I did not choose to become human-first.
Aligarh made that choice for me.
"Eight standard. My grandfather's Luna. I just rode it."
Nobody taught me. I just got on and figured it out. That is probably the most accurate summary of how I have approached everything since.
I grew up in Aligarh in the 1980s. Cricket in the afternoon, AMU campus walks, the kind of childhood that feels slow and full at the same time. I played for my school team, represented in inter-school tournaments, and discovered something important: I am not the most talented person in any room. But I will outwork almost anyone in it.
And then the riots came.
I was young when I first saw it. People who had shared chai across a fence the day before, suddenly on opposite sides of something ancient and stupid. I watched a neighbourhood become a battlefield over something neither side could truly explain. I smelled smoke. I heard things I cannot unhear.
Something broke open in me then. And what came through was not anger. It was clarity.
The only identity that actually matters is human. Everything else is a story we tell to feel less alone. Sometimes those stories kill people.
I have never forgotten that. Every product I have built, every team I have led, every person I have mentored. It all comes back to this: people deserve to be treated like people. Not resources. Not headcount. People.
The city
Aligarh. Famous for its locks. Famous for its riots. Famous for producing people who carry both in their bones.
The vehicle
A Luna moped. 50cc. Top speed 45 km/h. The first thing I ever operated without being told how.
The lesson
Human before everything. This never changed.
"I was the college topper. The interviews disagreed."
After AMU, I moved to Greater Noida for my MCA. I was good at studying. Always had been. So when campus placements began, I walked in expecting the world to simply recognise what my grades said about me.
Interview after interview. Nothing.
The silence was brutal, not just professionally but personally. In India, being unemployed after being a topper is not just a gap on your resume. It sits on you like a coat you cannot take off.
Marks get you a seat at the table. What you do when no one is watching gets you the job.
Months later: a contractual apprenticeship at Bharat Electronics Limited. A project working on a national identity card. Unglamorous. Contractual. Perfect.
You know that card today as Aadhar. I was one of the first engineers to work on it during the pilot phases. I did not know then that I was part of something that would eventually touch a billion people. I just knew it was a chance to build something real. I took it with both hands.
Magic Software hired me without a clear brief. No role defined. No manager hovering. No desk with my name on it. Just a salary and a floor to sit on.
Most people would have treated that as a problem. I treated it as a blank canvas.
I started watching. Magic built dozens of mobile apps and tested every single one manually. I kept thinking: this is solvable. What if you could input any app and it would automatically find the bugs? No testers. No scripts. No code from the user at all.
I shared the idea with my seniors.
They laughed. Not politely. Actually laughed. The kind of laugh that says: sit down, you are embarrassing yourself.
I kept building in the margins. Early mornings. Late evenings. Then one afternoon I walked into the MD's office and showed him what I had. He did not laugh. He leaned forward. His eyes went wide. Within the hour: three engineers, a two-month runway.
Then the company changed hands. New management. A call asking me to present. I walked in not knowing if I was about to be shut down or given the biggest stage of my career.
Heart rate: elevated. Preparation: complete.
I presented to Acky and Arjun, co-founders of HCL, a tool that automated the entire mobile app testing pipeline without a single line of code. They lit up. Full funding. A device lab. Complete ownership.
We landed in California. Sixteen Intel engineers who were not there for slides. Four hours. Every edge case thrown at the product like a stress test. The product held. They called us back the next morning. Then came the conversation none of us were prepared for: pricing. We had no model. We had never imagined we would get this far. I flew home. Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, my CEO got an email. They did not want to license it. They wanted to own it.
The idea that was laughed out of a meeting room went to Santa Clara and came back as a $200,000 acquisition. That was the day I understood what a real product can do.
"240 apps. We turned them into one. Then hit a ceiling made of org charts."
Head of Employee Experience at PayPal, inheriting a sprawling portfolio of 240 internal apps used by over 20,000 employees. The brief: consolidate. The reality: rethink everything from scratch.
We built Connect: one mobile-first app for everything an employee needed. React Native, Node.js, designed like a consumer product not a corporate tool. Management kept funding us because we kept delivering things they had not asked for but immediately wanted.
But the users were internal. Priority was always a negotiation. We were building something that genuinely mattered to 20,000 people and it was treated like a support function.
The most dangerous place to be as a builder is inside an organisation that does not believe your work is the main thing. You spend your best energy defending the work instead of doing it.
I started thinking about what it would mean to build this for every organisation. Not just PayPal. All of them.
Uniify is the product Connect always wanted to be, built for every organisation, owned by no single one. Five pillars: Listen, Engage, Care, Empower, Recharge. Not a feature list. A philosophy about what work should feel like when it is actually working.
The startup years have been the hardest and most clarifying of my life. Nobody tells you how lonely the early days are. Nobody tells you how many times you will question the decision, usually at 2am, usually alone, usually right before something breaks in your favour.
Along the way I founded HRIN, HR Innovators Network, a community of over a thousand HR professionals. Because the people responsible for employee experience were often the most isolated. Nobody was saying what was actually hard. HRIN is the room where we say the actual thing.
Today I mentor founders, not on strategy decks or funding tactics. On the thing that actually separates products that sell from products that sit: building something someone wants to own.
The kid who got on his grandfather's Luna without being taught is still in every room I walk into. Still figuring it out as he goes.
That belief is not a strategy. It is a scar.