Startups and spirituality
The only two things I’ve ever really cared about. I’ve been building and selling things since I was fourteen — some of it worked, and the parts that didn’t are the reason a+ exists.
My first job, at fourteen, was finding leads for a wholesaler of semi-precious stones. I did it by scraping two-sided marketplaces — Alibaba, Amazon — with no idea that what I was doing had a name. By my fifteenth birthday I was good at it. That is how I found out there was such a thing as code.
Then I tried everything. Resold costume jewellery out of my father’s shop. Supervised staff on construction sites to learn real estate. Made myself assistant to the chairman of the Bombay Stock Exchange to learn broking.
ION Education was the first company. We taught school and college students how to invest — not the theory, the actual thing: we sat with them while they opened their first account. Ten thousand students across fifty universities in three years. Then we pivoted to IonID and turned the student ID card into an RFID card they could use for attendance and to pay for lunch.
In 2011 we got our first term sheet, from an SVP at Google. I asked him for his time rather than his money. Two weeks later I was on the top bunk of a house in San Francisco called the Hacker Quarters, where my flatmates taught me to code, to build a computer, and to ship a mobile app.
On my twenty-first birthday I launched OneShop — a simple way for Etsy sellers to get a website of their own. Thousands of merchants on the waitlist, the product ready to go. Then my visa application fell through, and that was that.
I came back to India and applied to build in the UK, which meant taking on a new co-founder. We moved to London and raised a seed round. Then he told me to hand him three times the equity, or he would delete the codebase and write to the Home Office to have my visa cancelled.
I stood my ground, and watched him burn the company down. Every customer gone, nothing in the bank, and the visa I had only just been granted revoked.
I was twenty-four with less than fifty dollars to my name. I lived on popcorn, fifty-cent bagels and water, and wrote to my brother asking him to send a hundred so I could eat and make rent.
In 2015 I asked myself whether I was actually built for this or whether it was a story I had been telling myself, and decided to apply for jobs. The first company I wrote to was Haptik. I met Aakrit the next day and was running product and growth by the end of that week.
Eighteen months: sixteen million raised, the team from twenty people to six hundred and fifty, two million downloads. Reliance bought it in 2019 for a hundred million. That was the first time equity turned into money I could actually touch.
I had just watched a podcast with Elon about the Model 3, and I wondered what would happen if I converted the car instead of selling it. My father thought I had lost it. I took that as a sign.
I spent mornings and nights at IIT Bombay with the student team building electric racing cars, importing cells from China and welding lead strips into battery packs of my own — all of it alongside the job at Haptik. In 2018 a scooter moved on a pack we had built from nothing. That got us our first seed investor, and ION Energy existed.
In 2019, while Haptik was being acquired, I was doing an acquisition of my own: Freemens, a French battery-management company. That is how I met Alex, who became my co-founder and CTO.
We built the largest battery-management supplier in India — Hero, the biggest two-wheeler manufacturer in the world, and a quarter of a million units deployed. In 2022 Endurance Technologies bought the BMS business for forty million. Thirteen years from the first thing I ever sold to the first million.
The rest became Altergo, the digital-twin platform Alex and I still run, used by large energy players to manage their renewable assets.
AI is making it easy to build, so millions of people are about to become entrepreneurs. More than ninety per cent of them will fail, because somewhere along the way we all accepted that ninety per cent of startups die, and the entire ecosystem got built around that number. An investor takes a hundred shots and wins the match with two. The founder is all-in on one.
Three things kill three-quarters of startups: never reaching product-market fit, co-founder conflict, and not being able to raise. I have lost companies to two of the three. a+ is the infrastructure I wish had existed — and if more founders return capital, investors stop needing the one outlier to carry the fund.
The rest of it The part that isn’t work. Open it if you like.
