The Long Game

SC. 01 · INT. SUPPORT DESK — PUNE · NIGHT

Where nobody's portfolio starts.

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

SC. 02 · INT. FIRST DEV JOB — PUNE · DAY

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.

SC. 03 · INT. AN EMPTY DEPARTMENT · DAY

Employee number one of a team 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 later part of a $4.75 billion acquisition. The pattern was forming: get hired before the thing exists, leave behind a thing that works.

SC. 04 · INT. TWO JOBS AT ONCE · DAY & NIGHT

Three founders, three day jobs, one hundred restaurants.

By day, I led frontend at the Pune center of a US retail giant — introducing Angular to a floor that had never shipped a single-page app and delivering 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, writing 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 — 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.

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.

SC. 05 · EXT. OUT ON MY OWN · DAY

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. 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.

SC. 06 · INT. THE PHONE RINGS AGAIN · NIGHT

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.

SC. 07 · INT. PRESENT TENSE · MORNING

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.