A friend of mine — I call him Machi, the way Tamils call old friends who have become family — asked me a question last month that I found surprisingly difficult to answer.
"What makes you feel satisfied? Not successful. Not proud. Satisfied."
My first answer was the wrong one. I said something about revenue targets and market share. He looked at me the way old friends look at you when you are performing instead of answering. "That is not what I asked," he said.
So I sat with it for a few days.
Why I started
I left employment and started a business not because I had a grand plan or a burning product idea. I left because I was not built for accomplishment in the traditional sense — the kind that is handed to you by someone else, evaluated on someone else's terms, incremented annually in a conversation where someone else holds most of the leverage.
I needed to build something of my own. I did not know exactly what. I just knew that.
The early years were difficult in ways I will write about separately. But the direction was always clear, even when the path was not: build something real. Something that employs people and creates value and exists beyond me.
What we have built so far
As of today:
These numbers matter to me. Not as vanity metrics — but as evidence of scale. Each number represents a real person whose life we touched in some way. A customer who got something they needed. A tenant who had a stable place to live. A family that renovated their home.
And there are milestones I am working toward: a name board on a tall Singapore building. A valuation of 100 million. Not for ego — because that scale means we are doing something that genuinely matters at a level that can be seen and measured.
The banyan tree answer
A few days after Machi's question, I found the real answer.
I want to be like a banyan tree — large, stable, eternal. Giving shade and shelter to as many people as possible.
The banyan is not a fast tree. It does not shoot up quickly and disappear. It grows slowly, sends roots in every direction, becomes wide before it becomes tall. And once it is there — it is really there. For decades. For generations. Animals shelter under it. People rest in its shade. The tree does not ask anything of them in return.
That is the shape of what I am trying to build. Not an exit. Not a flip. Not a viral moment. Something that endures — that gives more than it takes, for a long time, to as many people as possible.
Right now, I am a banyan seed.
The roots are going in. The growth is real but slow. Some years the growth is invisible from the outside — you would look at the seedling and not know what it is becoming.
But I know what it is becoming.
And Machi, if you are reading this — that is the answer. That is what makes me feel satisfied. Not the numbers. The direction. The knowledge that I am building toward something that will be standing long after I am not.