was just beginning to understand what it was becoming. Bangalore in the early 2000s was not yet the thing it would become, but you could feel it shifting under your feet if you were paying attention. The IT boom was assembling itself. International companies were arriving. And with them came a particular kind of resident: the NRI professional, the engineer or executive who had left India for Dubai or London or New Jersey or Singapore, placed their children in one of Bangalore's international schools, and was now separated from those children's daily lives by distance, time zones, and the logistical reality of a world that was connected in theory but not yet in practice.
The problem was visibility. A parent in Dubai could not see how their child was doing in school. Reports came by post. Calls were expensive and scheduled and partial. The gap between a parent abroad and their child's attendance record was measured in weeks and phone bills and the particular anxiety of someone who had chosen opportunity over proximity and was living with the cost of that choice every day.
The internet existed. Dial-up connections existed — the modem, the sound it made, the wait, the moment the connection established and the world briefly became accessible. The solution was, in retrospect, obvious: put the school records online. Let a parent in Singapore dial up on a Sunday morning, wait for the connection, navigate to the site, and see their child's attendance and grades on a screen.
This sounds unremarkable now. In 2001 it was not unremarkable. The schools we approached were not initially responding to the technology — they were responding to what the technology said about them. We are a school that understands what is coming. We are a school that parents who live abroad will choose because we speak the language of the future. We sold to six or seven schools. Subscription model, per-student pricing, recurring revenue. It was working.
I sold that company. Then moved to the next one.
TendersSouth.com was India's first online tenders portal focused on the south. Government tenders — work orders published in newspapers and sent to PO boxes, bid on by construction companies that needed to physically obtain and submit documentation within tight deadlines — were information asymmetry made policy. We aggregated them. Built a searchable database. Made publicly available information practically accessible for the first time.
I built the entire UI/UX. Brought in a partner with connections in the construction industry. The company grew.
Then Bennett and Coleman arrived. One of India's largest publishing houses looked at what we had built, understood it, and absorbed it. Not through negotiation — through the particular power that large organisations have over small ones when there is no IP documentation, no trademark protection, no legal architecture defending what the smaller party built first. It appeared in the newspaper one day. Times Tenders. Our concept, their masthead.
We earned nothing from it.
I want to say something careful here because the temptation is to tell it as a story of injustice, and it is not quite that. It is a checks and balances story — one of those moments the universe uses to correct your understanding of something you were not yet seeing clearly. I had been building. I was always building. And when you are building with your whole attention, you can miss what is not yet in place around what you are building. We had no moat. We had a correct idea, early timing, and publicly available information assembled into a useful format. A publishing company with existing newspaper relationships and commercial infrastructure could replicate in months what had taken us years.
The lesson was not about the partner or the giant. The lesson was about the difference between being first and being defensible. I have asked one question before building anything since: what is the thing about this that cannot be easily copied? That question came from a tenders portal in Bangalore and it has shaped every platform and product and strategy I have touched in the twenty years since.
Then came the call center years.
Bangalore was assembling itself into the outsourcing capital of the world, and the physical evidence of this was visible before the economic evidence was fully understood. ITPL — International Technology Park Limited — stood in Whitefield as a declaration of what the city intended to become. Glass and steel and air conditioning and a kind of professional infrastructure that most of Bangalore had not yet seen from the inside. When I joined First Ring there, it felt like walking into the future. Not metaphorically — literally. The building itself was an argument about what was possible.
First Ring was my entry into the call center industry. From there I moved to HSBC — a larger operation, more structured, the full architecture of the ITES boom made operational. The salaries being paid across these companies were exceptional by any measure — half of dollar wages in rupees, in the early 2000s, was not a compromise. It was abundance. I had joined intending to understand the business, to learn it from the inside and then build something in the space.
I stayed eight years.
The money was the reason. I am honest about this — not ashamed of it, not defensive about it, just honest. I had a life to build. The salary was real and significant and it enabled things. I rose to Assistant Manager of Operations at HSBC. I managed teams. I ran processes with precision and care. I was good at my job in the way that a river is good at following a channel — efficiently, reliably, in a direction determined by the shape of the ground rather than any intention of my own.
And then one morning I was sitting at my desk and I had a thought that arrived not as a complaint but as a clear, factual observation:
This is not what I am for.
Not the people management — I valued that. Not the process discipline — I learned from it. But the trajectory of it. I was optimising someone else's system. I had been an entrepreneur since Hubli. I had printed circuit boards and visiting cards and built school databases and designed tenders portals. I had always been a builder. And I had spent eight years being something else.
I left. Found Position2 — a startup whose co-founder I initially wanted to buy a portion of the business from. Stayed because of the people. Stayed because it was growing toward something. Stayed because the work was closer to creation than administration. And in the years since, through digital transformation and AI strategy and building platforms and teams and products — I have been doing, in the oldest sense, what I have always done.
I am writing this on a website I am building for myself. It has a design system, a content management platform, an AI pipeline that will take my voice and shape it into stories, a playground where visitors will generate new narratives drawn from everything I know and believe.
It is, in its way, a visiting card.
A more complex one than the hard paper rectangles I printed in Hubli in the early 1990s. Different material, different medium, different scale entirely. But the intention is the same: I exist. I am here. This is what I do. This is what I think. This is what I have built and learned and carried through thirty years of building things in cities that were always becoming something new.
The first thing I ever made was a small rectangle that said: here is a person worth knowing.
The last thing I am building is the same sentence, at full length.