I solve hard problems. Now I want

I'd opened a furniture showroom in an upscale Pune neighborhood where, it turned out, nobody was shopping for furniture. Months in, zero sales, pure desperation.

So I asked a different question. People weren't buying furniture because choosing was hard and overwhelming. What if I sold a complete home instead — sofa, beds, dining, cupboards — at one fixed price? One lakh for a 1BHK. Done.

I called it Kanchan's Design Studio, after my wife. Packaged home design, years before it was a category. The inquiries flooded in. The contracts came.

Then my designers siphoned the clients and my carpenters vanished with my tools. I executed one last contract and walked away. The business ended. The insight didn't.

I went into logistics the only way I know how — all in. Bought two trucks and personally drove chemical shipments across Maharashtra, just to understand the business in my bones.

And I found the problem nobody talked about: brokers sat between companies and drivers, skimming the margin from both sides, adding almost nothing. So I built TruckRaja.com — a platform to connect operators directly to companies and cut the middleman out.

Today you'd call it Uber for trucks. In 2013, it was just obvious — obvious because I'd lived it. We built it, and one crore in funding was almost in our hands.

Then my co-founder blinked, said he didn't want the responsibility, and it was over. Not because the market said no — because the person beside me did. The model went on to reshape Indian logistics. I just wasn't the one who got to build it.

Technology was killing my transcription business yet again. A college dropout, seventeen years an overpaid typist — by any résumé, unemployable. So I went into food, the one thing tech can't eat, selling dry fruits store to store by hand.

She was willing to eat bad chips because nothing better existed. The demand was screaming; the supply was missing. And I knew real Kerala Nendran chips were superior — they don't stick to your teeth.

So I built the supply chain from scratch. I even walked into Lulu Mall's purchasing desk pitching dry fruits I knew they'd never buy — just to find out who the best chip makers in Kochi were. It worked.

It nearly died in the pandemic. Half my stock came back expired; I lost my house and my car keeping it on the shelves. This time, I didn't walk away.

Today Jaambu is the most successful Kerala snack brand in Pune — outselling the national players on every shelf, now shipping across India. And the company that owns it is my old transcription firm. The business technology tried to kill became the engine of the one that's winning.