I want to tell you the whole story. Not the LinkedIn version, not the highlights, not the arc that has been cleaned up to look inevitable in retrospect.
The actual story. With the gaps in it.
The beginning: Chennai, 2003
In June 2003, I launched my first business — chennailisting.com, a local business directory for Chennai. I was young, enthusiastic, and almost completely wrong about what it would take.
I borrowed ₹1 lakh from my father to start it. He lent it to me at interest — because he believed in the lesson as much as the money. He wanted me to understand that capital has a cost, and that borrowing from family does not exempt you from that lesson.
I failed to understand the lesson quickly enough. The business did not work. I ran out of money, runway, and the clear-eyed honesty that the market was not responding to what I was building. I folded it.
Then I started GR Consulting. A services business. Something closer to what I actually knew how to deliver. It went better — for a while.
December 2004. I ran out of cash again. Not because I was building something wrong this time — but because early businesses are fragile, and I had not built enough cushion to survive the slow months.
I needed a job.
Singapore: the first time
I found one. Nucleus Software, HR Singapore. I moved. I worked. I saved. I watched how Singapore operated — the systems, the efficiency, the way business was conducted here.
And then I went back to India. Not because I failed in Singapore. Because something was still unfinished there, and I knew it.
The bike and the friend
Back in Chennai, I was starting again from somewhere close to zero.
A friend named Viswanathan lent me his bike. No terms. No conditions. No timeline. He just handed it to me and said I would need it. He was right.
That bike meant I could move. Meet clients. Show up. Not be dependent on public transport on a tight schedule. It sounds small. It was not small. At that stage, mobility is the difference between momentum and being stuck.
I have not forgotten that.
2011: A new direction, and a marriage
In 2011, I started a crafts business. A completely different industry from anything I had done before. New market, new customer, new product category.
That same year, she said yes.
I want to be precise about what "said yes" meant in 2011 in my context. She knew the failures. She knew the trajectory — failed business, job abroad, returned, borrowed bike, trying again. She said yes anyway.
I remember standing outside the Bukit Gombak bakery in Singapore on one of our early trips, splitting one 80-cent cookie between us because that was what the budget allowed. Not dramatically — just as a fact of that particular evening. We split the cookie and it was fine. We were both fine.
That is who she is. That is the foundation the rest of this is built on.
2013: The hardest year
The crafts business failed in 2013.
That same year, our first child was born. I borrowed money for the delivery. I want to say that plainly — not for sympathy, but because it is true, and it is part of the story. A lot of what I am building now is in direct conversation with that year. Every room we manage, every project we complete, every employee who draws a salary — it is in conversation with 2013.
I sold my wedding ring.
And I started Adobha.
Adobha: the real beginning
I did not start Adobha alone. A co-founder stepped in with funds at the moment I needed them most. I will not name him here without his permission — but I will say that what he did is not something I take lightly. He bet on me when the evidence for that bet was thin.
The early years of Adobha were about survival, then about stability, then about scale. Each phase had its own kind of difficulty. The survival years were raw. The stability years were grinding. The scale years — where we are now — are complex in ways that are harder to explain but no less demanding.
Today
One team member — I will call her by her role, not her name — is now in a place where she could buy her first bike without asking anyone for help. That is not a metaphor. She literally bought a bike. And I thought about Viswanathan the day she told me.
Another team member was able to afford having twins. Another one sends her children to a school that is better than what she had access to growing up.
These are the data points I track that do not appear in any financial report.
Why I am telling you this
Not for admiration. Not as a sales pitch. Not to perform struggle.
Because the version of founding a company that circulates publicly is incomplete — and the incompleteness does real damage to the people who are in the middle of their own hard years, thinking that their difficulty is a sign they are doing it wrong.
It is not a sign of that.
The hard years are the years. They are not the thing you get through to reach the story. They are the story.
I sold my wedding ring. And I started Adobha. And the business is now real. Those three sentences belong together.
If you are in your 2013 right now — the year where everything is hard and the birth of something new is arriving at exactly the moment you can least afford it — I want you to know that I understand what that year feels like.
And I want you to know that 2013 is not the end of the story.
It is just where the real one begins.