How I ended up here.
A short version of a longer story — and the reason this work matters to me.
I qualified in 2017. The traditional path was right there.
I cleared my finals in 2017. The path most of my batchmates took was well-marked: a Big 4 audit firm, slow climb up the corporate ladder, eventually a tax or assurance specialty. Safe. Respected. Predictable.
I chose the path for the obvious reasons. Becoming a CA in India is no small thing — the years, the exams, the articleship. It teaches discipline. It also teaches deference: to rules, to process, to the way things have always been done. I respected all of that. I still do. But the work that came after — the work I actually carried home in my head — looked nothing like what I had trained for.
I started down it. And then I started noticing something different about the work that actually energized me.
The work I loved had nothing to do with what I was paid for.
The clients I was working with — small business owners, first-time founders — kept asking me questions that had nothing to do with my technical scope. Not "is this entry correct," but "should I take this investor's term sheet." Not "what's the tax treatment," but "is my pricing wrong."
The technical work was 20% of the value. The judgment was 80%. And nobody was being trained to give them that.
It crystallized over many conversations. A founder asking about depreciation but really worried about an investor's term sheet. Another asking about audit timing but actually deciding whether to pivot. The pattern was always the same: the technical question was the doorway. The real question was always further in. Whoever walked through that doorway with them — that was the partner they kept calling.
For nine years, I've worked inside founder-led businesses.
Not service firms. Not from a distance. Inside the room when the hard calls get made.
I've built financial models that survived VC partner meetings. I've caught pricing leaks that paid for years of my fees in a single quarter. I've told founders to walk away from clients, to fire team members they liked, to delay raises, to take raises. The kind of work that doesn't fit into a billable-hour invoice.
Now I work with a small handful of premium founders at any given time. The kind who don't need another vendor — they need a finance partner who's already three moves ahead.
The numbers tell the truth first.
Almost every pivot, every hire mistake, every cash crunch was sitting in the numbers six months earlier. The job is to see it earlier and act on it.
Founders deserve better partners.
The default finance relationship in India is transactional and reactive. You can do so much more with a partner who understands your business as well as you do.
Strategy beats activity.
The right business needs to do three things really well, not thirty things sort-of-well. Finance is how you figure out which three.
When I'm not in a founder's spreadsheet…
I read business history obsessively — long-arc stories about how decisions compound over decades. That is what finance is at its core: short calls that bend long futures. Most of what I think about outside the work is just a longer version of what I think about inside it.
I'm not on most social media. I prefer long-form thinking to short-form posting. If you want to follow my work, LinkedIn is where I show up.
Think we'd work well together?
The fastest way to find out is a strategy session. No prep. No pitch. Just numbers and questions.