Here’s the minute

There is a version of the jack-of-all-trades line that gets used as an apology. I’d rather use the whole thing: master of none, still better than a master of one. That’s not modesty and it’s not a boast — it’s an accurate description of what I’m for.

I work in the founder’s office at Saras, a company built for the Indian stock market, out of Surat. My title is Chief Insider Officer, which I picked, and which means whatever nobody else is currently doing. In a given month that has been pricing, positioning, a hiring loop, an analytics rebuild, a vendor negotiation, and a piece of internal software I wrote myself because buying it made no sense.

I am not the best person in that company at any one of those things. On a good week I’m the most useful, because I can carry a problem from “nobody owns this” to “this now has an owner” without needing four handoffs to do it.

None of it was planned, starting with the degree: I trained as a mechanical engineer and graduated in 2019 into a job that had nothing to do with it. I started in brand protection — tracking client products across Southeast Asian marketplaces, investigating sellers, building enforcement cases. Pure investigation work, and it taught me the one thing that transfers everywhere: how to find the pattern in a pile of ugly data. Then RED, where the remit was close to “go find what’s broken”. One of the venture models I worked on there turned into Maati, which I co-founded and ran across four jobs at once because there was no budget for four people.

I’m not an engineer and I won’t pretend otherwise. But the gap between “we need this thing” and “we can buy this thing” kept being wide, and at some point it got cheap enough to close myself. Dashboards, scrapers, small automations, a storefront. None of it beautiful. All of it shipped.

The thread that actually runs through it

If you laid my CV out and asked what connects brand-protection casework, an organic-gardening brand, ISO documentation and a founder’s office, the honest answer is: measurement. Every one of those jobs was really about getting a messy situation into a form where you could see it — a marketplace full of suspect sellers, a warehouse full of stock that wasn’t moving, a company whose processes lived in people’s heads.

That’s why I keep ending up as the person who builds the reporting. Not because I love dashboards — I’ve deleted more of my own than I’ve kept — but because an argument that’s stuck usually isn’t a disagreement about what to do. It’s two people looking at different numbers and neither of them knowing it.

How I actually work

I build the rough version first and I show it early, which some people find alarming. A bad prototype on Thursday beats a good specification in three weeks, because the prototype tells you whether the thing was worth doing and the specification only tells you what you already assumed.

I write things down, probably too much. I hand things over more slowly than I should — the honest measure of a founder’s office is how much of it you’ve successfully given away, and by that measure I’m about a year behind.

Outside work I trade a bit, mostly gold, and I read more than I write — which is the wrong ratio and the reason this site exists. I moved from Delhi to Surat in February 2025, married my girlfriend of ten years the same year, and spend most weekends on a football pitch, a trek, or a longer drive than the destination strictly justifies.