I play the long game.

Where nobody's portfolio starts.

My first job in tech was answering support calls in Pune. No famous internship, no head start — a year of listening to people whose thing was broken and learning to be calm and useful anyway. I still think it's the most underrated engineering training there is.

One junior. One whole product.

My first engineering job handed me an entire platform to build for yoga studios — schema, backend, frontend, deployment. I shipped it alone, learning as I went, and found the thing that has defined every job since: I can carry a product end to end. By the time I left, I was helping hire and mentor the Python team growing around me.

Employee number one of a department that didn't exist.

A Pune software firm hired me as their first Python engineer. Three years later there was a department of eight, a string of enterprise Django projects delivered on my watch, and my fingerprints on a marketing-automation platform that would later be part of a $4.75 billion acquisition. A pattern was forming: get hired before the thing exists, leave behind a thing that works.

Three founders, three day jobs, one hundred restaurants.

By day, I was leading frontend at the Pune center of a US retail giant — introducing them to single-page apps and shipping their first one. The nights belonged to something better.

A former client — a founder in the US I'd freelanced for — called with an idea: a cloud point-of-sale for Indian restaurants. Three of us built CeleryHQ. He was the visionary and wrote the Android side from another continent. A fresh graduate ran sales, marketing, and operations, door to door. I built everything else — the web platform, the backend, billing.

This was India before cheap mobile data. Over a hundred restaurants across Pune and Maharashtra paid for it anyway. The tech was never the problem — the next stage of growth meant a paid sales force knocking on restaurant doors, and three founders who hadn't quit their day jobs couldn't fund one. So it never became a company.

Here's the part I undersold for years: it never really died. The last paying customer left in 2026 — eight years after we stopped pushing. Someone else took the market we proved. What we kept turned out to be worth more.

Founder to freelancer to founder again.

When the startup wound down, I didn't look for a job — I looked for a client. Found one: an automotive-AI startup in the US. A freelance engagement became full-time, full-time became a team, and the team became Vellestudio, the agency I still run. Then an options-trading platform. An education non-profit. Clients across New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, Italy, and the US — engagements measured in years, not sprints.

And my co-founder at Vellestudio today? The same fresh graduate who sold CeleryHQ door to door. Nothing gets wasted.

The same founder trusted me twice.

The visionary called again. His new venture was Simplified — an AI content platform taking on the biggest names in design tools, backed by some of Silicon Valley's best-known funds. He needed the platform architected and the engineering team in India built. He didn't run a search.

Over five years, Simplified grew from a content-creation tool into an AI-powered SaaS spanning text, image, video, and audio generation — fifteen million users. Somewhere in there I moved the entire platform from AWS to GCP over a weekend. It's the least interesting part of this story.

Specs, reviews, and a shuttlecock.

These days my team ships AI-first: engineers write specs and review; AI writes most of the code; the architecture stays mine to hold straight. I work at whatever altitude the problem needs — design your platform, advise you the way a CTO would, or sit in the sprint and take tickets. The title was never the point. Building is.

And most mornings there's badminton — after fifteen years of decade-long games, there's real joy in a point that ends in seconds.

Pick an altitude. I've flown at all of them.

Fifteen years in, most engineers position up — advisor decks, keynote headshots, a safe distance from the codebase. I'd rather stay dangerous at every level.