Two of the top tech leaders in recent months have fallen out of grace; one took over one of the most iconic brands in the world, the other built the fastest rising one. On many measures they have made it on the wealth equation. But what they could have gone down in history for millennia as iconic leaders, their actions in recent times stole that mantle from them. This is not about them. It is about the disease that inflicts so many leaders at their peak.

I’ll be honest having climbed that ladder myself, I came very close to falling for it too. What makes it so devious is the timing. It doesn’t come for you when you’re struggling. It comes on the ascent, sitting quietly on your shoulder, waiting.

Perhaps that’s just the fundamental nature of being human. We all love adulation, we all want to be liked. And when the recognition finally comes, it feels earned. That’s precisely what makes hubris so dangerous. It arrives wearing the face of success.

How It Starts and How It Spreads

Here is what I have noticed about the leaders who rise well. At the beginning, almost all of them carry the same three things in rough balance:

Confidence : the courage to take calculated risk, to back their own conviction when others hesitate.

Risk Awareness : the discipline to read the downside, to not confuse momentum with invincibility.

Humility : the openness to be corrected, to update, to know what they don’t know.

The formula works beautifully on the way up. You take bold moves, you get feedback, you adjust. You build trust because people see you listening. You build results because the listening sharpens the decisions.

Then success arrives. Sustained, visible, compounding success. And almost without anyone noticing, including the leader, the team around them shifts. The candid voices get replaced by familiar ones. The close-knit circle becomes an echo chamber. Meetings get easier. Nobody pushes back the way they used to.

The confidence doesn’t change. The risk-taking doesn’t change. The humility just quietly disappears.

And this is where the equation breaks.

The Equation

Hubris = Confidence ÷ (Humility × Risk Awareness)

Confidence is necessary. It is the numerator. Without it, nothing gets built. But confidence inflates the outcome when the denominator collapses.

Humility and Risk Awareness sit in the denominator multiplied together, not added. Which means if either one goes to zero, the denominator goes to zero. And when the denominator is zero, the output is not just large. It is infinite. Uncontrollable. Catastrophic.

This is not a soft framework. It is mathematics.

Subscribe now

Two Lives of the Same Man

The clearest proof I know is Steve Jobs, not one Steve Jobs, but two.

In 1983, he launched the Apple Lisa at $9,995. No software ecosystem. No real understanding of what corporate buyers needed. Enormous confidence. Zero risk awareness about pricing and market readiness. Near-zero humility toward the engineers and customers who tried to tell him otherwise. The Lisa failed. So did NeXT, the company he built after Apple’s board fired him.

Then came eleven years in the wilderness. Building NeXT humbled him — technically brilliant, commercially struggling. Running Pixar humbled him differently — he had to collaborate with creative people who would not simply comply. He had to learn to listen, to shape ideas rather than impose them. He had to eat dirt and start over.

When he returned to Apple in 1997, the confidence was unchanged. The denominator had been rebuilt. The equation balanced. The rest is the iPhone.

Same man. Same volcanic energy. Completely different architecture inside.

The pattern repeats everywhere you look. Napoleon entering Russia in 1812, his advisors warned him, the history of Russian winters warned him, and he dismissed both because thirty campaigns of winning had eroded his risk awareness to nothing. Six hundred thousand men entered. Fewer than one hundred thousand returned. Kodak’s own engineers invented the digital camera in 1975. Leadership buried it. They filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Not for lack of intelligence for lack of a functioning denominator.

Travis Kalanick (Uber): Kalanick built Uber into a $70 billion company on sheer aggressive confidence. But the same denominator that got him there had quietly emptied, he dismissed legal risks, ignored HR warnings about a toxic culture, and surrounded himself with people who validated rather than challenged. When the board finally removed him in 2017, it wasn’t a sudden fall. It was the inevitable conclusion of years of unchecked hubris accumulating inside a shrinking feedback loop.

Adam Neumann (WeWork): Neumann’s confidence was genuinely magnetic, he convinced SoftBank to pour in over $10 billion. But his humility toward financial reality was nonexistent. Every WeWork location lost money at scale, yet he kept expanding as though momentum was the same thing as a business model. When the IPO collapsed in 2019, it wasn’t the market that failed him. The denominator had been zero for years. The market just finally looked.

“Kalanick and Neumann didn’t lose the plot suddenly they lost the denominator gradually, one unchallenged decision at a time.”

Three Things That Actually Help

I have thought about this a long time, from my own journey, from watching leaders around me, from the two people on my own team who made my leadership meetings the most uncomfortable rooms I regularly sat in. They challenged my decisions openly, sometimes in front of others. There were moments I resented it.

They are also the reason I did not lose my footing.

So here is what I think actually works, not theory, but practice.

1. Keep people around you who are still permitted to tell you that you are wrong.

Not people who agree slowly, or who push back gently in private. People who can say it clearly, in the room, and know you will not punish them for it. This has to be a deliberate structural choice, because the natural drift of success is toward people who know how you operate and make the environment more comfortable. Comfortable is the enemy.

2. Build a reflection practice quarterly at minimum.

Not a performance review. A genuine reckoning. Where am I making good decisions and where am I not? Where have I stopped listening? Where is my confidence outrunning my evidence? The leaders who do this who sit with the discomfort of honest self-assessment are the ones who stay sharp. The ones who skip it are the ones who show up in case studies.

3. Go to the frontline. Intentionally. Repeatedly.

Not a walk-through. Not a town hall. Real time in the trenches with junior employees, with customers at ground level, with the people furthest from the executive floor. This does two things simultaneously: it shows you the actual state of the business, which is always more complicated than your dashboard suggests, and it reminds you where you came from. Both are essential. The higher you climb, the more deliberately you have to engineer your own contact with reality.

— — —

The antidote to hubris is not less confidence. It is a stronger denominator.

The leaders I have most respected across thirty years and thirty countries are not the ones who never felt the pull of hubris. They all felt it. What separated them was the architecture they had built to hold themselves when the pull came.

Build the denominator before you need it. Because by the time you realize you need it, it is usually already too late.

— — —

If you are a leader at any level, in any organization, how are you keeping hubris at bay?

I was traveling for the last five hours. I pulled my car into the garage, got out, and walked in through the garage door that opened into the hallway between the kitchen and the family room.

I was busy on a conference call discussing a deal we had been trying to close for five months, and the quarter close was just around the corner. I walked in through the door, saw my mom standing a few feet away, gave her a quick nod, and continued talking on the phone.

In the next few seconds, my mom walked up to me, pulled the phone from my ear, switched it off, and gave me a hard slap on my face.

At that point, my whole world felt like it came crumbling down. I was completely bewildered, shocked, taken aback, not sure what hit me.

It took me two or three seconds to recompose myself. I was extremely frustrated and angry inside because I was on an important call, and I had not announced my departure. At the same time, I realized one thing: when my mother is angry, she is always right, and I had done something profoundly wrong.

Yes, mothers are always right.

Subscribe now

I glanced around the room. My wife was standing at the kitchen counter with my one-year-old son in her arms, who was trying to push away and run to me. I looked to the left; my dad was sitting on the sofa with a somber look on his face. Both of them were not sure how they wanted to respond. I looked back at my wife; she communicated through her eyes that I needed to be calm and composed.

But I was really angry and frustrated. Here I was, a young leader trying to grow through the ranks, working hard, leaving on Sunday nights or Monday mornings, coming back on Thursday nights, traveling around the US trying to close deals with my teams. We were on a trajectory to exceed 120% of our target for the year. That was a big achievement and a big year for me, hopefully setting me up for a promotion the following year.

I looked back at my mom. She had walked back to the sofa. I started to question her. “What happened, Mom? Why did you do that? That was a very important call. I cannot be off the call.” I was so engrossed in myself, my head wrapped around the deal. She just motioned with her left hand for me to come and sit on the chair next to the sofa.

As I was walking over, my little one escaped from the arms of my wife and trotted toward me, trying to catch my attention. I lifted him up, went and sat on the chair, reconciled to the fact that I would have to come up with some excuse to explain to my team why I had abruptly gotten off the phone.

The phone was lying right next to my mom on the sofa. I kept looking at it, not having even a bit of courage to touch it or go close to it. I sat down, plopped myself on the chair, my son at my feet pulling on my pants, trying to get my attention, wanting to play. But I was completely in a state of shock.

Then my mom spoke up.

“I’ve been here for a few weeks,” she said, “watching you leave on Sundays and come back on Thursday nights. I understand you’re working hard. You’re a rising leader. You’re trying to build something.”

She paused.

“But remember this: you are a leader first at home, and only then to the rest of the world.”

“A man who does not know how to lead at home will never truly lead anywhere else.”

“Your wife and your son wait all week to see you. They deserve your presence. When you walk through that door, it is not just a door, it is hope. It is excitement. It is a future this family believes in.”

“When you walk in, you must bring energy. You must bring warmth. You must bring sunshine.”

She looked straight at me.

“I hope you don’t walk into your office the way you walked into your home today, distracted, frustrated, lost in your own world without even noticing the people around you. Because if you do, you will never be a great leader.”

“That is not the son I raised.”

Her voice softened, but her words cut deeper.

“Every single time.”

“Whether it is your home, your office, an event or even a funeral you must be intentional about your presence, your emotions, and what your face communicates.” She paused.

“Next time you walk to that door, pause. Take a deep breath. Hang up your phone. Let go of the world outside. Put on a smile.”

“And then walk in.”

“Lift your family. Bring them energy. Bring them hope.”

“That… is leadership.”

Silence.

I had no response.

All my anger drained out of me. My frustration disappeared. I felt myself retreat inward to the deepest, quietest corner of my being.

She could see it. She got up and walked away, leaving me there. I sat for what felt like an hour just staring at the floor.

Processing.

Realizing how wrong I had been. Realizing that in chasing what I thought was success, I had stopped seeing the people who mattered the most.

That night was one of the longest nights of my life. I couldn’t sleep. I replayed everything like flipping through the pages of a book questioning how I had been showing up, what I had been prioritizing, and what I had been blind to.

The weekend passed slowly. Few words were exchanged.

My dad, always a man of few words, came up to me a couple of times, put his hand on my shoulder, tapped on it, nodded at me. As if just saying: you know your mom is right, you have got to work on it. And walked away. He always had this uncanny ability to communicate everything without saying a word. My wife tried to pep me up, giving me the best support she could.

That Sunday night, as I was leaving for the airport, I walked up to my mom. She was angry and sad at the same time. Angry because she was not happy with my approach to life. Sad because she had to take a tough action to get me back on the road. She was always a tough mom, having raised us through incredible stretches of hardship and poverty. But she always took the tough action when she needed to jolt us into becoming better human beings.

I went up to her, gave her a kiss on her cheek, said goodbye, and walked to the door. I paused. Looked back at her. She had a neutral face. I walked out, got into the car, and headed to the airport.

That day, I made a vow to change how I show up as a person.

When I showed up in the office on Monday morning, I stopped outside the door. I thought about myself and what I was walking into. I put on a smile. I walked through the door. I said hello to a lot of people. I shook hands more than I generally did. I was more present than I had ever been.

Share

That one slap of my mother taught me a lesson that stays with me throughout my life.

Even today, twenty+ years later, when I walk up to my home, I always make sure I tell my colleagues I am getting off the phone and will not be available for the next thirty to forty-five minutes, or I schedule my calls around it.

I walk up to the door, take a couple of deep breaths, tidy up my clothes, put on a big smile, then walk through that door. I am intentional and aware. I try to make my family feel it. I bring my best into the home: excitement, happiness, and as my mother said, sunshine.

That one act has made a profound difference in my leadership, at home and at work.

Many people over the years have admired and given me feedback, asking me how I bring so much energy, positivity, and optimism to even the toughest meetings.

I refrain from reciting the long story of my mother. But I always smile, think about my mom, and say:

Thank you, Mom. That slap changed my life.

Proven across neuroscience, psychology, and ancient philosophy, the mind is mapped in three bands. The conscious layer: the short-term, task-oriented surface where most of your workday lives. The sub-conscious: the medium-term pattern library that shapes what you decide without your knowing it. And beneath both vast, quiet, and almost entirely untapped the unconscious: your accumulated mental model of reality, the seat of wisdom, the layer that, unlike the other two, has no ceiling.

Subscribe now

Here is what nobody told you when you became a founder, or made Managing Director, or took the board seat: you have been rewarded, your entire professional life, for optimizing the wrong layer.

"The conscious mind is finite. It runs out.
The unconscious is infinite. We treat it like a basement
we keep meaning to clean but never do."

Look at the triangle from my earlier above. At birth, the deepest layer is widest. Children operate from instinct, wonder, and an almost primal connection to pattern and meaning. Then school trains them out of it. Career finishes the job. By the time most executives hit their peak earning years, they are running almost entirely on conscious bandwidth packed calendars, dopamine-loop dashboards, the tyranny of the urgent with the sub-conscious running on decade-old patterns, and the unconscious layer barely touched.

We call this high performance. We should call it what it is: a slow amputation of our deepest cognitive resource.

Share

The Data Makes It Worse

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio demonstrated that the unconscious processes roughly 11 million bits of information per second. The conscious mind handles about 40 bits. You are running your company, your investments, your relationships almost entirely on the 40-bit layer. The 11-million-bit engine is idling.

Harvard’s Robert Kegan found that fewer than 20% of adults ever develop what he calls a “self-authoring mind” the capacity to examine your own mental models, hold contradiction, and think beyond the frameworks others handed you. The other 80% are making high-stakes decisions from a sub-conscious layer they have never once audited.

And wisdom? The average age at which leaders describe accessing genuine insight, not knowledge, not experience, but synthesized wisdom, is their late 50s. By which point most of their highest-leverage decisions are behind them.

Look around at the ones who made it. Really made it, by every external measure. The exit, the title, the wealth, the recognition. From the outside, the story is clean. From the inside, ask what it cost. Ask their spouse. Ask their body. Ask the friendships that quietly dissolved, the health that was quietly mortgaged, the version of themselves they quietly stopped being somewhere around year four of the sprint that never ended. Something always gives. It just gives on the inside first, where nobody can see it, until one day it becomes visible, and by then the bill is very large.

That is the provocation. Not that ambition is wrong. Not that the drive to build and achieve is misguided. But that running at full velocity on the first two layers, indefinitely, without ever pausing to go deeper, is a bet you are making with someone else's chips. Your health. Your relationships. Your interior life. The people closest to you absorb what the mission produces but cannot yet account for.

The founders who build enduring companies aren't the ones with the best processes. They are the ones who metabolize failure slowly, read widely, sit with discomfort, and develop a mental model of reality that is richer, more accurate, and more adaptive than their competitors'. That is a wisdom advantage. It compounds, like interest, in the background, while everyone else is optimizing their inbox.

"Action without wisdom is just expensive noise.
Decisions without wisdom are just faster mistakes.
Wisdom without action is poetry.
All three together that is what mastery looks like.”

The third layer is where you calibrate. Not once, at the end, when the dust settles and you finally have time to reflect. But repeatedly, along the way. Is this still worth it? Is who I am becoming someone I would choose? Are the things I am accumulating on the outside matched by something growing on the inside? These are not soft questions. They are the hardest questions. And they can only be answered from the deepest layer.

The layer that never runs out is the one you keep putting off. But the price of putting it off is not paid by you alone. When did you last deliberately feed it?

It's not just the engineering though building fully autonomous hardware, AI vision systems, and safety-critical software is extraordinary. It's his unflinching commitment to a singular mission: restoring mobility and dignity to people the industry forgot.

He's doing this with a team of four or five people, operating in production, not pitch decks.

In this interview we went over everything from AI engineering to market access to designing and running a startup with a small team and more.

• How to Build AI at the Edge: The engineering philosophy behind autonomous systems in real-world, constrained spaces where failure isn’t an option. Why he built a device with joystick override a philosophy of trust most AI companies get wrong.

• The Hidden Market: Why elderly mobility in airports is a white-space opportunity that venture capital systematically overlooks. The data-driven case for a problem everyone walks past.

• From Customer Obsession to Design: How “Start with the customer” (Bezos) and “Start with the why” (Sinek) become real product decisions. Why a device that feels like a wheelchair but doesn’t behave like one changes everything.

Rajeev built something that most founders would have abandoned after the first iteration. He's gone through four complete iterations of a complex AI product, hardware, custom chips, software, visual intelligence with a handful of people. And he believes this platform can scale across airports, warehouses, hospitals, and every massive indoor space where human agency matters.

In a world obsessed with disruption, this is the story of someone quietly building the future for the people everyone else overlooks.

That's how you change humanity at scale and we love founders like Rajeev Ramanath.

[If you know founders like Rajeev who are solving serious societal challenges, we would love to amplify their work and their voice, drop us a note at info@seranai.com. If it fits our mission, we will bring them on and share with the world. Thank you]

Almost every leader has it blocked on their calendar. The weekly leadership meeting. And almost every leader is getting it wrong.

I’ve been in rooms where these meetings were scheduled with the best intentions and then watched them slowly deteriorate. They became performative. Predictable. A tax on everyone’s time rather than the engine of the team’s success. After decades of leading at scale, founding companies, and coaching leadership teams of all sizes, I’ve come to believe this:

How you run your weekly leadership meeting is one of the single biggest predictors of whether your team becomes exceptional or just average.

Let me be direct about what’s broken in most of these meetings.

The meeting is inconsistent, it’s shortened, lengthened, or canceled when the diary gets full, which is precisely when you need it most. The leader (or a few of the loudest voices) takes up all the oxygen. Action items are captured in a flurry but rarely followed through. These meetings are too serious. There’s no vulnerability, no laughter, no celebration. And most people leave more confused about their priorities than when they walked in.

And here’s the mistake I see even in fast-growing startups of 50, 60, 80 people:

The leadership table is kept artificially small.

Three people. Four. Five at most. While the rest of the organization the people who actually know what’s broken are never in the room.

That’s not a leadership team. That’s a committee pretending to lead.

This is not a process problem. It’s a leadership problem.

Yes many leaders will say they have great meetings but they are perfunctory in nature.

The Story Nobody Talks About: Startup Cadence

Having coached 50+ founding teams across industries and geographies, here’s what I see most often.

The founders communicate constantly. They’re on Slack, they’re in stand-ups, they’re pinging each other at midnight. The co-founders know each other’s thinking. The leadership team is small enough that information travels fast. So the assumption becomes: we’re aligned. We’re connected.

“We don’t need the ritual because we talk to our teams and we have town halls”

That assumption is quietly killing more startups than bad product decisions ever will. And because everyone is moving fast, nobody stops to ask whether the team is building the kind of trust that survives a bad quarter, a pivot, or a departure.

Speed is used as the reason not to do this. But speed is actually the reason you must.

A consumer goods startup I worked with recently had a growing sales team, real market traction, and a founder who was genuinely excellent at the product. The sales team barely came to the office once a month. The calls that did happen were all about numbers. Pipeline. Conversion. Revenue targets. Every single conversation was transactional. There was no camaraderie. No shared identity. No sense of being part of something together. When results dipped as they inevitably do there was no reservoir of trust to draw on. The team fractured around the stress rather than coming together through it.

The founder told me: “I don’t have time to build the ritual right now. I need to hit my numbers.”

I told him: you won’t hit your numbers without the ritual.

Download the High Performing Leadership Ritual Checklist Below

What 33 Trapped Miners Understood That Most Leaders Don’t

In August of 2010, 33 Chilean miners were trapped nearly a kilometer underground under 700,000 tons of rock. They had food for two people for roughly ten days only. The world didn’t know they were alive for the first 17 days. They didn’t know if the world was looking.

What kept them alive psychologically and physically was not luck or heroics alone.

It was a ritual.

Shift supervisor Luis Urzúa imposed a strict daily structure almost immediately. Cards were distributed so miners could write about their feelings, their fears, their disagreements, a deliberate exercise in psychological safety. Twice-daily prayer meetings provided anchoring and hope. Hygiene and maintenance were non-negotiable, on a rotating roster. Exercise was mandatory. And every single day at noon, all 33 men ate together.

That shared meal was the most powerful ritual of all. Every single day at noon, all 33 men ate together.

That shared meal(although it was meagre) was the most powerful ritual of all. In the middle of uncertainty, scarcity, and fear, they created a moment of community, banter, and shared humanity. It was not optional. It was sacred.

Sixty-nine days later, every single one of them walked out alive.

Now ask yourself: what is the equivalent of that noon meal in your leadership team?

What I’ve Seen Work (and fail) at Every Scale

I want to share some experiences that shaped everything I now believe about this ritual.

When I joined Accenture in 2013, I inherited a team of about 6,000 people. I was new to the city, new to the company, and the mandate was clear growth had plateaued for the center and we needed to turn it around.

The first move was expanding the leadership table carefully. We had four leaders running an organization of 6,000. We went from four to nine first. Got that to work. Then to twelve. Then, as the team grew, to over twenty. Calibrated. Intentional. And critically: I began inviting the functional and enabling leaders Transition, finance, infrastructure into our meetings on a regular basis. This collapsed the distance between senior leadership and the ground in ways no org chart change could. Everyone who mattered was inside the tent. Did not matter who they reported to.

The single most transformational thing, though, was simpler than all of that. We started a weekly leadership meeting every Friday at 2:00 PM on the 10th floor of our central office for 2 hours. Mandatory, unless you had a client commitment or a personal emergency.

Over four and a half years, that meeting became something people genuinely looked forward to. Consistent time, broad participation, a structured agenda with room for the unplanned, a chai break at the halfway point, external speakers, celebrations, cross-functional pairings, skip levels in the room and an offsite where a leader roasted me for 90 minutes in front of 100+ people. When they saw me on the floor laughing at myself, something unlocked.

Permission to be human. Permission to have shortcomings and laugh about them together.

After that, we were unstoppable.

By the time I left, the team had grown from 6,300 to over 25,000+. We deployed 10,000+ robotic process automations. We hosted over 1,100 client visits in a single year in 2016. We built the first digital center Accenture created anywhere in the world.

None of that happened because of a strategy deck. It happened because of a team that trusted each other completely and a Friday meeting that was the beating heart of that trust.

Share

The Pattern Holds at Every Scale

I know what some of you are thinking: that’s a 25,000-person organization. My world looks nothing like that.

I’ve seen this work with 2 people. I’ve also seen it fail at 80.

At VeARC Technologies, a company I founded, we started a standing meeting when there were just the two of us. Me and my first hire every Monday morning at 11:30. We called it AHM. And we never stopped. As the company grew from two to ten to dozens to hundreds, the format evolved but the ritual never broke. Today it still happens every Monday at 11:30, in a large open room on the floor, not a boardroom where the whole team gathers. There was resistance early on from a faction at the second and third level who didn’t like Monday mornings, who had Sunday night plans. For about seven quarters, they pushed back. But eventually, without fanfare, it became muscle. The ritual outlasted the resistance.

In another company I was brought in to coach and help turn around, the leadership meeting exists on paper but barely in practice. Cancelled. Delayed. Topics decided at the last minute. And the table is a tiny four or five people in a company of sixty-plus, which means the people who actually know what’s happening are never in the room. The distance between the leader and the front line never collapses. The team never fully gels.

One of these companies has a culture people fight to stay in. The other has revolving door atrophy. The product quality difference is real. The talent retention difference is real. Both trace back, at least in part, to this one ritual and how seriously it was taken.

10 Things High-Performing Teams Do That Most Leaders Won’t

First get the basics in place: lock the time, set an agenda, celebrate wins, praise in public and coach in private are in the free checklist linked below. What follows are the eight critical moves that actually separate the teams that transform from the ones that just function. These are the ones most leaders know they should do and quietly don’t.

1. Build your Extended Leadership Team even at 50 people. I prefer an expanded leadership team but if you want a core smaller team, then divide your leadership into two tiers. Your core team: four to five direct reports who own the big functions. And your Extended Leadership Team (ELT): fifteen to twenty people who include team leads, functional enablers, skip levels the people one layer closer to the front line. Even at fifty people, even at eighty, you can and should have both. The more people you have under the tent, the faster the distance between leadership and the front line collapses. That collapse is exactly what you’re trying to achieve.

2. Welcome every new member with honor and responsibility. Every time I added someone to the leadership meeting, I sent them a personal email before their first session. I congratulated them. I told them specifically why they were being included. And in the same email, I told them exactly what was expected: an active contribution, a voice that represented not just their function but the scores of people outside that room whose work would be shaped by the decisions made inside it.

Honor and responsibility, in the same breath.

That combination changed how people showed up from day one.

3. Seat everyone at the table. Literally. Not behind someone. Not on a chair against the wall. At the table. I was absolutely insistent on this. Sometimes it meant the room was shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow. That was the point. The physical geometry of a meeting communicates hierarchy or the lack of it more loudly than any words you’ll say. When someone sits at the table for the first time and realizes they are not a guest but an equal, something shifts in how they show up.

Subscribe now

4. Watch your own airtime. Measure, even informally, how much you’re speaking versus everyone else. If you’re talking more than 30-40% of the time, you’re not running a leadership meeting, you’re running a broadcast. I made a deliberate habit of asking questions rather than giving answers. The quality of thinking that comes back when you do this will surprise you.

5. Use offsites to go deep, not just decompress. Most organizations run offsites and watch the camaraderie evaporate by Monday morning. That’s because they treat the offsite as a picnic(pressure valve) rather than a trust accelerator. The offsites that changed my teams were the ones where people shared real fears. Real stories. Things they’d only told the people they loved. One of our offsites had a leader open by roasting me for 90 minutes. What it created was permission to be human, to be imperfect, to laugh together. That’s not team-building. That’s a trust crucible. The returns compound for years.

6. Hold the line, even when it’s painful. When someone is consistently out of alignment after genuine, patient, repeated attempts to bring them along, you have to make the hard call. I know how difficult this is. It’s rarely clean. If you’ve built real human connection in this team, it’s genuinely painful. But the rest of your team is watching. They want to know whether you’ll protect the mission or protect the individual. Every day you delay, you’re making a choice that affects every aligned person in that room. Protecting the team sometimes means rotating someone out of it. That’s not a failure of leadership. It is leadership.

7. Share the uncomfortable Details. Really. I gave every leader in the room including skip levels access to information never available before. Full visibility into the real numbers and real issues. In detail. I asked them to treat it with discretion. What happened next: people stopped thinking like function heads and started thinking like owners. The level of accountability and performance that followed was unlike anything I’d achieved through targets or incentives alone. Transparency is not a risk. Opacity is.

8. Design deliberately for hybrid, it doesn’t happen by accident. A hybrid meeting left unmanaged defaults to a two-tier experience: the people in the room connect, the people on the screen observe. A few things I’ve found non-negotiable: cameras on, always, for everyone remote no exceptions. Rotate who facilitates across sessions so remote leaders own the room, not just join it. And double the intentionality around the human moments: the break, the birthday acknowledgment, the celebration because those are the first things that die when a meeting goes virtual and the last things to come back. The principles don’t change in a hybrid world. The effort required to maintain them does.

9. Include the rebels. I initially struggled with this one more than I’d like to admit. There were two leaders on my team who were, let’s say, unique in their style, their bluntness, and their ability to hold up a decision at exactly the wrong moment. One was deeply human-connected, the kind of person who felt everything the team felt before anyone else. The other was a technical expert who made it his personal mission to call out the elephant in the room, every time, regardless of who was in it. Both were direct. Both could confuse or intimidate. There were moments I was genuinely up the wall with them.

But here’s what I came to understand: they completed the picture. Every time. The perspectives they brought from the ground, from the people, from the uncomfortable corners of reality were perspectives no one else in that room could see. Without them, we would have made decisions that looked clean from the top and broke apart in execution.

Today, they are two of my closest friends. I respect them for exactly who they are. And more than anything, they made me a better leader. If your leadership meeting only has people who agree with you, you don’t have a leadership team. You have an echo chamber with a calendar invite.

10. Show up. Every single time. This is perhaps the most underappreciated element of all, and the one I feel most personally.

For this ritual to work for a team to genuinely transform the leader has to show up first. Not just physically. Fully. That means the humility to say I don’t know in front of the people who report to you. It means being vulnerable when vulnerability is the last thing you want to perform. It means owning your mistakes out loud, in the room, before anyone else has a chance to name them.

There were moments in that Friday meeting where I teared up acknowledging a misstep. Moments where I genuinely felt like hiding under the table because I had missed something important and the room could see it. Those moments were not weaknesses. They were the price of admission to a culture where truth gets told.

And showing up extends beyond the meeting itself. When a colleague was sick, undergoing a procedure, going through a personal crisis we showed up. We reached out before being asked. I wrote personal letters. We sent things to people’s homes to say: you are not a resource to us. You are a person we love. That distinction between managing people and genuinely caring about them is something people carry with them long after the meeting ends, long after the project closes, long after they’ve moved on.

Last month, a former team member sent me a letter I had handwritten to him twenty-five years ago about his career, his potential, what I saw in him. He had kept it. I had completely forgotten it existed. When it arrived, it stirred something in me: a reminder that the moments we think are small the letter, the phone call, the showing up are often the ones that last a lifetime.

Show up for the meeting. Show up for the person. That’s the whole thing.

One More Thing: This Meeting Has Seasons

Don’t expect it to arrive fully formed. In the first months, the room is watching you, leaders test what’s safe, what’s real, whether this is different from every other meeting they’ve been in. Your job is radical consistency and radical patience: show up, hold the structure, let your behavior prove this is a place where truth gets told. Between the third and sixth month, something shifts as people start preparing, showing up earlier, the quality of debate improves. By the third quarter, the meeting has its own momentum and the team runs it through you. And when disruption comes: a reorg, a departure, a market shift, teams that have built this muscle move through it faster than teams that haven’t. That’s the most durable return on this investment.

What This Means For You

If you’re a senior leader or CXO reading this and thinking, “I already do a weekly meeting” I want to push you on this: are people looking forward to it? Do they leave energized or depleted? Is there laughter in the room? Do people bring you problems they’d hide anywhere else?

If the answer to any of those is no, you don’t have a meeting problem. You have a culture problem and the meeting is where it shows up most clearly.

The Chilean miners didn’t survive because they had a plan. They survived because they built a living, breathing container of shared purpose, daily ritual, and human dignity. In the most extreme conditions imaginable, they understood something most leaders never learn:

Ritual is not a management tool. It is a lifeline.

Share Seranai Leadership by Arshad Sayyad

So before you close this and move on to your next meeting the one you’re already five minutes late for ask yourself one question:

If your leadership team were trapped together for 69 days, would they come out stronger? Or would the cracks that already exist tear them apart?

That answer tells you everything you need to know about where to start.

High Performance Leadership Meeting Checklist

10.6KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Download the free Leadership Meeting Checklist below — the complete list of practices distilled into a one-page guide you can use before your next meeting.

Arshad Sayyad is a 3x founder, former President at Fidelity Investments India, and Managing Director at Accenture. He writes about values-based leadership at www.arshadsayyad.com and publishes the Seranai Leadership series weekly.

I got home late one night from a dinner with friends that had turned into a three-hour debate about AI. A friend eventually proclaimed something like, “Our kids are graduating into a world where their jobs won’t exist.” Existential stuff. Real anxiety. These aren’t uninformed people, they’re founders, executives, parents and the fear in that room was palpable.

The next morning, I woke up, opened my phone, and counted 16 announcements of AI companies raising capital. Hundreds of millions of dollars, cumulatively. I’ve been seeing 10 to 15 of these announcements every single day for months now. The money pouring in is staggering.

But here’s what keeps nagging at me: when I talk to CIOs and CTOs inside actual enterprises, the people who run production systems at scale, the real deployments of AI are still very minimal. Pilots, yes. Experiments, plenty. But production-grade, revenue-impacting, workforce-transforming AI? We’re barely scratching the surface.

So I’m sitting there with my morning chai, caught between last night’s existential dread and this morning’s funding euphoria, and I realize I’m confused. Not about AI’s potential. I’m confused about the emotional whiplash. The wild swings between “AI will destroy everything” and “AI will save everything” that seem to happen in the span of a single news cycle.

I decided to take a step back and understand why the fear feels so much bigger than the reality on the ground.

We’ve navigated every major technological shift from the printing press to the internet. Fear first, adaptation eventually. Subliminally, everybody gets it. So why does AI feel so fundamentally different?

Because it is different, not in what it does, but in how we experience it.

Three forces are converging to make this moment unlike any previous technological shift.

Subscribe now

The 3V Framework

Velocity. AI is evolving at a speed we’ve never seen with any prior technology. Every few months, something leapfrogs what came before. People feel the ground shifting constantly, even when their own job hasn’t been touched.

Visibility. This is the part that changes everything. AI can show you its output. It writes, draws, reasons, codes, right in front of your eyes. The steam engine was abstract. Electricity was invisible. AI is the first transformative technology that can demonstrate its capabilities to a non-technical person in real time. That visibility short-circuits the psychological buffer that previous technologies had. When disruption is abstract, you process it intellectually. When it’s visual and immediate, you process it emotionally.

Virality. Billions of people are connected online. The fear doesn’t drift like a ripple anymore. It crashes like a wave, uniformly, across geographies and industries, simultaneously. A single post about AI replacing jobs reaches 50+ million people in 24 hours.

Put these three together and you get a fear psychosis, a collective, emotionally-driven response to a threat that is real but temporally misplaced.

People are reacting to a 2030 reality as though it’s happening next Tuesday. AI, unlike any technology before it, makes the threat visible, personal, and immediate. And it plays directly into our fight-or-flight wiring.

The Decoupling Nobody Talks About

Here’s what nobody is paying attention to: there are three curves moving at very different speeds right now.

The Awareness Curve: nearly vertical. Everyone knows what AI can do.

The Capability Curve: steep and real, but following an S-curve with natural plateaus.

The Deployment Curve: much, much flatter. Enterprise adoption, regulatory friction, infrastructure buildout, procurement cycles all moving at the pace of institutional inertia, not Silicon Valley press releases.

The gap between awareness and deployment is where the psychosis lives.

It’s where fear gets amplified beyond what the ground reality warrants. And it creates a dangerous secondary effect: talent fleeing disciplines, policy overreactions, learned helplessness that actually slows productive adaptation. The fear becomes self-fulfilling.

Not because AI destroys jobs on schedule, but because the panic distorts decision-making at scale.

Subscribe now

The Capital Constraint

And then there’s the capital reality everyone conveniently ignores. Hundreds of billions flowing into data centers, chips, power grids, model training. And the returns? Not remotely keeping pace. This is not sustainable indefinitely. At some point the investment cycle will correct, not because AI fails, but because returns have to catch up with capital deployment. It’s an inherently logical slowdown.

A metabolic regulation of the system will happen.

The industry will pull back, recalibrate, and grow sustainably. It always does.

The 80% Reality Check

There’s also a profound selection bias in the entire discourse. 80% of the world is still not affected by AI. The people most scared are the people most plugged into the awareness curve. And they’re writing the articles, making the videos, and feeding the cycle.

But here’s what actually keeps me up at night.

The bigger question isn’t whether humanity adapts to AI. We will. We always do. The real question is: who gets to adapt?

We’re spending all our energy debating whether AI will take our jobs.

Maybe the more profound question is whether billions of people will ever be able to afford to use AI to better their lives in the first place.

And even if the benefits eventually trickle down to the masses and they will, slowly, gradually, the way electricity and the internet eventually did, the head start matters enormously. The people and companies who can harness AI today are compounding their advantages at an exponential rate. By the time access democratizes, the wealth concentration will have already hardened and concentrated even more than today.

The gap won’t just be wider. It will be massively structural.

That’s the disparity question. And it’s far more consequential than the disruption question.

You read this first on www.arshadsayyad.com

Arshad Sayyad is a technology executive, 3x founder, and writes about the intersection of technology, leadership, and the human experience at Seranai Leadership.

Do you know which are the fastest-growing rich towns in India?

Hint: It’s not Bangalore, Mumbai, or Delhi. And that $300K mistake is killing your startup.

I was on a call last month with a founder from Indore. Smart guy. Great product. Just raised $300K. His Bangalore-based investors told him: “Launch in Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, and Hyderabad. That’s where the customers are.” So that’s what he did. And it was unclear which category of household was he going after?

Six months later? $200K burned. 3-5% market share everywhere. CAC climbing. Growth stalling. Now scrambling for a bridge round.

Here’s the irony: While he was bleeding cash in Bangalore, the real boom towns, places like Malappuram, Nashik, and Surat were seeing explosive income growth, lower competitive intensity, and customer behaviors perfectly aligned with his product.

He could have owned Nashik with $40K, targeted specifically the Strivers or The Near Rich household with clear knowledge of where they are located. Built 30%+ market share. Created a playbook that actually worked. Then scaled from strength.

This Isn’t Just an India Problem. It’s a Precision Problem.

Before I show you the Indian playbook, let me show you three companies that cracked this code globally.

DoorDash started in Palo Alto, California literally calling themselves PaloAltoDelivery.com. Not San Francisco where Uber Eats and GrubHub were already fighting. Not New York with its established delivery infrastructure. Palo Alto. Population: 68,000.

Why? Because in 2013, delivery services didn’t exist there. The founders spent over a year owning Palo Alto and Mountain View before expanding to San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago in 2014. Stanley Tang, co-founder, said it explicitly “Instead of going head to head with competition in the cities, they focused on underserved markets.”

Result? DoorDash now holds 60%+ U.S. market share. They’re the largest food delivery platform in America.

Pinduoduo in China went even more contrarian. While Alibaba and JD.com fought for tier 1 cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen), Pinduoduo launched in 2015 targeting tier 3, 4, and 5 cities the small towns everyone else abandoned when they went upmarket.

The data was clear, over 70% of China’s population lives in tier 3+ cities. These weren’t poor markets. They were price-sensitive markets with growing incomes and zero competition. Pinduoduo hit $15 billion in GMV in just 2 years. It took Alibaba 5 years to reach that milestone. JD.com took 10 years.

Today? 900 million users. China’s third-largest e-commerce platform.

Bolt (Europe’s ride-hailing giant) started in Tallinn, Estonia. Population, smaller than Leeds, UK. Founder Markus Villig, at 19, borrowed €5,000 from his parents and built a taxi app not in London or Paris where Uber was burning billions, but in Tallinn.

Then they went where competitors weren’t: Azerbaijan, Malta, Georgia, Czech Republic. Then Africa, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria. Only later did they attack Western Europe.

Result? €2 billion revenue in 2024. 150 million customers across 50 countries. 21% of African ride-hailing market share.

The pattern is clear: Palo Alto before San Francisco. Tier 3 China before Beijing. Tallinn before London.

Precision before presence. Ownership before awareness.

Subscribe now

Now Let’s Talk About India

Even if you want to go after metros, each metro is no longer a homogeneous location for many business segments. You have to think of micro townships.

India is not one market it’s 9 metros, 16 boom towns, and 38+ niche cities. Even within metros, it’s micro markets.

And the winners in India are following the exact same playbook as DoorDash, Pinduoduo, and Bolt.

Meesho is the poster child. While Flipkart and Amazon fought in metros, Meesho went after tier 2 and tier 3 cities with laser focus. Today, 80%+ of their orders come from tier 2/3 cities. They have 100 million+ transacting users and crossed $1 billion in revenue. 87% of their customers are from outside the top 8 cities.

They didn’t compromise. They chose precision.

The Fyn Mobility Playbook: Domination Over Distribution

I coach the CEO of Fyn Mobility, an EV startup focused on last-mile delivery and logistics solutions in India. While competitors burned cash across 15+ cities trying to be “pan-India,” Fyn built absolute density in micro towns.

Here’s what actually happened:

EV logistics solutions are capex and operations intensive given the multiple dimensions of vehicles, drivers, real time rostering, and EV servicing you have to manage at a low unit cost per ride for the customer.

The typical playbook: Given the explosive growth of 10-minute deliveries in metros, many players like Bounce, Vogo, Magenta, Zyngo, Zovo jumped into servicing metro areas. In the early years metros was the only place EVs were being deployed given the infrastructure required for charging and servicing. Players raised anywhere from $5M to $15M and launched across 8 cities, hired city managers, launched brand campaigns, and burned through their cash in 9 months or less. Many have shut down operations, scaled back drastically, or pivoted to a completely different business to survive. Some of them eventually had raised upwards of $30 Million.

The Fyn approach: In 2021, coming out of COVID, we were at a crossroads with scattered operations in 4 cities and revenue trajectory stalling. We decided to go deep and analyze each market from first principles.

The questions we asked were:

1. What behaviors are driving demand for 2-wheeler EVs?
   Quick commerce was the driving factor. Large players were anchoring consumer behaviors to instant deliveries, and EVs were economical at scale for them.

2. If it was indeed quick commerce, where was the demand density even within metros?
   We realized that even within Bangalore (from a quick commerce and hence EV perspective) there are 9 different micro townships.

3. What were these micro townships?
   We found three of the largest hubs with the most demand for two wheeler EVs - Mahadevpura, Yeshwantpur and Chandapura.

4. In those micro townships, who were the dominant customers?
   BigBasket, Amazon, Swiggy, Instamart, Shadowfax.

The decision: Focused capital deployment in these demand rich micro townships where the highest density of quick commerce demand existed.

The results:

• Built category leadership in the largest EV-usage micro-markets

• Achieved higher vehicle utilization than industry benchmarks

• Created a clear path to profitability in these markets

• Scaled from a position of strength and the same model today is deployed in Chennai and Hyderabad.

This isn’t luck. It’s precision.

There are two dimensions critical to success when you are scaling your startups in any country:

1. Precise targeting of geographical locations you can compete and own in a short period of time. Whether they be Tier 3 towns or micro markets, you have to know the location focus.

2. The household category in that location to be targeted based on affordability and share of wallet you can capture/displace/incentivize to acquire.++
   
   ++ I am keeping it a little simple here but #2 above needs some more work. And you will see why below.

   Share

The Boom Towns You’re Ignoring

Let me show you what the data actually says about India’s fastest-growing consumption centers.

While founders obsess over Bangalore and Mumbai, cities like Malappuram, Nashik, and Surat are seeing:

• Rising household incomes at rates exceeding metros

• Growing middle-class populations with high purchase intent

• Lower competitive intensity across most consumer categories

• Better CAC economics (40-60% lower than metro averages)

• Higher word-of-mouth velocity (tighter social networks)

Malappuram, for instance, has one of the highest per-capita banking deposits in Kerala, a direct indicator of purchasing power. Yet how many consumer startups are targeting it specifically?

Nashik and Surat are both economic powerhouses with manufacturing wealth, growing professional classes, and consumption patterns that mirror metros from 3-5 years ago. That lag? That’s your opportunity window.

These aren’t compromise markets. They’re precision targets.

The startups dominating these boom towns aren’t settling for second-tier cities.

Now some startups claim they are focusing on Bharat 2.0 the tier 2, 3 towns yet their approach does not reflect that aspiration in actual execution.

But Geographic Precision Isn’t Enough. You Need Household Precision Too.

Here’s the part most founders miss. Not all households in Nashik are your customers. Not all households in Surat matter for your product.

India isn’t one market. It’s 307.6 million households distributed across 8 distinct income segments each with different behaviors, different spending patterns, and different geographic concentrations.

Here I am using the demographic personas defined by PRICE Non profit for illustrations.

Most founders think of the middle class and imagine one homogenous group. The reality? India’s income pyramid has eight layers, and your product fits exactly one or two of them.

India’s 8 Household Income Segments: The Complete Map

Here’s the actual structure of Indian household income in 2020-21, based on PRICE’s ICE 360° surveys of 40,000+ households:

The Poor (206 Million Households | 67% of India)

1. Destitutes (₹0-1.25 lakh annual income): 45 million households

• Share of population: 14%

• Annual growth: -0.6% (shrinking)

• Average household income: ₹73,000

• Average expenditure: ₹82,300 (they spend MORE than they earn)

• Geographic concentration: 83% rural, primarily Left-Behind Rural areas

• Your strategy: If your product costs more than ₹500, this isn’t your customer. Period.

2. Aspirers (₹1.25-5 lakh annual income): 161 million households

• Share of population: 52%

• Annual growth: 0.6%

• Average household income: ₹2.56 lakh

• Average expenditure: ₹2.58 lakh (barely breaking even)

• Geographic concentration: 67% rural, 33% urban

• Your strategy: These households are price-sensitive but aspirational. They’ll buy your product if it solves a genuine pain point AND the price is under ₹2,000. Sachets, installment plans, and “try before you buy” models work here.

The Middle Class (91 Million Households | 30% of India)

This is where the money is. ₹84 trillion in total household income. ₹62 trillion in spending power. ₹12 trillion in savings.

3. Seekers (₹5-15 lakh annual income): 77 million households

• Share of population: 25%

• Annual growth: 4.8%

• Average household income: ₹9.25 lakh

• Average expenditure: ₹6.84 lakh

• Average savings: ₹1.29 lakh annually

• Geographic concentration: 52% rural, 48% urban

• Your strategy: This is India’s growth engine. They’re entering discretionary spending cars, appliances, education, travel. Products priced ₹5,000-₹50,000 work here. They’re brand-conscious but still price-sensitive. This segment is heavily concentrated in boom towns like Nashik, Surat, Malappuram where they have 30%+ market share potential vs. 5% in metros.

4. Strivers (₹15-30 lakh annual income): 14 million households

• Share of population: 4.5%

• Annual growth: 6.4% (fastest-growing middle-class segment)

• Average household income: ₹20.47 lakh

• Average expenditure: ₹20.47 lakh

• Average savings: ₹1.29 lakh annually

• Geographic concentration: 60% urban, 40% rural

• Your strategy: These households are confident spenders. They’ll pay ₹50,000-₹2 lakh for products that signal status or save time. Premium appliances, private education, international travel, luxury cars all in play. 54,000 Striver households in Nashik. 135,000 in Surat. That’s 200,000 households with ₹15-30 lakh income and zero competition.

The Rich (11 Million Households | 4% of India)

₹38 trillion in household income. ₹22 trillion in spending. ₹6 trillion in savings.

5. Near Rich (₹30-50 lakh annual income): 3.3 million households

• Annual growth: 7.4%

• Average savings: ₹6.06 lakh annually

• Geographic concentration: 62% urban (heavily metro-concentrated)

• Your strategy: Premium products ₹2-5 lakh. Luxury goods, international travel, private schooling, imported cars.

6. Clear Rich (₹50 lakh-₹1 crore annual income): 3.2 million households

• Annual growth: 9.4%

• Geographic concentration: 67% urban

• Your strategy: High-ticket items ₹5-20 lakh. Second homes, luxury cars, international education.

7. Sheer Rich (₹1-2 crore annual income): 2.4 million households

• Annual growth: 10.2%

• Geographic concentration: 67% urban

• Your strategy: Ultra-premium ₹20 lakh+. Multiple properties, luxury travel, wealth management.

8. Super Rich (₹2 crore+ annual income): 1.8 million households

• Annual growth: 11.3% (fastest-growing segment overall)

• Geographic concentration: 79% urban (50% live in Mumbai and Delhi alone)

• Your strategy: If you’re not selling ₹50 lakh+ products or services, this isn’t your primary market.

Subscribe now

Why This Changes Everything About Your GTM Strategy

Most founders make one of three mistakes:

Mistake #1: We’re targeting middle class India
Which middle class? Seekers earning ₹9 lakh annually or Strivers earning ₹20 lakh? That’s a 2.2x income difference. Completely different price sensitivity. Completely different purchase triggers.

Mistake #2: We’re launching in tier 2 cities
Which household segments live there? Nashik has 54,000 Striver households (₹15-30 lakh income) but also 205,000 Aspirer households (₹1.25-5 lakh). If your product costs ₹15,000, only 20% of Nashik can afford it. You just wasted 80% of your marketing budget.

Mistake #3: We’ll target urban India
48% of Seeker households (₹5-15 lakh income) live in rural India. 40% of Striver households (₹15-30 lakh) live in rural India. If you’re ignoring Developed Rural areas (160 districts with high infrastructure and income), you’re missing 40 million middle-class households.

The Precision Playbook: Two Dimensions, Not One

Winning founders don’t just pick a city. They pick a household segment in a geographic cluster.

Example 1: Meesho

• Target segment: Seekers (₹5-15 lakh income) + Aspirers (₹1.25-5 lakh)

• Geographic focus: Tier 2/3 cities + Developed Rural

• Result: 80%+ of orders from tier 2/3 cities. ₹1 billion+ revenue. 100 million users.

Example 2: Fyn Mobility

• Target segment: Strivers (₹15-30 lakh) + Near Rich (₹30-50 lakh)

• Geographic focus: Chandapura, Yeshwantpur, Mahadevapura micro-townships

• Why: Highest density of quick commerce = highest density of Striver/Near Rich households needing EV logistics

• Result: Category leadership in target micro-market. Path to profitability. Scaled from strength.

Example 3: Pinduoduo (China)

• Target segment: Tier 3/4/5 city households (China’s equivalent of Seekers)

• Geographic focus: Small cities Alibaba abandoned

Result: ₹15 billion GMV in 2 years. 900 million users. China’s 3rd largest e-commerce platform.

How to Pick Your Segment + Geography Combination

Here’s the framework we use with founders:

Step 1: Define Your Affordable Segment

What’s your product price point?

• ₹500-2,000: Aspirers (₹1.25-5 lakh income) = 161 million households

• ₹2,000-10,000: Seekers (₹5-15 lakh income) = 77 million households

• ₹10,000-50,000: Strivers (₹15-30 lakh income) = 14 million households

• ₹50,000-2 lakh: Near Rich (₹30-50 lakh income) = 3.3 million households

• ₹2 lakh+: Clear Rich and above (₹50 lakh+ income) = 7.4 million households

Step 2: Map Segment Concentration by Geography

Use household income data (PRICE ICE 360°, Census wealth indices, district-level consumption data) to answer:

• Which boom towns have the highest concentration of my target segment?

• Where is competitive intensity lowest for this segment?

• Where can I achieve 30%+ market share with ₹40K spend?

Example data points:

Seekers (₹5-15 lakh) concentration:

• Nashik: 171,000 Seeker households (32% of city)

• Surat: 522,000 Seeker households (31% of city)

• Malappuram: High per-capita banking deposits = high Seeker concentration

• Vs. Bangalore: Seekers are only 20% of households (diluted by Rich segments)

Strivers (₹15-30 lakh) concentration:

• Nashik: 54,000 Striver households

• Surat: 135,000 Striver households

• Jaipur: 191,000 Striver households

• Vs. Mumbai: Strivers exist but CAC is 2-3x higher due to competition

Step 3: Build Density, Not Presence

Don’t launch in 5 cities targeting “middle class.”

Launch in 1 boom town targeting Seekers or 1 micro-township targeting Strivers.

Build 30%+ market share. Hit unit economics. Document the playbook. Then scale.

The precision playbook isn’t just picking Nashik over Bangalore.

It’s picking Seeker households in Nashik over Seeker households in Bangalore.

It’s picking Striver households in Mahadevapura over Strivers scattered across Bangalore.

Geographic precision + household precision = market dominance.

The Boom Towns Are Waiting. And They’re Growing Faster Than You Think.

Let me leave you with one final data point that should change how you think about India:

By 2030 just 6 years from now India will have 715 million middle-class consumers. That’s up from 432 million today.

It’s happening in Developed Rural areas 160 districts with infrastructure, income, and zero competition.

This Is Your Moment

If you want the same precision approach we brought to Fyn Mobility’s GTM strategy, the one that’s driving category leadership, let’s talk.

Credits: I want to accord my special thanks to the PRICE non profit for the incredible work they are doing across the Indian demographics data. I have used their approach for illustration within the blog.

India’s Global Capability Center (GCC) model has been on an exponential trajectory. With over 1,800 GCCs employing approximately 2 million professionals across IT and IT-enabled services, the industry delivers over $64.6 billion in revenue, growing at nearly 14% annually. Most Fortune 500 companies from Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Samsung, JPMC, National Australia Bank, Volvo and more have embraced and doubled down on the model. India commands over 45% of the global market share and continues to expand. Projections point to 2,400+ centers by 2030, generating $100 billion in revenue. Growth, capabilities, talent, innovation all seemingly unstoppable.

But I believe the GCC model stands at the edge of a cliff.

The critical question: does it take flight from here, or does it hurtle downhill?

Having built and managed GCCs of all sizes over two decades, I’ve witnessed firsthand the extraordinary value this model delivers. Yet it now faces forces that demand a fundamental rethink. The GCC industry was modeled on IT services, which today has begun to stall. I wrote about these impending headwinds in March 2025. Hiring in IT services, which typically exceeded 200,000 by this time of year, has been close to zero. To understand what lies ahead, we must first reflect on the road that led us here.

Subscribe now

The GCC model’s success has rested on a powerful convergence of forces:

• Currency arbitrage delivering 85–90% real estate savings and 4–5X labor cost efficiencies;

• Demographics that supply ~2.1 million passionate, hardworking English-speaking, tech-skilled graduates annually and will persist through at least 2035;

• Digital dexterity, proven across three decades of technological waves from ERP and Y2K to SaaS and now AI

• Education and training ecosystem that augments engineering schools

• Government incentives like Export processing zones and tax incentives

• Technological advances in connectivity, cloud, and mobility that enabled seamless global collaboration.

Together, these created a massive tailwind, one that, despite repeated negative predictions, has only widened the gap.

But the model inherited from large IT services pioneers like Infosys, Wipro, TCS, HCL also carries structural weaknesses. And today, several ground shifts are beginning to undermine it in fundamental ways. Let’s examine them.

Defunct Organizational Model

GCCs largely replicated the “Pyramid” shaped organizational structure of IT services firms. Approach is to hire large numbers of young graduates, train them, deploy them to projects, and layer management to ensure oversight, delivery, and control. This worked because arbitrage was large, hours were long, and aspirational talent was willing to go the extra mile. Over time, layers were added to bridge time zones, create domain depth, and manage scale but the focus remained oversight-heavy.

Meanwhile, software development itself evolved. Agile, full-stack engineering, and Amazon’s “two-pizza teams” flattened organizations and reduced the need for managerial layers. Yet many GCCs today still operate with 7–14 layers between a frontline engineer and senior leadership, creating systemic bloat. I’ve personally seen GCCs with 10–40% excess headcount, hidden behind billion-dollar savings narratives.

When you’re delivering $1B in savings, no one questions a $100M - $200M inefficiency.

In an AI-first world, this structure is fragile and increasingly indefensible.

Subscribe now

The AI Hammer

The pace at which AI evolves to deliver software code is rapidly diminishing the need for entry-level developers. In the previous era, armies of junior graduates maintained legacy software solving mostly repeatable problems requiring someone to identify and patch. Developers gradually moved to development projects and up the value chain. Today, faster, fully automated AI solutions or autonomous platforms are eliminating this need, moving toward self-remediation. Some examples below.

Organizations today are pyramid-shaped: large numbers of developers at the bottom, increasingly reduced layers of managers on top. If AI eliminates the base, we shift to a diamond-shaped organizational model.

The biggest challenge? For a diamond-shaped organization to succeed, all middle layers must be hands-on, high-impact developers, which isn’t the case today.

In a country with 8 million IT professionals, at least 30%+ occupy middle layers. How do we transition them to this new world?

Culturally in India, most developers don't want to remain developers after 4-5 years; they move to middle management and become people managers. Exceptions exist, but this is largely true. How do we reward, sustain, and keep talent excited about being developers for 20-30 years? This is the hardest problem; it's deep-rooted with a sense of success attached to it.

Share

“AI Shoring”

There was an implicit barrier to becoming a software engineer, you needed an engineering degree or, as a non-engineer, spend years learning basics before slowly evolving into a competent engineer.

But if natural language prompts become the primary input mechanism for writing code, every country will have abundant local talent without needing traditional engineers. Some may dismiss this as rubbish for higher-order work and it’s true you’ll need proficiency and depth for complex tasks. But the reality is 60% of work isn’t complex.

If you do not believe me, you have not yet tried Claude Cowork yet!

Remember the 1980s? You needed specialized knowledge to operate punch cards on a mainframe to do math. Today, even basic calculators have calculus and are more powerful than yesterday’s mainframes, no engineering degree required.

AI today is where we were circa 1980s with mainframes. The Mac or Windows equivalent of AI is around the corner, coming to every pocket. Only difference, change is happening in hours not years.

If that happens, will you invest effort sourcing, hiring, developing, and running large campuses of junior developers in far-flung places with attendant risks and costs?

Or will you tap local talent like SWAT teams, move with agility, and disrupt?

Nationalism

Though advancement in communications and connectivity created real-time collaboration platforms where teams could build trust, and reverse migration of experienced talent from Western countries provided strong support, the landscape is shifting. In an increasingly nationalistic world, threats of tariffs and visa revocations create barriers that can stall or significantly increase friction. Tariffs, taxes, or bilateral barriers pose challenges for strategic programs at speed and scale. Apple exemplifies a company that has moved fast on product innovation while largely keeping talent local for these reasons. There are more examples that stay cap their global risks and will do so more in the months ahead.

Culture Shift

India’s IT talent isn’t uniform, it’s three different generations within one organizational structure.

Leave a comment

Entry level (Gen Z and younger): They come from homes with safety nets and aren’t driven by the hustle culture of yesteryears to give their all to a job. Exceptions exist, of course. Generally, GCC talent is among the highest paid, enjoys great offices and significant benefits, and faces less work pressure compared to local startups or IT services companies. The desire to drive to the next level of performance is diminished. This is not bad but has an impact on the core premise of yesteryears.

Middle layers (Millennials): With teenage children, they’ve created financial security and seek to maintain the status quo rather than rock the boat. They want and need stability as they juggle aging parents, growing children, and higher affluence. They want to experience life.

Top management (Senior Millennials): Empty nesters with strong financial security, they want to experience life at its best. They’ve mastered managing their global leadership and are generally the most well-rounded global players.

The bottom line: the comforts and compensation of modern GCCs may have eroded the drive to constantly battle through new waves of disruption. Whether the dexterity I mentioned earlier persists or fades remains to be seen.

Share

Risk Management

Boardrooms are realigning supply chains thanks to new tariff regimes and COVID. The same will come for CIO and CTO organizations. If I were in the boardroom, I’d ask CEOs to de-risk(hedge) by bringing core development in-country rather than waiting for a surprise change in visas, taxes, or tariffs to jeopardize the firm. The good news for India: I don’t see this as an action plan or top priority for any western organization yet. Everyone claims BCP and DR plans but the concentration risk is real. But my intuition tells me one bad actor or event will trigger this in full force and change the game.

The orthogonal risk element is the rise of sovereign LLMs.

If proprietary knowledge leaks or seeps into other copilots, it could create a huge challenge. Security implementations in GCCs are best in class, and likelihood may be low but with cloud based bots and local LLMs, we’re in uncharted waters. We don’t know who’s using which copilot on what device. LLMs can process images, so how do you manage that level of risk?

Weakening Economic Model

If the organizational structure reduces to a thin diamond shape, arbitrage erodes dramatically because higher layers of talent cost approximately 80% of their western counterparts. The compelling drive to hire abroad with all its associated risks becomes unwarranted and eats away at the need for the model itself. This is the Achilles’ heel quietly emerging beneath the surface.

Is Collapse Imminent?

No. Not yet.

Too many variables are at play for a simple answer. Environmental and ecosystem variables are uncontrollable, so we must focus on key measures.

If you are building a new GCC or just started on that journey then there are many things you can do to ensure you are future proofed. I am not covering all the recommendations for CEOs/CTOs here but a general swath of top recommendations for securing and leading the future of GCCs:

Subscribe now

1. Model Shift

If you’re building a new GCC, build it with a radical new approach. Have a game plan for a “Force Multiplier” GCC:

1. For every developer you hire, ensure they’re expert in leveraging Claude or Copilot and can deliver 3x the work of current productivity benchmarks

2. Both speed and technical quality must be top-tier

3. Restrict organizational layers to 3-4 maximum from front to top, don’t scale for the sake of moving roles. Do not just shift roles. Ask will this role shift give me 3X lift.

4. Create a “Platoon” structure of 30-40 engineers per leader (yes, seems improbable, but it can and must be done). I have made this work so speaking from experience.

5. 85%+ of talent must be hands-on

2. Productivity Measures

This has been controversial for ages and remains unresolved. It’s not about lack of trust but sharpening outcomes in a hyper-competitive world.

Share

In an AI-assisted world, how do we distinguish 10 average developers from 5 rockstar developers?

There must be stringent processes and measures ensuring bloat doesn’t creep in and there are no freeloaders. I’ve encountered numerous situations where firms at HQ have no idea the amount of bloat accumulated in their GCCs, leaving money on the table with sundry and frivolous roles.

3. Accountability Roles

Over recent years, there’s been a concerted effort to bring accountability roles like CTOs or Product Heads or business heads to India, driving clear line of sight and ownership of performance at the market level. Organizations like Goldman Sachs, Adobe, and Maersk have led the way, but most GCCs pay lip service or posture more than deliver reality. Moving end-to-end accountability changes the game. I watched Nielsen Media do this with Anil Goel as CTO, he’s been a change catalyst for the firm at scale. This must be Day 1 planning, not an afterthought. Of course, it requires courage and skill at the C-suite to build a coalition without being seen as an assault on local talent and workforce.

4. India-to-India (I2I) Model

For firms where India is a large enough market, spinning off the team with autonomy for local markets can unleash exponential performance. In non-tech sectors, Unilever has done this with their India subsidiary some of their best global products were born in India. The Indian subsidiary of Unilever has been innovating for Global markets for a decade or more now. This dramatically shifts the model from cost center to value creator.

Then the scale is not about cost or arbitrage, it’s about driving market value and outcomes.

5. Government Incentives

India today has a vibrant local startup ecosystem going global with their products or taking innovations worldwide. Examples range from Whatfix, Icertis, GreyOrange to Zepto, PhonePe, Paytm and many others at significant scale. The government has been providing substantial incentives at the ground level to spawn these startups, feeding the ecosystem.

India needs a Sovereign AI Fund to invest in fast-growing AI Indian startups for the global markets.

This can meaningfully help attract, retain, and develop best-in-class products for world markets. This should be inclusive of GCC programs. Add a framework allowing independent carve-outs of GCCs to access funding support and fast-track approvals to ramp up. This progressive model can push GCCs to the next level of growth and partner with global firms to invest in innovation-centric GCCs as catalysts. Ireland has a model worth studying.

The government should also provide tax deferrals or holidays for valid AI training supported by GCCs for college graduates, enabling talent to develop high-quality AI skills rapidly making India an AI Center of Excellence for the world. This can enable GCCs to move to an entrepreneurial productization model where value accretion is much higher and eventually creates global companies at scale from India.

6. Productization

There is a lesson here from China. Once the factory of the world, it is now home to global product leaders like BYD, Huawei, Alibaba, Anker, and more. This shift transformed both talent ambition and industrial outcomes.

The same can be true for GCCs. We could have a slew of GCCs within the corporate holding structure but as separate entities or like the Unilever model, within the GCC framework, experiment, innovate, launch, and scale product platforms globally. The game is no longer dependent on older variables and paradigms. We reinvent ourselves to play a whole new product platform vision.

Firms like PhonePe, Icertis, Whatfix, and Freshworks have demonstrated that we can build the largest and best-in-class platforms in India. It just needs the right alignment of courage, skills, backing, and market opportunity. And things can take off.

Conclusion: The window to adapt is closing fast, so velocity and courage will matter

The ground will shift rapidly for GCCs in the next three years due to converging forces across the tech landscape. This isn’t a slow change but something moving at an accelerated pace. There’s an opportunity to pivot and potentially scale the GCC model to new heights but one thing is certain, it will require bold and courageous leadership that breaks many existing notions of growth.

“Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost”

Famous dialogue from an Indian film “The movie is not yet over, my friend”

Leave a comment

I can’t either and it’s quite disappointing and frustrating. Yes there are many who are extolled for their stock performance or monopolistic hold on certain segments but not one who is capable of inspiring us to be them!

We are surrounded by CEOs but starved for leaders.

In the early 1990s and 2000s we debated leaders because they stood for things. You could love or hate Steve Jobs, Alan Mullaly, Anne Roddick, Anne Mulcahy, A G Lafley and more but you could not ignore them. They were flawed human beings in their own ways but when you totaled their “Human Balancesheet” we all wanted to be them. Because they took positions on what they believed was right. They stood for something larger than just their companies’ stock performance, profits or public image.

Today’s corporate leaders are different. They are highly intelligent, deeply competent and exquisitely careful. They do not put a stake in the ground on values. They hedge, they derisk and optimize.

Leave a comment

This is not because today’s executives are worse people. It is because they operate inside a system that quietly punishes anyone who dares to stand for something bigger than the stock price.

And that is why so many people — employees, founders, even investors — feel like they are still searching… for real leadership.

Why did we lose the leadership ethos?

Financialization ate leadership: In 1980, 10% of S&P Profits went to shareholders and today about 90% of profits go to shareholders via buybacks and dividends. That means CEOs became portfolio managers and not institution builders.
Board Compensation Trap: Board members make $300K-$500K and sit across multiple boards so they are not focused on legacy, employees, innovation or larger mission. They optimize for stock stability.
Professional CEOs: Over the last decade or so we saw a generational shift from Founder CEOs to Professional CEOs. Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Tim Cook, all are brilliant operators but they did not found the company, they did not lose it all, they did not face bankruptcy. So when they face a values-based decision that conflicts with financial/shareholder outcomes, they flinch. Not because they are weak but because they have never bled for the company.
CEO Tenure collapse: And they flinch because average CEO tenure has gone from 9-10 years in 1995 to 5 years or less today. You cannot build moral authority in 5 years; you can only manage optics and finances.
The Pay-Ratio Explosion: In 1965, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 21:1. By 2020, it hit 351:1. When a CEO is paid 300x their average worker, their “tribe” is no longer their employees—it is the top 0.1% of the financial elite.
Reputation Risk: Every decision and move is litigated on Twitter(X), every move is weaponized in a highly tribal world, and creates political theater. So leaders have become PR- managed, not principle driven.

Share

We didn’t lose great leaders. We built a system that no longer allows them to exist.

So the key question is will this ever turn around and if yes, when?

Yes, it will - not because people suddenly will become better, but it will flip because the system will break.

The revival will come when the following axes converge and combined with a declining market performance will drive a change. And you can sense it today in some ways.

The Human Angle: Employee Fatigue as the Spark for Bottom-Up Change

While 80% of workers report finding some meaning in their jobs, 35% are still considering leaving, highlighting a “meaning paradox” where surface satisfaction masks deeper voids. The pandemic eroded employer-employee bonds, with 23% of workers feeling less loyal due to mishandled responses. By 2026, 73% of HR leaders report employee “change fatigue,” with execution suffering as workers feel overwhelmed. Burnout affects 83% of employees, exacerbated by grind culture and inflexibility

As financial security grows (e.g., via remote work gains), the human need for purpose intensifies—COVID accelerated this, diluting blind loyalty and setting the stage for bottom-up demands like meaningful roles over optimization.

The AI Existential Threat: Accelerating the Turning Point

AI poses an “existential threat” to employees, with professional managers optimizing humans as AI adjuncts. This could be the catalyst: As white-collar jobs face displacement, workers will demand values-based leaders who prioritize human dignity over efficiency. AI isn’t yet mass-displacing but is reshaping white-collar roles (e.g., finance, tech, law), with exposed jobs growing faster than average. Projections for 2026 show 11 million new AI-related jobs but significant risks, requiring constant upskilling. In 2–3 years, as AI matures (e.g., better tools by 2028), managers’ optimization focus will clash with employee demands for meaning—sparking values revival or mass unrest.

AI is amplifying optimization, not leadership.

Radical Transparency & the Glass Box Organization

In the 90s, a CEO’s lack of values could be hidden behind PR. Today, internal Slack channels and Leaked Memos have turned companies into glass boxes. Strategic Blandness is becoming a liability. Employees (especially Gen Z) are increasingly willing to leave high-paying roles for Values Alignment. The War for Talent will eventually force CEOs to take a stand just to keep their best talent.

Inspiring Values based Leadership is coming

When enough people start looking for meaning again, real leaders will appear. This cycle repeats itself every 20 years or so. And we are 15 years into the erosion of values based leadership. As someone said, History does not repeat but rhymes. We saw similar revival periods post the Great depression into the FDR era, Post the Vietnam war to the 70s-80s reformist period and post Enron, Dot Com to early 2000s.

We are currently in the Trough of Disillusionment, where the lack of leadership is most painful.The political theater globally also adds this to disappointment at scale. The Stewardship era was fueled by cheap money (Zero Interest Rate Policy). When money is free, you don’t need values; you just need growth.Only leaders with a Moral North Star can keep a team together when the stock is down 50%.

The stewardship model—often characterized by risk-aversion and a focus on incremental quarterly growth—is increasingly being challenged by a more “agentic” or “founder mode” style of leadership. This shift is led by individuals who prioritize deep conviction, long-term vision, and a willingness to walk through “storms” to protect the soul of their company.

Subscribe now

And the tide is turning. I see the new incumbent leaders starting to emerge.

Emerging Founder-Leaders: Role Models Challenging Incumbents

New entrepreneurs like Charles Prince of Cloudflare, Brian Chesky of Airbnb, Tobi Lutke of Shopify must scale to demonstrate values-based success, inspiring others. They’re not yet at “incumbent” size but are gaining traction, showing how founder grit can infuse purpose.

These leaders embody “chutzpah” from building through storms (e.g., Chesky’s COVID pivot), but need to hit trillion-dollar scales to fully role-model against incumbents. In a few years, as they grow, they could inspire a wave of founder-challengers.

In an age where AI can optimize a spreadsheet better than any human manager, the only remaining unfair advantage is the human heart—the Chutzpah to stand for something when the wind blows the wrong way, and the Moral Authority that only comes from having walked through the storm.

So it begs a question, what does each one of us do till the tide turns?

Everyday Preparation: How to Build Your “Internal Chutzpah”

We cannot wait for the Boards to change; we must change the culture from the inside out.

• Practice “Micro-Chutzpah”: Don’t wait for a storm to stand for something. Practice stating a value-based opinion in a meeting where it’s easier to be silent.

• Build your “Trust Battery”: Tobi Lütke’s (Shopify) concept. Every interaction either charges or drains the trust people have in your word. A “Humane Leader” has a battery that is always at 100% because they don’t play political games.

• The “Wait for the Details” Rule: Like Brian Chesky, refuse to be “high level.” Leadership is the intersection of grand vision and the smallest pixel. If you don’t care about the details, you don’t care about the value.

• Audit your Incentives: Personally ask yourself: “Am I doing this because it’s right, or because my personal ‘payout curve’ tells me to?” If you can’t tell the difference, you’ve already become a steward.

The next generation of leaders will not be appointed. They will be followed. Not because they manage better, but because they risk more. Not because they say the right things, but because they are willing to lose something for what they believe.

And when enough people are ready to follow again, real leadership will return, not as a trend, not as a title, but as a necessity.

We have spent a decade treating leadership like a science of mitigation rather than an art of conviction. We have built safe boardrooms and polished C-suites, only to find that in our quest to eliminate risk, we accidentally eliminated soul.

But the Stewardship Era is hitting its expiration date. The search for humane leadership doesn’t end with a headhunter or a better compensation formula. It ends when we stop asking “Who will lead us?” and start asking “What do I stand for?”

The era of the Builder—the leader who cares more about the pixels and the people than the payout—is returning.

Don’t just search for that leader. Be the storm that brings them back.

What is the one thing that consistently defines every high-performing team in the world?

Over the years, we’ve all admired teams whether in sports or in business and wondered what truly sets them apart. Most people will cite talent, teamwork, trust, hard work, execution, confidence, vision, or focus. And they’re not wrong. All of these matter.

But in my experience, they are visible outcomes, not the underlying cause.

There is a deeper element that consistently separates great teams from merely good ones.
It isn’t something you can buy, hire, or manufacture overnight. It takes time, pressure, and deliberate forging.

That element is character.

Not as a single trait, but as a composite force.

In 2013, as I took over a team of 6,000 associates, I was given the mandate to rapidly scale the delivery center and bring renewed energy and edge to what was the most visited Accenture site in Bangalore. I began with a small leadership team of four senior executives each with far deeper experience in the business than I had while I was coming in from the U.S. with a technology background.

The first 9–12 months were hard lessons. I struggled to truly take the reins and unify a team operating across more than five locations and seven distinct capabilities. Over time, that experience became my crucible. We rotated some leaders, expanded the leadership team to more than 20, and eventually scaled the organization to nearly 25,000 associates. Along the way, we emerged as leaders in automation and became one of the firm’s strongest showcases of delivery excellence.

Subscribe now

Through that journey, I came to deeply understand the importance of forging a team rooted in character. On the surface, many of our successful leaders who traversed this journey, initially were seen as misfits or stagnant. Yet this very team surprised everyone delivering remarkable growth year after year. The deepest value they consistently demonstrated was character.

Character is often described as a distinguishing attribute or the set of mental and ethical traits that shape individuals and groups. But when I speak of character, I mean something far deeper.

Character is the ability to commit to a purpose larger than oneself with discipline and humility while staying aligned to strong moral values.

Every truly high-performing team from the New Zealand All Blacks, Apple under Steve Jobs, Real Madrid, the San Antonio Spurs, Coca-Cola under Roberto Goizueta, the New England Patriots, Mercedes F1 has demonstrated this consistently.

Character begins at the individual level and, over time, synthesizes at the team level. When it is woven deeply across a group, it produces sustained excellence. When it erodes, performance collapses often far faster than anyone expects.

Share

Character enables world-class performance, but it is not permanent. It must be continually reinforced. When its underlying elements degrade, even great teams can fail or stagnate sometimes with only a few changes because what they lose isn’t talent or strategy, but character itself.

True character is not a single trait. It is a convergence of multiple attributes that reinforce one another.

Integrity: The Bedrock

Every individual in a high-performing team operates with a deep sense of integrity : congruence between thought, word, and action.

These are people who stand for something internally. Often shaped by environments that demanded high ethical standards, they develop a core that does not waver under pressure. You may not always agree with their style or approach, but they are consistent every single time.

Individuals with high integrity make personal sacrifices for the larger purpose almost instinctively.

Warren Buffet captured this perfectly

“In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”

Integrity is the bedrock. Without it, you can never build a high-performing team. When things inevitably go wrong and they always do, integrity is what reassures each member that their peers will stand firm and true.

Humility: The Pillar

Each high performing individual carries a quiet humility and often, faith.

Call it belief in a higher power, faith, luck, or simply acceptance of forces beyond our control. They understand that in the vastness of the universe, none of us are as important as we think and that outcomes often require more than individual brilliance.

This humility is what keeps them open to learning. It allows confident people even those who may appear arrogant to adapt rapidly, accept feedback, and subordinate ego to the team’s playbook.

Even Steve Jobs acknowledged that

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Humility makes teams self-correcting. It allows them to give and receive feedback, to acknowledge others in victory, and to show grace in defeat. It reminds them that they stand on the shoulders of many.

If integrity is the bedrock, humility is the pillar. Remove it, and sooner or later, the structure collapses.

Subscribe now

Discipline: The Daily Contract

High-performing teams are built by individuals who embody discipline not in grand gestures, but in daily behavior.

Kobe Bryant arrived at practice hours before his teammates, every day, for years. That relentless repetition earned him the reputation of the greatest tough-shot maker not because of talent alone, but because of discipline.

Discipline comes from a deep sense of responsibility to oneself and to others. It is ownership of the mission beyond immediate tasks. Discipline is not about talking about big games. It is about doing small things, consistently, over long periods allowing compounding to work its magic.

Muhammad Ali said it plainly:

“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses… long before I dance under those lights.”

John Wooden famously taught players how to put on their socks properly to avoid wrinkles, blisters, lost practice time, and ultimately lost games.

Those socks were never about socks.

They were about understanding that small details ignored today become big problems tomorrow.

Moral Values: The Compass

Every member of a high-performing team carries deeply held moral values and a clear sense of right and wrong.

These values are forged over time and reflect an intent to do good, stay good, and leave things better than they found them. They do not weaken under pressure, they become more visible.

In a world where leadership often bends with the wind, it’s tempting to believe values no longer matter. My experience says otherwise. I encounter people with strong moral cores constantly.

We are built to serve. We thrive when we give. That instinct is the foundation of values.

Values are what make a player pass the ball instead of chasing personal glory. They are what make leaders credit the unseen contributors the water boys, the groundskeepers, the support staff.

As Muhammad Ali said in his most tough times

“I know where I’m going and I know the truth. I just can’t compromise my principles for a fight or for fame.”

Values provide oxygen in the hardest moments. They keep teams climbing when conditions are hostile.

Reed Hastings, Netflix Founder said it powerfully:

“The real test of our values is what we do when it costs us something.”

Share

Character Under Pressure

Character is easy to admire when incentives are aligned and outcomes are favorable. It becomes decisive when they are not. In every large system I’ve been part of, the real test of character surfaced when performance pressures, revenue targets, or short-term wins tempted compromise. The strongest teams did not rely on goodwill or personal virtue alone they designed leadership standards, decision norms, and accountability mechanisms that made character non-negotiable, even when it came at a cost. In the short term, that discipline was uncomfortable. In the long term, it was precisely what sustained trust, execution quality, and performance when others faltered.

Character Is Non-Negotiable

Can you build character with only two or three of these attributes?

The answer is no.

Integrity as the bedrock, supported by humility, discipline, and moral values, is an interdependent system. Remove one, and the others begin to decay rapidly.

As John Wooden said:

“Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.”

So if you want to build a high performing team make sure each one of your team member embodies these attributes - Integrity, Humility, Discipline and Values - Character”

Now if you have read till here, congrats, you are already a stellar leader or an aspiring young leader about to change the world around her or him. The bigger question is how do you build character for an individual and a team? Is it preordained how people are ? Can Character be built?

Leave a comment

These are seminal questions as you think about your team and it’s evolution. The simple answer is some of the elements have to be pre installed in the individuals whereas some can be forged and built. Even if some attributes are lighter than others, they MUST be strengthened to reach a degree of high performance.

So I’ll leave you with a simple question:

Does your team have character?

P.S. How do you test and build character? That’s for another article.

Download The Character OS Playbook here

We are surrounded by CEOs but starved for leaders.

In the early 1990s and 2000s we debated leaders because they stood for things. You could love or hate Steve Jobs, Alan Mullaly, Anne Roddick, Anne Mulcahy, A G Lafley and more but you could not ignore them. They were flawed human beings in their own ways but when you totaled their “Human Balancesheet” we all wanted to be them. Because they took positions on what they believed was right. They stood for something larger than just their companies’ stock performance, profits or public image.

Today’s corporate leaders are different. They are highly intelligent, deeply competent and exquisitely careful. They do not put a stake in the ground on values. They hedge, they derisk and optimize.

This is not because today’s executives are worse people. It is because they operate inside a system that quietly punishes anyone who dares to stand for something bigger than the stock price.

And that is why so many people — employees, founders, even investors — feel like they are still searching… for real leadership.

Why did we lose the leadership ethos?

Financialization ate leadership: In 1980, 10% of S&P Profits went to shareholders and today about 90% of profits go to shareholders via buybacks and dividends. That means CEOs became portfolio managers and not institution builders.
Board Compensation Trap: Board members make $300K-$500K and sit across multiple boards so they are not focused on legacy, employees, innovation or larger mission. They optimize for stock stability.
Professional CEOs: Over the last decade or so we saw a generational shift from Founder CEOs to Professional CEOs. Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Tim Cook, all are brilliant operators but they did not found the company, they did not lose it all, they did not face bankruptcy. So when they face a values-based decision that conflicts with financial/shareholder outcomes, they flinch. Not because they are weak but because they have never bled for the company.
CEO Tenure collapse: And they flinch because average CEO tenure has gone from 9-10 years in 1995 to 5 years or less today. You cannot build moral authority in 5 years; you can only manage optics and finances.
The Pay-Ratio Explosion: In 1965, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 21:1. By 2020, it hit 351:1. When a CEO is paid 300x their average worker, their “tribe” is no longer their employees—it is the top 0.1% of the financial elite.
Reputation Risk: Every decision and move is litigated on Twitter(X), every move is weaponized in a highly tribal world, and creates political theater. So leaders have become PR- managed, not principle driven.

We didn’t lose great leaders. We built a system that no longer allows them to exist.

So the key question is will this ever turn around and if yes, when?

Yes, it will - not because people suddenly will become better, but it will flip because the system will break.

The revival will come when the following axes converge and combined with a declining market performance will drive a change. And you can sense it today in some ways.

The Human Angle: Employee Fatigue as the Spark for Bottom-Up Change

While 80% of workers report finding some meaning in their jobs, 35% are still considering leaving, highlighting a “meaning paradox” where surface satisfaction masks deeper voids. The pandemic eroded employer-employee bonds, with 23% of workers feeling less loyal due to mishandled responses. By 2026, 73% of HR leaders report employee “change fatigue,” with execution suffering as workers feel overwhelmed. Burnout affects 83% of employees, exacerbated by grind culture and inflexibility

As financial security grows (e.g., via remote work gains), the human need for purpose intensifies—COVID accelerated this, diluting blind loyalty and setting the stage for bottom-up demands like meaningful roles over optimization.

The AI Existential Threat: Accelerating the Turning Point

AI poses an “existential threat” to employees, with professional managers optimizing humans as AI adjuncts. This could be the catalyst: As white-collar jobs face displacement, workers will demand values-based leaders who prioritize human dignity over efficiency. AI isn’t yet mass-displacing but is reshaping white-collar roles (e.g., finance, tech, law), with exposed jobs growing faster than average. Projections for 2026 show 11 million new AI-related jobs but significant risks, requiring constant upskilling. In 2–3 years, as AI matures (e.g., better tools by 2028), managers’ optimization focus will clash with employee demands for meaning—sparking values revival or mass unrest.

AI is amplifying optimization, not leadership.

Radical Transparency & the Glass Box Organization

In the 90s, a CEO’s lack of values could be hidden behind PR. Today, internal Slack channels and Leaked Memos have turned companies into glass boxes. Strategic Blandness is becoming a liability. Employees (especially Gen Z) are increasingly willing to leave high-paying roles for Values Alignment. The War for Talent will eventually force CEOs to take a stand just to keep their best talent.

Inspiring Values based Leadership is coming

When enough people start looking for meaning again, real leaders will appear. This cycle repeats itself every 20 years or so. And we are 15 years into the erosion of values based leadership. As someone said, History does not repeat but rhymes. We saw similar revival periods post the Great depression into the FDR era, Post the Vietnam war to the 70s-80s reformist period and post Enron, Dot Com to early 2000s.

We are currently in the Trough of Disillusionment, where the lack of leadership is most painful.The political theater globally also adds this to disappointment at scale. The Stewardship era was fueled by cheap money (Zero Interest Rate Policy). When money is free, you don’t need values; you just need growth.Only leaders with a Moral North Star can keep a team together when the stock is down 50%.

The stewardship model—often characterized by risk-aversion and a focus on incremental quarterly growth—is increasingly being challenged by a more “agentic” or “founder mode” style of leadership. This shift is led by individuals who prioritize deep conviction, long-term vision, and a willingness to walk through “storms” to protect the soul of their company.

And the tide is turning. I see the new incumbent leaders starting to emerge.

Emerging Founder-Leaders: Role Models Challenging Incumbents

New entrepreneurs like Charles Prince of Cloudflare, Brian Chesky of Airbnb, Tobi Lutke of Shopify must scale to demonstrate values-based success, inspiring others. They’re not yet at “incumbent” size but are gaining traction, showing how founder grit can infuse purpose.

These leaders embody “chutzpah” from building through storms (e.g., Chesky’s COVID pivot), but need to hit trillion-dollar scales to fully role-model against incumbents. In a few years, as they grow, they could inspire a wave of founder-challengers.

In an age where AI can optimize a spreadsheet better than any human manager, the only remaining unfair advantage is the human heart—the Chutzpah to stand for something when the wind blows the wrong way, and the Moral Authority that only comes from having walked through the storm.

So it begs a question, what does each one of us do till the tide turns?

Everyday Preparation: How to Build Your “Internal Chutzpah”

We cannot wait for the Boards to change; we must change the culture from the inside out.

• Practice “Micro-Chutzpah”: Don’t wait for a storm to stand for something. Practice stating a value-based opinion in a meeting where it’s easier to be silent.

• Build your “Trust Battery”: Tobi Lütke’s (Shopify) concept. Every interaction either charges or drains the trust people have in your word. A “Humane Leader” has a battery that is always at 100% because they don’t play political games.

• The “Wait for the Details” Rule: Like Brian Chesky, refuse to be “high level.” Leadership is the intersection of grand vision and the smallest pixel. If you don’t care about the details, you don’t care about the value.

• Audit your Incentives: Personally ask yourself: “Am I doing this because it’s right, or because my personal ‘payout curve’ tells me to?” If you can’t tell the difference, you’ve already become a steward.

The next generation of leaders will not be appointed. They will be followed. Not because they manage better, but because they risk more. Not because they say the right things, but because they are willing to lose something for what they believe.

And when enough people are ready to follow again, real leadership will return, not as a trend, not as a title, but as a necessity.

We have spent a decade treating leadership like a science of mitigation rather than an art of conviction. We have built safe boardrooms and polished C-suites, only to find that in our quest to eliminate risk, we accidentally eliminated soul.

But the Stewardship Era is hitting its expiration date. The search for humane leadership doesn’t end with a headhunter or a better compensation formula. It ends when we stop asking “Who will lead us?” and start asking “What do I stand for?”

The era of the Builder—the leader who cares more about the pixels and the people than the payout—is returning.

Don’t just search for that leader. Be the storm that brings them back.

Here is a sobering statistic: According to data on scale-ups, 96% of companies fail to scale beyond their initial traction. They hit what is known as the “Valley of Death.” Even more alarming is that this failure rate persists despite record levels of venture capital. In 2021 alone, startups raised over $600 billion globally, yet the graduation rate from “funded” to “profitable scale” barely budged.

Why? Because capital is just fuel. If you pour rocket fuel into a lawnmower engine, you don’t get a rocket; you get an explosion.

The differentiator between the 4% that scale and the 96% that stall is not vision, and it is rarely product-market fit. It is the existence of a rigorous Operating System (OS), a cadence, a rhythm, a disciplined way of making decisions, running meetings, correcting drift, and aligning people.

This is not a Silicon Valley discovery. This is a 2,000-year-old pattern.

The Emperor’s OS: A 2,000-Year Blueprint for Scale

The concept of an “Operating System” isn’t a Silicon Valley invention. It is the golden thread connecting the most dominant institutions in human history.

• Alexander the Great (300s BC): Alexander didn’t conquer the known world just on charisma. He engineered a logistics OS that was centuries ahead of its time. He restructured the Macedonian army to reduce the baggage train, forcing soldiers to carry their own equipment, which allowed his army to move 2x faster than his Persian enemies. His “cadence” was built on the precise synchronization of supply lines with harvest seasons. He didn’t just outfight them; he out-operated them.
  
  Does this sound like the “Agile Methodology” to anyone? Yes it is!
  
  

• The Roman Legions (100s BC - 400s AD): Julius Caesar didn’t rely on heroism; he relied on the Triplex Acies—a standardized battle formation that allowed fresh troops to cycle to the front lines systematically. The Romans institutionalized this rigor. A Centurion in Syria and a Centurion in Britannia operated on the exact same daily cadence of camp construction and reporting. This standardization allowed Rome to scale its culture across three continents.
  
  Does this sound like “The Forward Deployed Engineers” to anyone (aka Palantir)? Yes it is!
  
  

• Akbar the Great (1500s AD): When scaling the Mughal Empire, Akbar realized he couldn’t micromanage vast territories. He introduced the Mansabdari System, a decimal-based operating system. Every official was given a dual rank (Zat and Sawar)—one for personal status and one for military obligation. It was a perfect alignment of incentives, revenue collection, and military readiness.
  
  Does this sound like the OKR system to anyone? Yes it is!

All of our modern methods are copies of the systems that formed the backbone of the largest institutions that lasted 100s of years.

Subscribe now

From Industrial Titans to Digital Giants

This lineage of rigor continued unbroken into the modern era, evolving from industrial efficiency to digital agility.

In the 20th century, Jack Welch transformed GE not through magic, but through a relentless “Operating Rhythm.” His calendar was sacred. The “Session C” meetings for talent and “Session I/II” for strategy were the heartbeat of the firm. It forced the entire organization to align its breathing with the leadership.

Steve Jobs, often mischaracterized as a chaotic artist, was actually a ruthless operator. When he returned to Apple, he installed a functional OS where experts led experts (one P&L for the whole company). His “Monday Executive Team” meeting was the institutionalized cadence that ensured the vision didn’t drift.

Today, Satya Nadella has retooled Microsoft’s OS from a “Know-it-all” culture to a “Learn-it-all” culture. But make no mistake—it is a system. The way Microsoft now measures leading indicators (usage) vs. lagging indicators (revenue) in its cloud business is a rigorous discipline that enforces the culture change.

I have personally witnessed this at Accenture, Wipro, and Cognizant, this rigor is what turns a consulting shop into a global institution. The decline begins the moment this muscle atrophies—when the “routine” is viewed as bureaucracy rather than the skeleton that holds the body upright.

Why Scale Ups/Startups Fail to Build an OS

If the evidence is so overwhelming, why do founders resist?

1. The Hero Trap

Early growth comes from hustle. Founders assume hustle will scale. It doesn’t. What worked at $10M breaks at $50M and collapses at $100M.

2. Confusing Rigor with Bureaucracy

An OS is not red tape.
It is scaffolding.
It creates predictability, which enables speed.

3. Cultural Drift

Culture without systems is just a poster.
An OS is culture — in motion, in meetings, in decisions, in how teams resolve friction.

4. Delayed Pain

The absence of an OS is invisible… until it becomes catastrophic.
Misalignment. Burnout. Slow decisions. Siloed execution. A loss of the founder’s voice.
These problems don’t appear overnight — they compound quietly.

The Compounding Cost of Not Building an OS

The longer a company waits, the harder and more expensive it becomes to retrofit discipline. You cannot bolt a steel frame onto a skyscraper after the 20th floor has been constructed.

The cost shows up as:

• Leadership exhaustion
  
  

• Unscalable sales and delivery
  
  

• Client Churn
  
  

• Inconsistent customer experience
  
  

• High-performer attrition
  
  

• Slow execution masked by busy activity
  
  

• Cultural erosion and political behavior
  
  

Many organizations never recover from this entropy.

Why You Need a Steward, Not Just a System

Founders are often too close to the fire to build the fireplace.They know the business, but they have never institutionalized operating cadence at scale. This is where a Steward — a coach, COO, operating partner, or external guide — becomes essential:

• To codify the OS
  
  

• To design the right rhythms (weekly, monthly, quarterly)
  
  

• To create clarity of roles and decision rights
  
  

• To establish dashboards and accountability loops
  
  

• To ensure culture and execution stay tightly coupled
  
  

• To speak to the truth of reality. It’s amazing how many founders and teams have a misplaced view of their strengths and weaknesses
  
  

The earlier this begins, the lower the cost and the higher the leverage. Because at the end of the day…

Capital amplifies systems.
Systems amplify people.
And people amplify growth.

If you want to build an institution that lasts, you don’t just need a better strategy. You need a better Operating System. Do you have One?

Seranai (noun) · /ser-uh-nai/

Definition: A state of quiet persistence; steady progress made with calm focus, without urgency or noise.

Across languages, Seranai holds many meanings.
Each one whispers a different truth about growth, leadership, and life.

In Sanskrit-inspired roots, it connects to “Sara” — essence, and “Nai” — to guide.”

In Malay, Seranai evokes gentle harmony — the balance between stillness and progress.

In Tagalog, it echoes “to flow like a river” — finding a path, no matter the terrain.

In Swahili, it carries the sense of quiet persistence — strength that doesn’t shout.

In Japanese, it resembles the word for inner peace found through discipline.

Together, Seranai means “to guide through essence” — a fitting reflection of what we do.

To us, Seranai is not just a name.

It’s a philosophy — to move quietly, persistently, and with purpose.

To guide others to their own summits — without noise, but with depth.

The global IT services sector, particularly Indian IT services companies, has adeptly navigated numerous technological disruptions over the years. From the Y2K wave to the dawn of Web 1.0, the shift to 3-tier architecture, the mobile revolution, and the rise of open-source paradigms, these firms have consistently adapted, transformed, and maintained their dominant position as the foremost providers of cost-effective IT solutions. Today, many of these IT and ITeS (IT-enabled services) players form the backbone of global corporations’ operations, playing a pivotal role in their growth and survival.

However, the AI disruption is unparalleled in its scope and potential impact. Will this be yet another wave that these companies skillfully ride to new heights, or will it mark their Waterloo—a decisive battle that tests their resilience and adaptability?

Why do I pose this question? Let us delve into the convergence of challenges across several dimensions to understand the stakes.

Coding Co-Pilots: Consider the evidence. Generative AI and other AI models, though still in their nascent stages, are already delivering productivity gains exceeding 50%, alongside remarkably high-quality outputs. I anticipate these gains will soon surpass 70%, if they haven’t already—though precise measurements remain elusive. Most developers are currently in a phase of exploration and learning. Within our own organization, teams are extensively leveraging tools like Cursor, achieving a throughput increase of over 50% with ease. In our own organization, our teams are extensively using Cursor and are comfortable with 50%+ higher throughput. The adoption curve, illustrated below, serves as a compelling testament to the transformative impact of these technologies.

Envision a future, perhaps within the next one to two years, where the influence of models transitions from being predominantly predictive to remarkably discrete, unleashing an unprecedented velocity of outputs that will be nothing short of extraordinary.

IT & ITeS Market Saturation: Owing to relentless innovation, aggressive pricing strategies, and unwavering delivery consistency, the majority of Fortune 2000 companies have now integrated at least one or two Offshore/Global service providers into their operations. Over the past decade, the fierce competition for wallet share has driven pricing and contract tenures within the industry to plummet to remarkably low levels, with most deals now spanning three years or less—barring a few substantial agreements that necessitate long-term commitments.

The market paradigm has matured to such an extent that, in recent years, we have witnessed the rise of Global Capability Centers. These entities are essentially organizations establishing their own centers in offshore locations to directly harness the associated benefits.

Consequently, the majority of deals in today’s market are fiercely competitive, characterized by intense wallet share battles among multiple players. In this landscape, pricing has emerged as the pivotal decision-making factor, closely intertwined with competency and a proven track record. The COVID-19 pandemic has further eroded the relationship moats that once fortified large, entrenched players to a significant degree. Having spent a considerable portion of my career as an IT services leader, I recall that even a decade ago, most players—ranging from large to small—would pledge 30%-40% productivity gains as part of their client contracts. These gains were achieved through process improvements, the implementation of various frameworks, and simply extracting more efficiency from their workforce.

In today’s AI-driven world, the question arises: what will clients demand, or what will IT services players offer, to secure deals? Will it be 60%, 70%, or even 80% productivity gains? The stakes have undeniably been raised, and the competition is poised to reach new heights.

The Automation Tsunami:

Back in 2015, I recall spearheading a groundbreaking initiative at my firm, collaborating with a small Singapore-based company specializing in process automation for back-office operations. It took nearly a year of relentless effort to see the automation yield meaningful results. While it didn’t replace our workforce, the potential was undeniable—so much so that Accenture began diving deeper into this domain to unlock productivity gains, some of which were passed on to our clients. Over time, we rolled out large-scale programs with industry leaders like Blueprism, IPsoft and Automation Anywhere, deploying an army of Robotic Process Automations (RPAs) across our global centers. The scale grew so vast that we had to construct an internal control plane to manage these bots, ensuring telemetry and backup systems were in place to handle any downtime.

This shift gave us a significant pricing edge, allowing us to promise clients unprecedented productivity gains in our contracts. However, delivering on those promises often proved challenging post-contract, as legacy architectures and change management hurdles frequently hindered execution. Yet, the firm and its teams always found a way to deliver—or, at the very least, leveraged scope creep to renew contracts at a steady pace.

Fast forward to today, and the landscape has transformed dramatically. A few years ago, venturing into a niche market to develop an application or SaaS platform meant competing with perhaps three or four players at most. Now, no matter how obscure or specialized the niche, you’ll find 40 to 50 startups, flush with capital, racing to automate or reinvent the value chain. Take Stackgen.com, for instance—our startup, which can automate cloud deployments by over 60% and cloud-to-cloud migrations by an impressive 80% (apologies for the plug).

Compounding this shift is the unprecedented amount of capital waiting on the sidelines, poised to be deployed by venture capital and private equity firms into emerging players. What we’re witnessing is nothing short of an automation tsunami—a deluge of AI bots and applications that will intensify pricing pressures, fueled by an explosion of optionality and productivity gains. The question is no longer whether automation will reshape industries, but how swiftly and profoundly it will do so.

Digital Overhang: The pandemic compelled enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation at an unprecedented pace, resulting in a surge of hiring and the creation of countless digital platforms. However, as we near a return to pre-Covid organizational rhythms, it’s evident that the pendulum is swinging back. Amidst the turbulence of financial markets and geopolitical instability, organizations are increasingly prioritizing efficiency over expansion. By any measure, we find ourselves overinvested in the digital dimension of our lives. Consider the plethora of apps on your phone that perform identical functions—this redundancy is mirrored in the B2B enterprise landscape. What the ecosystem now requires is judicious pruning, not further investment. Corporations, if they haven’t already, will inevitably confront this reality.

Adding weight to this perspective, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk have underscored this truth through their actions, particularly with his decisive moves at Twitter and other ventures. Similarly, leaders such as Satya Nadella at Microsoft and Andy Jassy at Amazon are quietly but effectively streamlining their operations. A closer look at their General & Administrative (G&A) budgets reveals a clear shift toward consolidation and optimization. This is not merely an option; it is an imperative for any enterprise aspiring to maintain a leadership position in today’s dynamic landscape.

Employer-Driven Market: This may be the most contentious point I’ll make, and it’s likely to draw criticism. COVID united the world against a common threat, revealing our deepest instincts to protect and defend. For the first time in 80 years, since the world wars, empathy reached its zenith. Employees seized the moment, redefining what an ideal organization should embody—rooted in human connection and compassion, bolstered by unprecedented government support. It was a historically anomalous period.

However, this era also bred complacency, stifling entrepreneurial spirit in favor of catering to individualism in its many forms—be it Wokeism, DEI, or other movements. The pendulum swung sharply to the extreme left, eroding the timeless realities of survival and growth that have governed humanity for millennia. Let me be clear: I am a staunch advocate for DEI when implemented correctly. I have dedicated, and will continue to dedicate, significant time to supporting disadvantaged communities. Yet, I also believe that certain enduring truths—rooted in human nature—will persist. Humans are inherently tribal, and today’s tribes form online, shaped by our choices and preferences. These tribes, whether led by natural or appointed leaders, thrive on hierarchy, innovation, and agility. This dynamic is as true for commercial enterprises as it has always been.

During COVID, organizations (and their leaders) relinquished their assertiveness to prioritize humanity’s immediate needs. That chapter is now closed. Leaders are increasingly reclaiming the age-old structures essential for survival, growth, and leadership. Take Jamie Dimon’s discourse at a recent town hall as an example. Organizations are once again defining the rules of engagement for growth, but this time, it’s a top-down approach, not bottom-up.

As a result, efficiency, cost-cutting, and optimization (often manifesting as layoffs) will become more frequent and pronounced. The pendulum is swinging back.

Scale is the adversary: Over the past three decades, as the industry has expanded, so too have some of its key players in terms of their employee base. To such an extent that size, once considered an asset, has now become a significant liability for myriad reasons. I have long held the conviction that Nature does not favor scale beyond a certain threshold. History is replete with examples spanning the last two centuries where corporations, having grown too large, ultimately succumbed to their own magnitude. From the Mellons and Rockefellers to Westinghouse, GE, Compaq, Sears, Sun, DEC, EDS, and countless others, their eventual downfall was precipitated by the very scale they once celebrated.

Today, the titans of the IT industry—Accenture, TCS, Infosys, Cognizant, Cap Gemini, and DXC—collectively employ over 2 million individuals. Even if these behemoths were to trim a mere 10% of their workforce for performance-related reasons, that would translate to 200,000 employees displaced, particularly in regions like India. Such a move would inevitably destabilize workforce dynamics on a national scale.

Now, consider the ramifications of a more drastic reduction—30% to 50% or more—over the next two to three years. The implications are staggering, and the math speaks for itself.

Synthesis: The IT services market is poised to unfold in either of these two distinct trajectories:

• Raging Bull Market: The relentless evolution of technology stacks, coupled with the integration of AI and a pronounced skills shortage, will compel organizations to aggressively recruit AI-centric talent to remain competitive and drive growth. In this scenario, the IT and ITeS sectors will witness an exponential surge in demand for cutting-edge technology stacks, much like they have in previous cycles. Over the next 2-3 years, IT players will inevitably pivot to embrace this new wave of innovation, perpetuating the cyclical nature of the industry.

However, the question remains: will this shift be characterized by the traditional large-scale hiring of fresh college graduates, or will it recalibrate the hiring paradigm to prioritize experienced talent capable of achieving more with less? One could argue that most IT services firms today could deliver comparable outputs with at least 30% fewer employees, provided they are willing to pivot swiftly. But will they seize this opportunity, or remain tethered to conventional practices?

• Industry Recession: On the flip side, clients may begin demanding drastic rate cuts of 30% to 50% or more, driven by immediate productivity gains. Procurement teams will revel in leveraging these demands to pit service providers against one another, relentlessly driving down prices to the lowest possible threshold. In an already saturated market, it only takes one player to disrupt the status quo with an aggressive pricing strategy, setting a new, unsustainable benchmark for others to follow. Recall the brokerage fee wars? When Robinhood entered the scene, the cost per trade plummeted to zero—a scenario traditional players had deemed inconceivable, despite years of incremental reductions from $100 to $25, then $10, and finally $5. Yet, it took a single disruptor to dismantle the industry’s economic foundation in a matter of days, wiping out billions in revenue across the board. Could a similar upheaval occur in the IT and ITeS sectors? Perhaps, though the outcome remains uncertain.

A critical caveat lies in the inherent challenges clients face in driving internal change management, which is precisely why outsourcing has flourished as a dominant industry. The very essence of outsourcing, offshoring, or external sourcing stems from clients’ inability or unwillingness to instigate such transformations internally. Yet, in today’s mature and commoditized IT/ITeS market, the question arises: can clients themselves spearhead this change, or will they continue to rely on external partners to catalyze it? If the answer is that clients will persist in their gradual adaptation, then IT service providers may still have sufficient time to cross the Rubicon and navigate this evolving landscape.

But is there sufficient time?

Regardless of the outcome, the reckoning has arrived, and it is staring us in the face. It will be fascinating to observe how the industry and its clients navigate this transformative era. New players will undoubtedly emerge, reshaping the paradigm and triggering large-scale ramifications for providers, clients, and nations alike.

I am bracing myself for this journey, recognizing that showing up has never been more critical. I urge you to do the same—stay vigilant and ensure you’re fully present, not just phoning it in on Zoom.

The tech world is buzzing with excitement over the rivalry between ChatGPT and Deepseek. Some see it as a classic underdog story—an allegedly low-cost model from Deepseek disrupting the dominance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Others believe the Chinese government is fueling Deepseek’s rise with billions in funding. The debate so far has largely focused on money—how much is being spent to train these models—or the technical differences between the Transformer and MoE (Mixture of Experts) architectures. If you’re curious about the technical deep dive, you can explore that here.

But I think we’re missing the bigger picture—something far more strategic. This isn’t just about AI models or corporate competition. It’s about who controls the next era of computing and, by extension, the world’s narrative.

For decades, American innovation has shaped the global technology landscape. The Internet, funded by DARPA, the rise of web browsers pioneered by Marc Andreessen, and the iPhone revolution—each breakthrough put American firms at the forefront. From Google Search to social media, much of what the world sees, learns, and believes has been filtered through an American lens. This influence has helped shape global perspectives and, in many ways, the balance of power.

But over the last 50 years, China’s manufacturing and economic rise has challenged that order. As Ray Dalio has pointed out in his analyses of shifting world power, the global landscape is undergoing a fundamental transformation. There’s an old Indian saying: “Two swords cannot coexist in one sheath.” And today, we’re witnessing that conflict unfold in real time.

China understands that shaping the future means controlling the next major user interface: AI.

TikTok was just the first step in this strategy, fundamentally reshaping how people—especially young audiences—consume content. It’s reach today is staggering, influencing cultural narratives across the world. And now, GenAI is the next frontier. Whoever controls the AI-driven UI of the future will define the worldview of 8+ billion people, especially the next two generations.

A recent World Bank report confirms that GenAI adoption is skyrocketing among 18-34-year-olds, particularly in rapidly growing economies like India, Brazil, and Indonesia. The country that influences these young minds will drive the next century’s economic and political shifts.

China sees this opportunity clearly. Every day, new GenAI models emerge from Chinese firms—Kimi.ai, Alibaba’s AI suite, and more. Even Apple has switched to Alibaba’s model in China, a market with the largest internet user base in the world. Despite skepticism around data security, China’s AI models are advancing at breakneck speed, rivaling and even surpassing their American counterparts.

This is more than just a technological race; it’s a battle for influence, power, and the future of global narratives. The U.S. is responding aggressively—tightening controls on critical AI inputs like GPUs and encryption software while launching initiatives like Stargate. Meanwhile, China is leveraging its greatest advantage: a massive domestic user base and the global Android ecosystem to seed its AI-driven platforms.

Who will win this once-in-a-century AI race? The answer will shape history in ways most people aren’t even aware of yet.

Regardless of who takes the lead, one thing is clear: we all need to stay informed, question what we see, and seek diverse perspectives. With over $1 trillion being poured into this fight, maintaining an objective view won’t be easy.

But awareness starts with one small step. And I’m taking mine. 😉

Written by : Arshad Sayyad

Enhanced by ChatGPT and DeepSeek 😂!

Most of us will shrug off the Apple Watch Ultra as fancy marketing of a product with one more button, a larger screen, and a fancy loop for $800! But wait, did you realize that with just this product extension Apple will garner over $ 1 Billion+ of sales in the next 12 months or more? Yes, billion with a B in one year or less.

As an avid fan of Apple engineering, I have always marveled at their ability to extend products and disrupt new markets with a sharp clinical sense of knowing customer choices before even the customer knows they need them. So when I watched the keynote (I realized that although I might not be the target customer but what) intrigued me was the sharp targeting of the endurance athtletic community. I decided to do my research and that’s when I was surprised to realize that this made all the sense in the world. So let me explain in more detail.

The Ultra is targeted at endurance athletes like Marathoners, professional Swimmers, Mountaineers, Divers, trekkers, and other extreme sports professionals. You can also potentially add cyclists, snow boarders, surfers, and many others in this category. Now let us look at the target community in some of these categories.

1. There are more than 120 million hikers in the world with a market size spend of $12 Billion.

2. There are over 150 million swimmers and many more aspiring swimmers

3. Close to 2 Million marathoners and growing fast

4. Over 8 million divers and so on

So lets just assume just this segment totals to > 500 million athletes in the world. Most of these athletes profess a certain high level of affluence and invest in tools to be good at these sports. For them a tool to excel at their passion is a must have. Hence the video of Huish outdoors at the event claiming that the Ultra becomes a “dive computer” for the diver. No one can blame them for smart marketing but hey it does everything a dive computer used to do and much more! These sports are practiced in extreme weather conditions or high risk situations. So with the satellite connectivity built on, why would anyone not invest in a life saving device?. Of course we all want to live to scale more peaks and dive in the deepest corners of the world. I guess you get my point. The target market is so perfect that I suspect many of the feature requests that have been built came from the community itself. And that is the beauty of Apple, their ability to listen to the voices of consumers as they send in their requests or feedback. Carefully dissecting market segments even if they are adjacent and may look smaller at first glance but then dig deeper to evolve something that is ground breaking at all levels.

Now lets assume that just 2% of this target market buys the ultra over the next 12 months, which is a very feasible number given the positioning of the device and the sub $1000 pricing.

We are looking at a potential $1 Billion+ product.

This is not including the sales of additional iPhones, apps, accessories and other ecosystem sales that each customer will drive. This my friends is a brilliant masterstroke of Apple. Just taking an existing product, extending it with certain features that speak to the target segment very intimately and deeply and sweeping the market.

Few other things to learn from this launch at a high level:

1. The deep understanding of each endurance segment and to tailor the product just right to their needs is remarkable. For example increasing the size of the grooves on the crown so that you can use it even with gloves on, is customer intimacy at its best.

2. Ensuring that you emote confidence and assurance by certifying the product to global standards sends a message of trust and comfort. The watch is certified to EN13319 and other standards across land and water.

3. Creating bands that are easy to use and tailoring them to different environmental situations with the Trail for workouts, Alpine for intense weather and ocean band for deep sea diving.

4. The ultra can potentially become another product category killer with a multi-billion dollar growth trajectory aka Airpods for years to come.

5. And as the products scale up and health features keep getting integrated into it the number of extensions on this product can be numerous making it a significant volume and profitability driver for Apple for years to come.

6. Finally to bring a compass and GPS that will help you navigate back to civilization in case you are ever lost in the wilderness. In some way is a call to take the risk yet a comfort to say we have your back. Go for it with the ultra!

For some time now I have been worried about the lack of any groundbreaking product launch from Apple. But launches like these do get my hopes up Innovation is alive and well at Apple. Maybe, maybe there is something in the works that will surprise us someday. At the least even if they don’t announce a huge breakthrough product, I am happy with this ecosystem play and continual advancement of engineering across hardware, software, privacy and apps. Still, someday I hope someday we will see something big! Keeping my fingers crossed.

AI/ML has now come of age and proliferating at an unprecedented pace across Industries. The convergence of low-cost computing capability (thanks to powerful chips and cloud), ubiquitous network connectivity, and low cost of technology have propelled AI/ML into every aspect of our daily lives. From powering our smartphone decision engines to voice assistants to Autonomous cars to even simple automation for productivity apps, algorithms today power our daily schedules in ways we cannot even fathom. A simple scroll on Facebook/Instagram or even on your phone is powered by an algorithm, offering you the right content of your interest based on your past behaviors.

This is a great time for software developers to build algorithms and self-learning models that can drive significant impact and showcase their competency. The only challenge is AI/ML implementations remain a complex domain to navigate. Today most organizations need a combination of data scientists, Developers, and infrastructure engineers to bring the real power of AI/ML to life. These implementations need to converge statistical, data analytical knowledge with software development and eventually the capability to deploy and manage models on the cloud infrastructure. Hardly a task for a single individual. Hence in most corporates, AI/ML deployments are moving at a sluggish pace given the challenges of bringing multidisciplinary teams to move at high velocity. But wait there is an alternative for developers to drive the full power of AI/ML on their own.

What is Auto/ML?

Automated machine learning, also referred to as automated ML or AutoML, is the process of automating the time-consuming, iterative tasks of machine learning model development. It allows developers to build ML models with high scale, efficiency, and productivity all while sustaining model quality.

How is it different from the traditional approaches?

• AutoML takes away the development and deployment-intensive tasks from the humans and provides automated tools and platforms for most use cases.

• Even business users or data scientists who are not developers can utilize some of these platforms.

• Time to market is rapid as most of the iterative tasks of model development, feature engineering, model training are all automated.

• Today platforms are also offering end-to-end managed services.

Best illustration is this write-up written by a 17-year-old Alexander Mamaev on how to use AutoML from scratch!

Why should you use AutoML?

• Most AutoML platforms take a low code approach with a Web GUI to do most of the model prep and parametrization.

• AutoML platforms and projects significantly enhance time to market for AI/ML deployments. This is one of the biggest pain points for most engineers and corporates.

• The platform approach gives you scalability options on demand, akin to cloud, that makes it easy for you to focus on the outcomes rather than the engineering complexity of development and deployment issues.

• It is a great way to start your journey to demonstrate early wins and learn at low cost rather than do a big program with high risks

• Provides velocity and flexibility reducing team dynamics across functions

• Variable cost structure with the ability to scale up and down and pay for use.

How do I get started?

The best place to start learning as a beginner would be here. Although this site directs you to packages I would encourage you to look at the platform-centric approaches first that I have enumerated below.

Great news is that there are now a plethora of AutoML platforms you can start playing around with. Few are listed below:

1. Google AutoML: Freemium model. You can use the cloud AutoML offering with some pre-built AI models and then scale up with a paid version. Google is leveraging the power of its vast AI engines behind the scenes. Worthwhile if the use cases are what you need to get started.

2. If Google is offering, Microsoft and Amazon cannot be far behind with their wares, can they? Both offerings are some versions of the Freemium models but the paid versions are what they will push you towards if you want to scale up in any measure.

3. BigML: Free for workloads up to 16MB per dataset. Yes, it feels like a small but great place to start if you are a developer just learning your way into AI/ML. Feature rich platform that offers quick access, models that can be understood, exported, collaborations, automation, flexible deployments, and more.

4. H2O.ai: Opensource platform with a very large community that continues to enhance the models and use cases. Great place to get your hands dirty, partner with other developers from around the world and grow your expertise. H2O is one of the most mature and leveraged platforms with use cases across most industries. So if you get serious about scaling up your deployments this is the platform to go to. Remember that you will have to be your support system at scale.

In addition to the platform plays there are many AutoML projects and some of them that you can access on Github are:

1. Auto-Sklearn: Mechanized ML programming package based on Scikit-learn.

2. MLBox: Robust Python package

3. Pycaret: Open-source low code Python Package machine learning library.

4. AutoKeras: Simplistic approach to learning models and applications. Built on the Keras platform.

These are just some of the platforms and packages/libraries in a growing list. More and more players are launching AutoML offerings s they realize the potential of the market. There is no clear leader. In addition, there are a number of open source projects mushrooming to address these needs.

Things to keep in mind:

1. If you are worried if your role is at risk, chill!. Data researchers and Engineers will continue to play a pivotal role in the AI/ML journey. AutoML is just an enabler approach.

2. Be thoughtful of the choice of the platform/package you choose. As you start to scale you will have to live with the features or lack thereof given the investments you would have made.

3. Leverage the use cases and platform features to the maximum. Engage and leverage the vendor support team or the community. There is significant body of knowledge and experience available so don’t try to do it yourself. Avoid the mistakes the early adopters have made.

4. Do! Jump in and get started. We as engineers love to debate the feature sets or the endless debates on which product is better. The key is to take an agile way of working. Do, try, finetune and repeat.

Hope this note will get you started on your AutoML journey and provide a faster path to learning, developing, and making an impact. Go for it, give it a try! Good luck.

The high churn of employees across the global workforce has been called the “Great Resignation”. Prof. Adam Klotz who came up with the term calls it an economic trend in which employees voluntarily resign from their jobs. The reason quoted is lack of worker protection and wage stagnation. In my view there are more seminal reasons that are subterranean that are driving this wave of change across the industries. Below are some in my view that are not being understood and talked about much but are leading to this trend.

1. Financial Security : The pandemic forced most of the white collar workforce to be sequestered in their homes and drove savings up significantly for more than a year. The impulsive purchases, the adhoc spends reduced significantly and increased savings to record levels. This led to a sense of financial security for most people and that has translated into a courage to take risks. Most folks have realized that they can take the risk for the wind is at their back.

2. Personal space : The forced WFH paradigm provided extra 2-4 hours of free time and coupled with the smaller moveable space forced people to invest in their relationships and personal passions. Both elements provide significant lift to a human soul at a deeper level and lend happiness. There are enough studies out there that corroborate these linkages. This has led people to rethink and realize their priorities in life. Of course this is not true for all relationships. But even the difficult ones have had to realize the importance of the change.

3. Common enemy: For the first time in many decades humanity came together to fight a common enemy C-19 collectively and everyone set aside their differences whether it was in their neighborhoods or countries to collectively tackle this challenge. A common threat always brings out the most positive emotions and response from humanity and that itself lifts people to think about their purpose of life. More and more corporate professionals are questioning and realizing life has more to it than just endless pursuit of narrow profits.

4. Less is enough: One common theme you hear from most people is how they realized they can survive on so little. So if one can sustain on very little, the realization dawns on most as to why I am running this hard to collect things that I do not need. The realization is can I be happy with less ?

5. Independence : Pre pandemic the most common rhythm for an employee was driven by their managers. These so called leaders defined and almost were the curators of daily life experiences for 8-10 hours in a day. Life was dependent on these endless streams of meetings with managers/leaders who defined all guardrails. If anything almost every myth around people management has been destroyed. People can govern themselves well (largely) and almost everyone does the right thing in the right environment. People have stepped up to the challenge in more ways than ever before and proven they can be the leaders in their own right. So it is easy now to decipher a great working environment from a claustrophobic, political and controlling environment. So people have realized they don’t have to be chained to their working environments rather seek the ones they thrive in the most.

There are exceptions I am sure to my assertions above and not every movement is right. Although there are large sets of people taking risks, going independent or trying to realize their potential in new ways, there are many that are not. We can understand these through the lens of personas. In my view generally most employees fall into 4 personas when it comes to the IT and ITeS world - Explorers, Dwellers, Sailors and the Rebels. I will cover these in my subsequent blog. I would love to know which persona you fall into and if there are others that I am missing. The names sort of allude to the types but there is more to it and no one persona is good or bad, it’s just how we are wired in our own journeys.

My hope is, through this pandemic journey, of almost 2 years that most people should have realized something deep about themselves and reflected on their life’s direction. And hopefully have course corrected in better ways to be happy. Having said that I do sometimes encounter people who seem to have drifted into the world of ultraconsumption through bingeing on media, food and other aspects that not necessarily are going to be healthy in the long term. In two years we all have now developed lots of new habits that will stay with us for long. Are they the best for us we will only know in the long term. I am an eternal optimist and hope that we will all come out of this with stronger self, family and communities. The silver lining of the pandemic for most was the ability to turn inward and go deep. It gave us countless days of stillness and silence and hopefully we found a lot in those voids in ourselves. I will leave with you a wonderful quote from

Blaise Pascal “All of humanity’s problems stem from his/her inability to sit quietly in a room, alone“

In my recent work with many startups focused on the B2B segment, one question keeps coming up – How do we grow faster? It’s a multidimensional issue and yet there are many things that founders can do to take charge of this issue. There is a belief that product led growth is it, we will build and they will come. There is a lot more to achieving the growth trajectory than just building more and more features in your product. There are certain pitfalls one must avoid and certain techniques one can adopt to drive the growth phase.

First question is how do I know I am in growth phase?

Most startups go through three phases in their early journey – Momentum, Growth and Scale up.

Momentum: This is the first phase when the startup has gained a handful of clients and they are seeing the product being utilized in a meaningful manner. There is a ton of feedback coming from the clients to help improve the product. When you have over 15-20 clients who are using the core functionality and willing to pay( or already paying) is when you have reached a product market fit (PMF). To know more about PMF, read Lenny Rachitskys notes. And then the startup tips over into the growth phase.

Growth: This is when the startup especially B2B ones go from 15-20 clients to much higher number. They start to add clients to their core functionality at a consistent phase. The product is sticking, retention is high, and clients are asking for more. They start referring other clients or are willing to be strong references.

Scaleup: This is the phase when a startup goes into a hockey stick expansion phase and is rapidly scaling up clients. User growth and demand is just organic at high velocity. The clients are pushing you to limits and the product starts to expand into adjacencies, new segments and you have multiple domains within the product portfolio. The core product functionality is now feeding into new areas of product expansion.

So, what happens in the growth phase?

Interestingly the growth phase is the one where the successful startups separate from the others and gallop ahead. This is also where many just languish, lose their way or wind up. One would argue that the growth phase makes or stalls an organization. Most founders continue to lead with their intuition. Yes, intuition is generally good approach especially if the founders are grounded in acute client pulse but many founder teams go astray for the following reasons:

1. Since the client roster has expanded and there is serious competition, founder teams start to obsess and build for parity with competition. There are times when you must be at parity but if that’s driving your overall strategy you will be an average product and not a differentiated one. Be careful about obsessing too much about your competition.

2. They start to over engineer the product on features based on anecdotal feedback. For example the 1st client or the largest client may ask for many changes or updates, most teams will go on building, after all they are paying for your product or you have an emotional attachment. You have to be careful of how intrinsic those demands to your roadmap and most importantly to your differentiation.

3. Trend catcher syndrome kicks in. A HR tech startup I was advising wanted to build an OKR module into their platform as it was the trend with enterprises and some others were doing it. There was no synergy or connect to their core functionality. This is too common these days with such an information overload. Everyone believes everything they read and want to add that to their product irrespective of its a key aligned and customer tested feature or not.

4. Monetization pressure pushes founders to look for ways to build for revenue rather than customer delight.

How do you ensure success in this phase?

There are some things the founders can do to drive a calibrated success in this phase. Some of the critical ones are:

1. First and foremost separate product from growth. Ensure that you have one of the founders wear the hat of the Growth officer. Rarely but possible your product lead, engineering lead or sales lead could be a growth officer. But very diligent in terms of who plays this role as it demands a lot out of the role.

2. The growth officer must focus on three dimensions.

a. Landing: you must use the data at granular levels to understand what is working with the existing product. You must focus on adoption as a key metric. Some founders I work with, are not very plugged into key questions like - what is the DAU for the product? what parts of the products are most used and why? What are the happy flows and thorny flows in the customer journey and why? You have to wake up each day and dig into these metrics and enable their success. BTW these are your input metrics that lead to great output metrics like NPS and revenue.

b. Building: You have to build adjacent features to the ones that product has. Especially dig into thorny flows and see if you can reengineer them. One example is in early days of Twitter, getting a handle was difficult and most people abandoned opening an account as the flow would not let you choose your handle. A simple tweak of suggesting usernames rather than letting users trying drove an exponential rise in sign ups. You have to do A/B testing on various such customer journeys to clear the path for client delight

c. Optimizing: Each customer journey with your product should be optimized for least amount of friction. You should explore and analyze the underlying emotional journey of the product experience. Identify for high friction, multi step, anxiety creating moments that need to be eliminated. You have to make the journey as seamless and shortest path to outcomes. Case in point is Robinhood’s pioneering three step process to open a brokerage account helped them to become a disrupter. Just the ability to scan the driving license using the phones camera to capture all of your data was nifty and took all unnecessary steps away. Zerodha has done the same in India. This optimizing to get the client to the trading window in the most optimized timeframe.

3. Daily prioritization: This is a tricky one. Founders have to learn the art of saying no, trying a few things, sometimes failing and starting all over. There are features that may seem to be compelling or it might be a one client demand, and it could compromise rest of the clients and roadmap. Do you do it or you defer it? Daily reprioritization and rapid feedback loops with no pride/ego is the only way to ensure growth.

4. Finally pivot to leading by input metrics and not output metrics. I see many founders continue to focus on client wins, users added, to the platform sales, revenue, billing etc as the metrics in the growth phase. These are important but the key is to drive input metrics like adoption rate, DAU/WAU/MAU, feature usage, retention. Sometimes you may have to build telemetry into areas of specific experimentation to capture metrics. Input metrics will help gather deep customer insights and help you propel the product into the scale up phase.

There are other dimensions around marketing, engineering and customer engagement that are also crucial in this phase and maybe areas for another of my posts. Hopefully these pointers will at least trigger some discussions and thoughts in your journey and help you navigate through the growth phase.

Women in India on average outlive men by at least four years. This also means nine out of ten women will be the sole financial decision-makers in their households at some point owing to life events. However, although women are better savers than men, they have not yet fully embraced the world of investing. As Kathy Murphy, Head of Personal Investing at Fidelity has said, “Women work pretty hard in their lives and at work. They want to have a better life and fuel their dreams. So, they should get the money to work hard for them as well.” Although women represent 53 per cent of undergraduate degrees and a whopping 69.6 per cent of M.Phil degrees in India, labor force participation is a mere 20 per cent and women making investment decisions is at a much smaller rate.

The pandemic has only compounded the situation. A recent Fidelity study of women in the US after one year of the pandemic shows that 79 per cent are feeling more weighed down by job and money stress, up from 67 per cent last fall. Some of the greatest stressors include saving for retirement and other long-term goals, balancing work and caregiving responsibilities, and managing daily expenses. The good news is that women have begun to appreciate the criticality of wealth management even more, as the pandemic has usurped our stable lives.

Women need to take charge of their investments to achieve financial and life goals. Here are some measures I would recommend.

1. Prioritise wealth management: Although women are better savers than men, they often do not take the next step into investing and largely stick to savings, which are neutral at best or can even result in money loss due to inflation. The key is to prioritize financial education and wealth management as much as family and health. Money may not provide happiness, but it does offer the freedom to pursue happiness goals and reduce friction in life. Carve out time each week to focus on finances, working with family, friends, and the external ecosystem. In a few months, the overall comfort of life will most likely improve with an increased sense of being in control.

2. Break the intimidation cycle: Investing may seem hard because of all the jargon such as alpha, beta, and quant. The good news is there are a plethora of online and offline options to begin the learning journey. Today, every bank in the country is keen to engage on an investing journey. It is good to set a learning path and meet people you are comfortable with, to learn about market choices. Use online tools or the services of a financial advisor to build a financial plan. It will provide long-term clarity on milestones needed to meet goals. Most importantly, it will provide an anchor for a woman and her stakeholders (spouse if married or extended family) to a plan that all can commit to.

3. Stay focused: In a survey conducted by BCG, women were found to regard wealth as a tool for attaining specific goals, and not as a goal itself. That is a good start, and the key is to take a long-term view of one’s needs. Sometimes, market players will entice investors with higher-risk profile investments and perhaps lofty return promises. But the key here is to ensure focus on personal goals, the risk profile that works best, and measured steps that are desired. When Fidelity analyzed eight million clients, we found that investments by women earned higher returns by a percentage point than men. Women balance risk-return trade offs better than men. No wonder that in 2020, women-managed mutual funds outperformed men-managed funds by 2 per cent in the US. So, play to your strengths.

4. Live a full life: Wealth management is just one of the tools to attain goals. It’s easy to get carried away by the vagaries of the markets and increase stress or anxiety. This is a long-term play. A market is a weighing machine over the long term and a voting machine in the short term. Set a strategy for goals, re-evaluate an investment approach just once a year or less, set reasonable expectations, and be patient.

Investing, although a gender-neutral topic, has been the domain of men in India for the longest time but can and should be one of the key pillars of growth for women. The digitization of the economy and the rapid adoption of mobile-friendly technologies has made it much easier to step into investing, irrespective of financial status or position. All it takes is a resolve to get started and the time is now!