I want to start there because every pitch story on this platform starts with the win. The confetti, the oversized check, the photo where everyone is holding the check at slightly different heights so it looks like a cardboard staircase. Mine usually start somewhere less photogenic. Usually a bathroom. Sometimes a stairwell.

In September 2025 I was one of five finalists in the software category at the RALLY pitch competition in Indianapolis. Up to $1M in investment on the line. Hundreds of people in the room. The time limit was two minutes.

Two minutes. That is barely enough time to say my name and my company's tagline, and in my case to hear my own heartbeat louder than either of them.

I had practiced that pitch, and the hundreds of versions that came before it, for more than 100,000 minutes. I did the math later because I am the kind of person who does the math later. 100,000 minutes is about 1,667 hours. That is roughly 69 full days of my life, awake, talking to a wall about e-commerce analytics. The ratio of practice to stage time works out to about 50,000 to 1, which is worse odds than most of the startups in that room were facing, mine included.

We won. I did not expect to. Explaining it back home was its own pitch, because if you have ever tried to explain a pitch competition to an Indian parent, you know it lands somewhere between a quiz show and a job interview where nobody gets hired but someone gets a large cardboard rectangle.

This edition is about those 120 seconds and the 100,000 minutes underneath them. It is also, because people keep asking, a fairly practical guide. If you are a founder about to pitch for money in front of strangers, I hope some of this saves you a few thousand minutes. You can spend them on sleep. I hear it is nice.

Why I Did So Many of These

The honest reason is unglamorous. Pitch competitions were the only money that would take my calls.

When I started Xena I was a solo founder, an immigrant on a student visa, building software for consumer brands on Amazon and Walmart. Venture capital did not look at that profile and see a pattern. It saw three asterisks. Pitch competitions did not care about the asterisks. They cared whether I could stand up and make a room believe something in a fixed amount of time.

So I entered. A lot. More than 40 of them over the years, from one-minute pitches to ten-minute ones, from rooms with 100 applicants to ones with more than 10,000. I lost plenty. I want to be clear about that, because "$1.65 million" sounds like a career and the truth is closer to a long series of polite emails that begin with "Thank you for your interest."

Some of the ones I did win changed the shape of my life, not just the bank balance. The Render Competition came with a $100,000 investment from Render Capital and a condition that I move the company to Louisville. I had no particular plans to live in Kentucky. Now I am a Kentucky Colonel and I sit on the board of the Louisville Orchestra, which is a sentence that would have confused my younger self deeply. The Vogt Awards gave us a $25,000 non-dilutive grant, and every dollar of it went into customer acquisition, because my father raised me to believe a rupee without a job is a rupee in danger. The SAAS NORTH PitchFest in Toronto came down to a live audience vote, and the audience picked us. That one did something to my nervous system that I am still processing.

The money mattered. I will not pretend it did not. But if I am honest, the part that compounded was something else. Every competition forced me to explain Xena more clearly than I had the week before. Customers do not give you a hard two-minute limit. Judges do. That constraint did more for my sales calls than any sales book ever did, and I say that as someone who has bought more sales books than he has finished.

The Part Where I Complicate My Own Argument

Before the tips, a warning, because I would be lying by omission otherwise.

Pitch competitions can quietly become a hobby that feels like a business. You can spend months traveling, rehearsing, refining slides, collecting finalist badges, and wake up one day realizing that your pitch has improved dramatically and your product has not. The judges loved the story. The customers were never asked.

I have felt that pull. There was a stretch where [the period when I was pitching too much and what it cost the company], and I remember looking at my calendar and noticing that I had more rehearsals booked than customer calls. That is a bad ratio. Worse than 50,000 to 1, in its own way.

So here is my rule now. A competition has to be worth more than the customer conversations it replaces. Sometimes it is. Often it is not. A trophy has never renewed a contract.

With that out of the way, here is what 100,000 minutes taught me.

Ten Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before My First Pitch

1. Read the fine print like it owes you money.

Not all prizes are the same prize. Some are cash grants. Some are investments, which means diligence, terms, lawyers, and a cap table that now has one more name on it. Some come with conditions. Render came with a relocation clause, and I am glad it did, but I would have been very surprised if I had found out after winning. Before you apply, find out what the money actually is, what strings come with it, who the judges are, and whether the final is decided by judges or by an audience vote. Those are completely different sports.

2. Write the two-minute pitch in words, then cut it by a fifth.

Most people speak around 130 to 150 words a minute. Under stage lights, with your heart doing things it was not designed to do, you will speak faster and lose words anyway. I write my two-minute pitches at about 240 words and leave the remaining seconds for breathing, which I have found to be useful.

Here is roughly how I split the 120 seconds:

• 0 to 15 seconds: one person with one problem.
• 15 to 40: why this problem is expensive, and why now.
• 40 to 70: what we built, in one sentence a judge could repeat to their spouse at dinner.
• 70 to 100: proof. Revenue, customers, growth, retention. Numbers, not adjectives.
• 100 to 120: the ask, and one line you want them to remember when they are scoring you later.

If your first fifteen seconds are a slide titled "Market Opportunity," you have already lost a judge to their phone.

3. Rehearse the first 20 seconds ten times more than everything else.

Stage fright is front-loaded. For me it peaks in the walk to the microphone and fades once I hear my own voice say something that makes sense. So I over-rehearse the opening until I can say it while panicking, because I will be panicking. I want the first 20 seconds to be muscle memory. The rest of the pitch can ride on the momentum.

4. Practice out loud, on video, in the worst room you can find.

Rehearsing in your head is not rehearsing. It is daydreaming with slides. I record myself on my phone, watch it back, wince, and do it again. I have rehearsed in hotel bathrooms, at airport gates, and once in a parking garage stairwell because the venue had no green room and the stairwell had excellent acoustics. If you can deliver it in a stairwell with someone's car alarm going off, a carpeted ballroom will feel like a spa.

5. Build the pitch in four lengths.

I have pitched in one minute and I have pitched in ten. Every serious founder needs a 30-second version, a 2-minute version, a 5-minute version, and a 10-minute version, and they should all feel like the same story at different zoom levels. The bonus is that the 30-second version becomes your answer at every networking event when someone asks "So what do you do?" and you can see their eyes start to plan an exit.

6. Q&A is where the real judging happens.

The pitch gets you considered. The Q&A gets you scored. Judges ask about whatever they are worried about, so before every competition I write down the ten questions I least want to hear and answer each one in a single sentence first, then explain. Answer first, context second. If you do not know, say "I don't know, here is how I would find out," which sounds weak in your head and strong in the room.

7. Judges reward clarity, then proof, then you.

After enough of these you start to see what actually moves scores. It is rarely the cleverest idea in the room. It is the founder who made a complicated thing simple, backed it with real numbers, and seemed like someone who listens. Coachability matters more than people think. If a judge gives you feedback in the Q&A and you argue with it, you have told them exactly what working with you will be like.

Audience votes are different. Audiences reward the story and the person. At SAAS NORTH the emcee called it one of the best pitches she had seen, and I do not think it was because of my slide on data integrations. It was because people could see who we were building for.

8. Assume your deck will be frozen early.

Many competitions require final slides weeks before the event. At RALLY, decks were due more than two weeks before we pitched. Your traction will change in that window, hopefully upward, so leave room to say the newest numbers out loud. Also, show up for the tech rehearsal. Check the clicker. Check whether the screen is behind you or in front of you. I once had an AV disaster I lived through, and since then I treat the AV team as the most important people in the building.

9. Give one ask, and make it specific.

"We are looking for partners" is not an ask. It is a horoscope. Tell the room exactly what you want: the amount, what it will buy, and what milestone it gets you to. Then tell them one more thing they can do even if you do not win, like an intro to a specific kind of customer. Half my best outcomes came from people in the audience, not the scoreboard.

10. Have a plan for losing, because you will lose more than you win.

I am a little ashamed of this, but it takes me days to get over a loss. I know the mature founder is supposed to stay calm in wins and losses and focus on the process. I am working on it. In the meantime, here is my routine. Within 48 hours, I email the organizers and ask for judge feedback, politely and specifically. I write down every piece of it, even the parts that sting. Then I find one judge or one person in the audience and follow up, not to argue, just to stay in touch.

That last step has paid off more than any prize. Techstars rejected me several times before they accepted us in 2022, and the credibility from earlier competitions is part of why the door finally opened. A loss is rarely the end of a relationship. It is usually the first meeting.

What the 120 Seconds Are Really About

People see the final two minutes and think pitching is a talent. Some people do have it naturally. I am not one of them. I am a man with stage fright who decided to out-practice his own nervous system, one stairwell at a time.

What I have come to believe is that the 100,000 minutes were never really about the stage. They were about understanding my own company well enough to explain it to anyone, in any amount of time, while terrified. That is a skill I use every day now, on sales calls, in hiring conversations, and in investor meetings where nobody hands you a cardboard check at the end.

The stage was just the most honest test. It does not care who you know. It does not care where you started. It gives everyone the same 120 seconds and a microphone that may or may not work.

I have lost more of those 120 seconds than I have won. I would still take the deal again.

With love,

Akhil

Founders should give themselves more credit for choosing a path where there are basically no guarantees.

I wrote that at 6:40 a.m. on a Tuesday, before my daughter woke up and before the first Slack notification, which is the only window of the day when I am capable of an original thought. Then I spent the rest of the week trying to figure out whether I actually believe it or whether it was just the coffee talking.

I think I believe it. Let me try to explain why, with the usual detours.

People love the word "leap" when they talk about founders. Take the leap. Made the leap. Leap of faith. It makes the whole thing sound athletic, like there was a running start and a landing and a judge holding up a scorecard.

There is no leap. There is a series of small, mostly unremarkable decisions where you choose the option with less certainty in it, over and over, until one day you look up and realize you have been doing this for years and there is no longer a normal job to go back to that would not feel like a demotion from a company of one.

For me the first of those decisions happened in Delhi. I was building e-commerce at Hindustan Times, which is a real company with real payroll and a real building, and I decided to leave that and go get an MBA at Babson, which is a real school with real tuition and no building that I owned. The version of this story I tell at pitch competitions makes it sound strategic. The honest version is that I had a feeling, and the feeling was expensive.

Then came the pandemic, and I was in Louisville, Kentucky, a city I had no particular reason to be in, with a laptop, an idea about Amazon data, and a network in the United States that could be generously described as "the people I had met at Babson and a guy from my apartment building who nodded at me once."

So I sent cold emails. Hundreds of them. The reply rate was what you would expect from a stranger emailing supply chain managers during a global emergency about a product that did not fully exist yet. Which is to say, most people were busy, and I was a Tuesday afternoon problem they did not need.

Somebody at Nestlé replied.

I want to be clear that I still do not fully understand why. I have a theory involving the subject line and a theory involving luck and a theory involving the specific person being bored on a specific afternoon, and I suspect the truth is a blend. But that reply became a conversation, and the conversation became a pilot, and the pilot became Xena Intelligence's first enterprise client. A solo founder in Kentucky with no U.S. network landing a global CPG company through unsolicited email is not a strategy I would recommend. It is, however, what happened.

Tom and Paul, or: the first people who trusted a stranger

Before Nestlé there were Tom and Paul.

They run a company called Go2Kits in Keene, New Hampshire. Keene is the kind of town where, if you have never been, you would guess correctly what it looks like. They were my first-ever clients. Not the first enterprise client, not the first "logo," just the first two humans who looked at what I was doing and said, essentially, "Fine. Let's see."

I think about them more than I think about most of the bigger wins, because the bigger wins came with some evidence. By the time larger brands were signing, there were case studies and testimonials and a deck with numbers in it. Tom and Paul had none of that. They had a guy with an accent, a Google Slides deck, and a great deal of confidence that was, at that point, entirely unearned.

They paid me anyway. Real money. Small, but real, and I remember staring at the invoice confirmation the way I imagine people stare at a positive pregnancy test: a mix of joy and "oh no, this is happening now."

Five years on, they are less like clients and more like people I call when I want to know if I am being an idiot. They have a very high hit rate. I would say this is the best return on any relationship I have made in business, except that it would sound like I am ranking my friends, which I am, but privately.

The point is: the earliest people who bet on you had the least information. Give them credit. And give yourself credit for being the kind of person they were willing to bet on with no information, because that is not nothing.

A brief accounting of things that did not come with a guarantee

I made a list. It is incomplete, but it makes the case.

• Leaving a stable job in India to study in a country where I knew almost no one.
• Choosing to start a company in a pandemic, in a city I did not live in yet, in a category (CPG on Amazon and Walmart) where the incumbents have budgets larger than my expected lifetime revenue.
• Going through Techstars NYC in 2022, which is a program that takes a small piece of your company in exchange for a large piece of your nervous system.
• Winning Render Capital, which is the reason I moved to Louisville permanently. I picked a city because an investor was there. I am aware that is not how most people choose where to raise a child.
• Pitching in Doha for TASMU. Pitching in Birmingham at Sloss.Tech (opens in a new tab) . Pitching in Zurich on a Kentucky trade mission, which is a sentence I would not have predicted for myself at any earlier point in my life.
• Entering, by my rough count, somewhere north of forty pitch competitions. Winning enough of them to total over $1.65 million. Losing enough of them to know that the judges' feedback forms are often more useful than the checks.
• Building a second product, SearchPanel, to track how brands show up in AI answer engines, at a moment when nobody could tell me whether "AI answer engine visibility" was a category or a phrase I had made up in the shower.

None of these had a guarantee attached. Most of them had a very strong prior of failure. Several of them were, by the standards of my parents' generation, actively irresponsible.

And here is what I keep landing on: I do not give myself credit for any of it. Not in the moment. In the moment, the only thing I feel is the next thing that is not done yet.

The Steve test

Let me tell you about Steve.

Steve owns a farm goods store here in Louisville. Not a tech company. Not a venture-backed anything. A store, with a door and a bell on the door. Xena Intelligence has been helping his business, and a few weeks ago we took a photo together for LinkedIn, which is the modern version of a handshake.

What struck me about Steve is that he had no framework for what I do. He did not care about AI visibility tracking or marketplace intelligence or the phrase "AEO," which I have said in more meetings than I would like to admit. He cared whether more people found his products and bought them. That was the whole conversation.

I have started using this as a test. If I cannot explain what Xena does in a way that would make Steve nod, I have overbuilt something. It is a humbling test. It has killed at least two features.

But it also reminded me of something about the no-guarantee path: the people it actually serves rarely know or care how risky it was for you to get there. Steve does not know about the cold emails. He does not know about the nights I refreshed a bank balance like it was a sports score. He knows the bell rings more often. That is the only metric that matters to him, and honestly, it should probably be the only one that matters to me.

On winning an award and feeling nothing for eleven minutes

Earlier this year I won the Martha Layne Collins Award for Excellence in AI and Digital Trade Innovation. It is a Kentucky award. It has a very long name. It came with a very nice plaque.

I stood at the podium, said thank you, took the photo, and then sat back down and checked my email. Eleven minutes, roughly, between the applause and the first "have you seen this ticket?" message from my team.

I am not saying this to be ungrateful. The award meant something. It still does. Seeing my name next to a former governor's on a piece of engraved glass is not a thing I expected when I was sending cold emails from a rented apartment. But I noticed the speed with which my brain filed it as "done" and moved on, and I think that speed is the real problem this diary entry is about.

Founders are calibrated to the next unsolved thing. It is an adaptive trait. It is also, over enough years, a way to never feel like you have done anything at all, despite a growing pile of evidence that you have. The evidence gets filed. The feeling gets skipped.

A few observations from the road, presented without commentary.

On being a solo founder. I do not have a cofounder. People ask about this constantly, usually with the concerned face people make when you tell them you are driving to Chicago alone. The upside is that every decision is mine. The downside is that every decision is mine. I have not yet found a third side.

On investor meetings. Every investor meeting is a form of theater in which one party pretends they have not already decided, and the other party pretends they have not noticed. The best meetings are the ones where both parties drop the pretense in the first five minutes and go get lunch.

On the phrase "we're excited to announce." I have written it at least sixty times. I have been genuinely excited perhaps eleven of those times. The other forty-nine were closer to "we are relieved to announce" or "we are legally permitted to announce," neither of which performs well on LinkedIn.

On pitch competitions. You know you have done too many when you can predict the exact second a judge will ask about customer acquisition cost, and you have a slide ready for it, and you are slightly disappointed when they do not ask.

On the Amazon marketplace. It is the only environment I know of where a two-star review titled "Great product" can tank a quarter. I have made peace with this. Peace is a strong word.

On raising a two-year-old while running a startup. Both involve a small stakeholder who cannot articulate what they want, communicates primarily through escalation, and is somehow always right. My daughter, Kiara, has better product instincts than most people I have pitched to. She also has no patience for a slow demo, which, frankly, is fair.

What "giving yourself credit" actually looks like

I want to be careful here, because "give yourself credit" can slide very quickly into a motivational poster, and I have spent enough years around founders to know that the poster is often the problem. We are not short on affirmations. We are short on honest bookkeeping.

So here is what I mean, practically.

Keep a ledger of the bets, not just the outcomes. Most founders track results. Revenue, users, funding, press. Almost none of us track the moments where we chose the uncertain option when the certain one was right there. I have started doing this in my journal. A line, once a week: "This week I chose X when I could have chosen safe Y." The ledger is longer than I expected. It reads like a rap sheet for someone with a low regard for stability, which I suppose is accurate.

Separate the courage from the result. Sending five hundred cold emails to strangers in 2020 was brave regardless of whether Nestlé replied. The reply was luck layered on effort. The effort was mine either way. If I only credit myself for the ones that worked, I am grading myself on a curve that is mostly random.

Let the "done" pile exist. I built Xena 360 as a managed services offering because clients kept asking for it. I built SearchPanel because the AI search shift was obviously coming and nobody was measuring it. Both exist now. Both have customers. My brain files them as "yes, and?" but the honest ledger says two products, from nothing, by one person, in a city with no existing ecosystem for this. Fine. Noted. Moving on, but noted.

Say it out loud to someone who will not flatter you. For me that is my wife, Sana, who has watched every version of this company from the kitchen table and has never once been impressed by a press release. When I told her about the award she said "good, that's nice," and then asked if I had eaten. This is exactly the right response. It is a person acknowledging the win and refusing to let the win replace lunch.

The thing about no guarantees

I have come to think the absence of guarantees is not a bug in the founder path. It is the whole path. The moment a guarantee shows up, you are no longer founding something. You are managing it. Those are both respectable jobs, but they are not the same job, and the first one is the one nobody hands out medals for because the medals only get made after the outcome is known.

So the credit has to come from somewhere else. It has to come from you, in the moment, while the outcome is still unknown, which is an incredibly uncomfortable time to be proud of yourself. It feels premature. It feels like counting chips you have not won.

But consider the alternative. If you only credit yourself once the result is in, you will spend the vast majority of your founding years feeling like you have done nothing, because the vast majority of founding years are spent before the result is in. That is not humility. That is a rounding error in your own favor that somehow rounds against you.

I did not have a guarantee when I left Delhi. I did not have one when I hit send on the first cold email. I did not have one when I moved to Louisville because an investor was here, or when I stood in a room in Doha explaining Amazon marketplace data to people who had flown farther than I had. I still do not have one now, sitting here on a Saturday, with a product launch in progress and a Slack channel that does not observe weekends.

What I have is a long list of times I chose the door with nothing written on it.

That is the credit.

With love,

Akhil

I want to be careful here, because this is not a bitterness post. Bitterness is a terrible business strategy and an even worse personality. This is more of a field report, written from the inside, by someone who came from Kochi, a coastal city in Kerala that most of my American friends cannot find on a map even when I am pointing directly at it, and who now runs a company from Louisville, Kentucky, a city most of my Indian friends also cannot find on a map, which means I have achieved perfect geographic obscurity on two continents and I am weirdly proud of it.

The Vocabulary Problem

The first thing you learn about privilege in the startup world is that nobody uses the word. There is an entire replacement vocabulary.

"I raised a friends and family round" means my friends and family have money, which, if you think about it for more than four seconds, is the entire ballgame. My friends and family are wonderful people who would give me their last rupee, and I would never take it, because it is their last rupee.

"I took a year off to figure things out" means there was a financial floor under me the whole time, invisible but load-bearing, like the netting under a trapeze artist. I did not take a year off to figure things out. I figured things out on nights and weekends while doing my MBA at Babson, while my visa status hung over every decision like weather, while I ran spreadsheets on how many months of runway existed between me and a very awkward phone call home.

"I failed fast and learned from it" means failure was survivable. This is the big one. This is the one nobody talks about. The single greatest privilege in entrepreneurship is not money, or networks, or a last name that opens doors. It is the ability to fail without the failure being terminal. Some founders fail and it becomes a slide in their next pitch deck. Other founders fail and it becomes a story their entire extended family tells at weddings for the rest of recorded time.

What I Had Instead

Here is what I had when I started: a degree, a work ethic that borders on a medical condition, and an unreasonable belief that if I could just get in the room, I could win the room.

So I got in rooms. Specifically, pitch competition rooms, which are the great underrated equalizer of the startup world, because pitch competitions do not care who your father is.

They care whether you can stand in front of judges and make them believe. Over the years I have won more than $2 million in pitch competitions, which sounds glamorous until you understand what it actually was, which was me, alone, rehearsing the same seven minutes in hotel bathrooms and airport gates and once, memorably, in a parking garage stairwell because the venue had no green room and the stairwell had excellent acoustics.

People ask me why I did so many competitions. The honest answer is that non-dilutive capital was the only capital that would take my calls.

Venture capital, in the early days, has a pattern-matching problem, and I did not match the pattern. I was a solo founder, which VCs treat as a character flaw. I was an immigrant, which meant every plan had an asterisk on it. And I was building for CPG brands on Amazon and Walmart, which is not the kind of thing that gets you invited to the cool parties. So I stopped waiting for permission and started collecting oversized checks, the cardboard kind, which do not fit in overhead bins, a fact I have now confirmed experimentally many times.

Tom and Paul, or, The Privilege I Actually Envy

My first clients ever were two gentlemen named Tom and Paul who run a company called Go2Kits out of Keene, New Hampshire. They took a chance on me when I had, generously, nothing. No case studies, no logos on the website, no website worth mentioning. What I had was a pitch and a promise, and they said yes, and I have thought about that yes more times than they will ever know.

Here is the thing about not being a privileged founder: you remember every single person who bet on you before it was rational to do so, because there weren't that many of them, and each one was a small act of faith you now carry around like a debt you actually enjoy owing. Tom and Paul went from clients to something closer to family. When you start with nothing, your first believers are not line items in a CRM. They are load-bearing people.

I suspect founders who start with warm intros to forty investors do not develop this particular muscle. When yes is abundant, no individual yes means much. That is the one privilege I genuinely do not envy. Scarcity taught me gratitude, and gratitude, it turns out, compounds better than most seed rounds.

The Part Where I Complicate My Own Argument

Now, the twist, because every honest diary entry needs one: I am privileged too.

I had parents who worshipped education. I had an English-medium schooling in a country where that alone reroutes your entire life. I got into Babson, the #1 school in the world for entrepreneurship, and Babson gave me a platform, and platforms are privilege wearing a lanyard. My wife has absorbed the volatility of this life with a grace I have not earned, and my two-year-old daughter thinks I am employed as a person who talks to a laptop, which is technically accurate and spiritually devastating. A supportive family is a privilege so large that founders who have it usually forget to count it.

So the honest version is not "some founders are privileged and some are not." The honest version is that privilege is a stack, and everyone's stack is different, and the founders who annoy me are not the ones with tall stacks. They are the ones who inherited a tall stack and then wrote a Medium post about grit.

Say what you had. That is my entire ask. If your uncle wired the first check, say so. It does not diminish what you built. What diminishes what you built is the pretending, because the pretending sets a fake benchmark for every kid from Kochi, or Keene, or wherever, who is comparing their real, unglamorous starting line to your fictional one and concluding that something is wrong with them.

Nothing is wrong with them. They are just playing the game on a harder difficulty setting, without the tutorial, while the game insists everyone started at the same screen.

Closing Entry

It is late in Louisville as I write this. I now run a $25M startup with over 100 clients like Nestle and Dow.

My daughter is asleep, the house is quiet, and somewhere out there a founder with a trust fund and a founder with a night job are both awake, both anxious, both convinced they are one good quarter away from everything changing. In that specific, sleepless way, we are all the same.

But we did not start the same, and the sooner our industry can say that out loud without flinching, the sooner we can stop wasting all this energy on origin-story theater and spend it on the only question that ever mattered, which is not where you started.

It is whether the people who bet on you early were right.

Tom and Paul were.

I am still working on the rest.

With love, Akhil.

Money existed in our house the way electricity did. It powered everything. Nobody talked about it directly. You just knew not to waste it.

So imagine my confusion when a VC looked at my financials, frowned, and asked why my burn was so low.

He said it like it was a symptom. Like he'd spotted a suspicious shadow on an X-ray. Low burn? In this economy? Sir, are you feeling okay? Have you considered hiring eleven people you don't need and renting an office with a kombucha tap?

I didn't have a good answer in the meeting. I mumbled something about capital efficiency and he nodded the way people nod when they've already decided to pass.

I have a better answer now. It just took me thirty years to put it into words.

The Man Who Interviewed Every Rupee

I grew up in Kochi watching my father treat money like a manager treats employees. Every rupee had a job. Every rupee had a performance review. And no rupee left the house without a clear description of what it was going to do and why.

I never saw him make an impulsive purchase. Not once. Not a chocolate at the billing counter. Not a slightly nicer shirt because it was on sale. Nothing.

The man could stand in a shop, hold an item, feel its full emotional pull, calculate its exact utility, and put it back on the shelf without a flicker of regret. It was like watching a monk resist temptation, except the temptation was a table fan with three speed settings instead of two.

As a kid, I read this all wrong. I thought it meant we didn't have enough. I remember feeling a little embarrassed about it, the way kids do when they compare their house to other houses.

I was completely wrong. We had enough. What we didn't have was waste. Those are different things, and it took me starting a company in a country nine thousand miles away to understand the difference.

The Training Kicks In

When I started Xena from my apartment in Louisville, I didn't consciously decide to run lean. There was no strategy memo. No blog post about "default alive" that changed my life. My father's operating system just booted up on its own, like malware, except the kind that saves your company.

No salary for the first stretch. Every subscription had to justify its existence monthly, like a gladiator pleading with the emperor. Thumbs up, you live another month. Thumbs down, cancelled, and I will manually do whatever you were doing, thank you.

I once spent two full days deciding whether to buy a $30 tool. Two days. I made a comparison document. For a $30 tool. My MBA classmates would have expensed it before the page finished loading. Some of them expensed things that cost more than my monthly rent and called it "team culture."

And look, I know how this sounds. It sounds neurotic. It probably was, a little. But here's the thing nobody tells you about those two days: I understood that tool's value better than anyone who bought it on impulse. When I finally paid for it, I used every last feature like I was extracting juice from a lime that owed me money.

What Low Burn Actually Buys You

Here's what that VC couldn't see on the spreadsheet.

When a client churned, I didn't panic. It hurt, sure. Churn always hurts. But it didn't threaten anything. The lights stayed on. The work continued.

When investors passed, and plenty did, I kept building. Not because I'm especially tough, but because my personal runway wasn't hostage to their decision. A "no" was a data point, not a death sentence.

That's the part that never shows up in pitch decks. Burn isn't just a number. It's the exchange rate between your money and your freedom. High burn means every setback arrives with a countdown clock attached. Low burn means setbacks are just Tuesdays.

The founders I see get crushed are rarely short on talent. Some of the most brilliant people I've met have shut down companies that deserved to live. They weren't short on ideas or effort. They were short on time. And they were short on time because somewhere along the way, their lifestyle started making decisions for them.

The nicer office made the decision. The team hired for optics made the decision. The salary that matched what their classmates were making made the decision. One day they looked up and realized they weren't running the company anymore. The monthly expenses were, and the expenses had opinions.

Frugality Is Not Fear

People hear "frugal" and picture scarcity. A guy eating instant noodles in the dark to save on electricity. That's not it. That was never it.

My father wasn't afraid of money. He was in command of it. There's a world of difference. Fear is when money controls your choices. Sovereignty is when your choices control your money.

Frugality isn't a scarcity mindset. It's a sovereignty mindset. It's the difference between asking "can I afford this" and asking "does this deserve my money." The first question makes you feel poor no matter how much you have. The second makes you feel powerful no matter how little you have.

Every dollar I don't spend is a dollar of patience. Patience to say no to bad deals. Patience to wait for the right customers. Patience to build the thing properly instead of the thing that demos well. In a game where most people lose by running out of time, patience is the whole ballgame.

The Ending He Didn't Write

That VC never invested. He went looking for founders who spent money the way he expected founders to spend money. I hope he found them. I genuinely do. I also hope he checks in on them, because ambition funded by other people's money has a shorter shelf life than ambition funded by discipline.

Meanwhile, I'm still here. Still building. Still occasionally taking two days to evaluate a $30 tool, though I've gotten it down to one day on a good week. Growth.

My father never gave me a lecture about money. Indian fathers don't lecture about money. They just live in a certain way and let you take notes without realizing you're taking notes. Twenty years later, the notes turned out to be a survival manual.

He treated every rupee like it had a job. Now I run a company where every dollar has one too. The VC saw a problem. I see an inheritance.

Some kids get trust funds. I got trust in the fundamentals. I know which one I'd pick again.

I didn't understand how rare mine was until I started collecting other people's stories without meaning to. It happens at the edges of events, after the panels end and the badges come off. Someone orders a second drink, the polish drops, and they tell you the thing they'd never put on LinkedIn.

One founder told me his wife had given him a deadline. Not a supportive "let's check in next quarter" deadline. A real one. If the company didn't hit a number by a certain date, he was getting a job. He was pitching investors by day and rehearsing how to tell his own house he'd failed by night. I watched him present the next morning. Polished. Confident. Nobody in that room knew he was carrying two clocks at once, and that the louder one wasn't ticking for the investors. It was ticking at home.

Another peer, a genuinely brilliant operator, the kind of person you'd back on instinct alone, told me his parents still introduce him at family functions as "between things." He's three years in. He has real customers. And every holiday he walks back into a room where the people who raised him quietly believe he's lost his way. He told me he'd stopped talking about the company at family dinners entirely. Not because nothing was happening, but because every update got met with the same careful, pitying silence, the kind that makes a win feel like something you have to apologize for.

There was a third. We were at a conference hotel bar, the kind of fluorescent late-night conversation that only happens when both people are too tired to perform. He told me his marriage was quietly cracking under the company. Not from fighting. From absence. He'd been so deep in survival mode for so long that he'd become a ghost in his own house, and his wife had stopped expecting him to be present even when he was physically there. "She didn't sign up for this version of me," he said. He wasn't sure the company was worth what it was costing him at home, and he wasn't sure he could stop either. He just sat with that, turning the glass in his hand.

I started seeing the pattern everywhere once I knew to look for it. The quiet dinners where nobody asks how the company is doing, because the answer always lands like bad news and everyone's tired of bracing for the fall. The spouse who keeps the smile up in public and saves the real conversation for the car ride home. The slow erosion that has nothing to do with the market and everything to do with the people you come home to.

I used to think the hardest part of building a company was the company.

It isn't.

The hardest part is doing it while the people closest to you are silently hoping you'll stop.

Here's what I keep coming back to about my own situation, and why I don't take it for granted for a single day.

When I left a stable path to build Xena, I wasn't doing it from a position of comfort. I was a first-generation immigrant in a city where I knew almost no one, building a company over cold email from Louisville, a place that doesn't exactly light up the venture capital map. I had no local network, no safety net of old friends, no warm intros waiting. By every reasonable measure, this was the precise moment for someone who loved me to gently talk me out of it.

Sana didn't.

She never once asked me to walk her through the spreadsheet to justify the risk. She never asked me to prove the dream deserved the gamble. When I'd surface from a 2am session, eyes wrecked, having rewritten the same pitch for the tenth time, the house was calm instead of tense. That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. A tense house at 2am is its own slow poison, and across all those years, I never once had to drink it.

I remember the night before one of the bigger competitions. I'd been spiraling, running worst-case scenarios on a loop, deep in that specific pre-game dread that convinces you you're a fraud who somehow got lucky and is about to be found out in public. Sana didn't give me a speech. She didn't try to argue me out of the spiral or fix my deck. She just made the evening aggressively normal. Dinner, kid, regular noise. Kiara was being a kid, completely oblivious to the stakes, tugging at me to come look at something she'd built, and for twenty minutes I forgot I was supposed to be terrified.

That's the part nobody warns you about. Sometimes the most valuable thing in the world isn't encouragement. It's a daughter who has no idea you might bomb tomorrow and wouldn't care if she did, which turns out to be its own kind of medicine. She wasn't impressed by my pitch. She didn't know what a pitch was. She wanted me to look at her LEGO build, and she wanted my full attention while I did it. And somehow that one demand, look at this thing I made, recalibrated my entire nervous system. The stakes I'd been inflating all evening got cut back down to their real size.

I won that competition. But the version of me that walked on stage the next morning was built the night before, at a dinner table, by people who had no idea they were doing it.

There's another memory I come back to. A stretch where things were genuinely grim. A deal had stalled, old notes were maturing, deadlines were stacking up, and I was in that brutal fog where you honestly cannot tell if you're building something real or just refusing to admit it's already over. I came home heavy that night, the kind of heavy you can't hide. Sana could read it on my face. She didn't ask for the financial breakdown. She didn't need the play-by-play. She just said some version of "okay, so what's the next move," and the company became a problem we were standing in front of together instead of a weight I was carrying alone. That reframe, from my problem to our problem, is worth more than most of the advice I've ever paid for.

People talk about runway like it's only money in a bank account.

There's another kind of runway entirely. It's the emotional cushion that lets you take a real swing without flinching, because you know that if the swing misses, you still land somewhere soft. That cushion never shows up on a cap table. No investor asks about it in diligence. There's no line item for it. But it is quietly the reason some founders can keep getting up after losses that would flatten a person who goes home to a cold room and a colder conversation.

I've lost competitions in front of crowds. I've had deals fall through after I'd already let myself believe. I've had the months where the math doesn't work and the doubt is loud and the obvious, logical, responsible move is to fold the hand and walk away. And every single time, the thing that reset me wasn't a motivational quote or a new productivity system or a better morning routine. It was walking through my own front door and being met by people who were glad I was there, completely regardless of the scoreboard.

Here's what I've come to believe...

Family support isn't a nice-to-have. It's infrastructure.

You can be the most relentless person in any room and still get slowly worn down by a home that treats your dream like a phase you're supposed to grow out of. And you can be a perfectly average operator who outlasts everyone in your cohort for one deeply unglamorous reason. You have people behind you who refuse to let you fold, so you simply stay in the game longer than the ones who were quietly bleeding out at home the whole time.

Because endurance is the entire game. Most companies don't die from one clean fatal blow. They die because the founder ran out of the will to absorb just one more bad week. They die in the gap between "this is hard" and "I can't do this anymore," and that gap is almost always shorter for the founder who's fighting the market and the dinner table at the same time. Support is what refills the tank that the work keeps draining.

So, two things.

If you have that support, name it out loud. Don't let it stay invisible just because it's reliable, because the most dependable support is exactly the kind we stop noticing. Thank the people giving it to you, by name, in specifics. They are carrying weight that never gets counted, never gets equity, never gets a line in the funding announcement. They are co-building the company in every way that matters. They just don't get the title or the carry.

And if you're a founder who doesn't have it, I won't insult you by pretending that's a small thing or that you can just hustle your way past it. It's a real disadvantage, and it is not your fault. But you can build your own version of it. Find the friends, the mentors, the founder group that says "keep going" when your own house goes quiet. Manufacture the cushion if you weren't handed one, because it is that important to whether you make it. Don't try to be the lone hero. That story sells in movies and kills people in real life.

Nobody builds anything alone.

The lucky ones just know exactly who's standing behind them.

And the wise ones never stop saying thank you.

With love and support

Akhil

But the night before launch, I sat at my desk in Louisville at 2 AM rewriting the announcement post for the seventh time. Not because the copy was bad. Because every version felt like it was begging.

You can build the most elegant piece of software in the world. You can stress-test it, validate it, get the buttons exactly the right shade of blue. The hard part starts when you have to walk outside and say "look at this."

I have launched things before. Xenalytics. Xena360. A dozen smaller features that mattered to maybe four people. Each launch, I tell myself this is the one where I won't feel sick beforehand. Each launch, I feel sick anyway.

The first time I cold-emailed a brand from my apartment during the pandemic, I hit send and immediately closed my laptop. Walked out of the room. Couldn't look at the screen for an hour. I had asked for nothing more than a 15-minute call. I knew rationally that the worst possible outcome was silence. My body did not know that.

Five years later, I have closed contracts with Nestlé. I have stood on stages and won over a million dollars in pitch competitions. None of it has cured the thing I felt that first afternoon in my apartment. The fear has just learned to dress better.

When I launched SearchPanel last Tuesday, I refreshed LinkedIn 40 times in the first hour. I told myself I was checking for typos. I was not checking for typos. I was checking to see if anyone, anyone at all, had liked it.

Here is what I have learned, slowly, after five years of doing this on my own.

Building is a private act. You sit in a room. You make decisions. The code does what you tell it. The slide deck does what you tell it. You are in control of the entire universe until the moment you ship.

The moment you ship, you are no longer in control. The work belongs to other people now. They get to decide if it matters. They get to ignore it. They get to misunderstand it. They get to point out the obvious flaw you missed at minute three.

That handoff is the scariest part. Not the labor. The surrender.

I have a theory about why founders procrastinate on launches. We tell ourselves we are polishing. We tell ourselves the timing isn't right. We tell ourselves we need one more feature. What we are really doing is delaying the moment we have to find out if we were wrong.

Every launch is a small confession. You are saying out loud, in front of everyone you respect, that you believed in something enough to spend your nights and weekends and a chunk of your twenties on it. If nobody cares, that belief looks foolish in retrospect. And the worst part is, you said the words. You can't take them back.

I have made peace with this by accepting that it never goes away. Not for me. Maybe not for anyone who builds things alone.

So I ship anyway. I write the post. I refresh the feed. I let the silence be what it is for the first few hours. And then I get up and build the next thing.

Because the alternative is sitting in the room forever, with something I made that nobody will ever see, telling myself I was waiting for the right moment.

The right moment isn't a moment. It's just the next time you decide to be brave.

Onwards!

And I have thought about this a lot over the past few years, especially while building Xena, and I have come to a conclusion that feels both obvious and difficult to fully internalize at the same time, which is that the amount of VC money raised is, in many ways, a vanity metric, one that looks incredibly impressive on the outside and opens doors that would otherwise remain closed, but does not necessarily reflect the depth of value being created underneath.

Because raising money is potential.

Creating value is proof.

And those two things, while related, are very far from being the same.

When I look back at the journey of building Xena, I do feel proud of the capital we have raised, not because it looks good on a slide or because it gives us some sort of external validation, but because it represents belief from people who chose to trust us at different stages of uncertainty, often when there was very little beyond conviction, a few early signals, and a lot of hard work happening quietly behind the scenes.

But if I am being completely honest, the thing that gives me a far deeper sense of pride, the kind that actually stays with you long after the excitement of a funding announcement fades away, is the value we have been able to create for the ecosystem around us, the customers who rely on us, the partners who build alongside us, and the people who have somehow become a part of this journey without any obligation to do so.

I still remember the early days very clearly, when Xena was not even close to what it is today, when there was no structured product, no polished narrative, and definitely no credibility to lean on, just a belief that e-commerce brands were operating in a world that was far more complex than it needed to be, and that there had to be a better way to give them clarity.

I remember sitting in small cafes around Boston during my time at Babson College, reaching out to local businesses in Wellesley, trying to convince them to let me manage their Amazon listings, often getting ignored, sometimes getting polite rejections, and occasionally getting a meeting that would either go nowhere or turn into a small opportunity that I would hold onto like it was the most important deal in the world.

There was one particular instance that has stayed with me, where I had spent days preparing for a conversation with a small business owner, going through their listings, identifying issues, thinking through how I would present the value, and when I finally got on the call, I realized halfway through that they were not even remotely convinced that Amazon was worth their time, let alone that I could help them succeed on it, and I remember finishing that call feeling like I had completely failed to communicate something that I deeply believed in.

At that point, there was no funding, no safety net, no guarantee that any of this would work out, just a growing list of attempts, some small wins, and a lot of learning happening in real time.

And yet, even in those moments, people showed up.

I remember one of our early customers who took a chance on us when we had very little to show, no fancy dashboards, no automated systems, just a willingness to work harder than anyone else to make things work, and I remember how seriously I took that responsibility, because when someone trusts you at that stage, it is not just a business decision, it is a personal bet.

That customer is still with us.

And that means more to me than any number on a funding announcement ever could.

As Xena started growing, as we began working with larger brands, as we built out more structured systems and started seeing real traction, there were moments that felt like validation, but even then, the journey never felt linear or easy.

I remember working with brands where we had to deal with listing suppressions, fake reviews, hijackers, things that most people outside of e-commerce never even think about, and spending hours, sometimes days, just trying to fix issues that should not have existed in the first place, and yet knowing that solving those problems was exactly what our customers needed from us.

I remember moments where we would push changes to listings or ad strategies and see nothing happen immediately, and having to stay patient while continuing to iterate, trusting that the underlying logic would eventually translate into results.

And then I remember the moments when it finally did.

When a product that was struggling suddenly started gaining traction. When a brand that felt lost started understanding their data in a completely new way. When a founder told me that for the first time, they felt like they were not guessing anymore.

Because as a recent immigrant and a first time founder, I did not come into this with a built in network, I did not have a long list of investors I could call, I did not have a predefined path that I was following, I was figuring things out step by step, often learning things the hard way, and constantly questioning whether I was making the right decisions.

And yet, despite all of that uncertainty, people believed.

Not always because everything was perfect or fully figured out, but because they saw something worth supporting.

I have had mentors spend hours with me, breaking down ideas, challenging my assumptions, and helping me think more clearly.

I have had investors take meetings with me when I had very little beyond conviction and a story that was still evolving.

I have had team members join at stages where stability was not guaranteed, choosing to be a part of something that was still being built.

I have had friends and well wishers reach out at the exact moments when I needed it the most, often without even knowing how much it mattered.

And I do not take any of that lightly.

Because that kind of support is not transactional.

It is not driven by immediate upside.

It is given because people choose to believe.

And when you are a recent immigrant trying to build something from scratch in a new country, that belief carries a weight that is hard to fully put into words.

There is a certain loneliness that comes with building something in an environment where you are still finding your footing, where you are learning not just how to build a company, but how to navigate an entirely new system, and in those moments, the kindness and support of others becomes something you hold onto very tightly.

So yes, while I understand why VC money is celebrated, and while I am grateful for the belief that investors have shown in us, I find myself caring far more about a different set of things.

I care about the brands that trust us with their growth.

I care about the people who have chosen to be a part of this journey.

I care about the ecosystem that continues to grow around Xena, one relationship at a time.

I care about the value we create when no one is watching.

Because at the end of the day, long after the numbers change, the rounds get announced, and the attention shifts elsewhere, what actually remains is the impact you have had on people.

And when I think about that, when I think about the customers, the team, the mentors, the partners, the friends, and everyone who has played even a small role in this journey, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude.

Not because everything has been easy.

But because none of it had to happen the way it did.

And yet, somehow, it did.

And that, more than anything else, is what I am truly proud of.

To infinity and beyond

Akhil

Because when you really think about it, this is the same recognition that has been given to people like Muhammad Ali, Walt Disney, Bill Clinton, and Elvis Presley, individuals who did not just build successful careers, but shaped culture, challenged what was possible, and left behind something that outlived them.

And somewhere in that list now sits a name from Edappally, Kochi.

Mine.

Even writing that feels strange.

The Distance Between Where You Start and Where You End Up

I grew up in Kochi, in a place where life had a certain rhythm to it, where expectations were clear, paths were somewhat defined, and success looked like something that followed a predictable trajectory if you did the right things consistently over time.

Edappally was home in every sense of the word, filled with familiarity, comfort, and a sense of belonging that you do not question when you are living inside it, but only truly understand once you step away from it.

Because no one really prepares you for what it feels like to leave everything you know behind and step into a world where nothing feels intuitive anymore.

No one tells you that you will one day be building something thousands of miles away from home, in a country where the systems are different, the people are different, and the rules of the game are not always obvious.

And yet, somewhere along the way, that distant possibility becomes your reality.

Starting With Nothing Except a Belief That Refused to Go Away

When I started Xena, there was no version of the story where things were easy or predictable, and there certainly was no safety net waiting underneath in case things did not work out.

I did not have deep pockets that could buy time. I did not have a powerful network that could open doors instantly. I did not have a polished roadmap that guaranteed success if I just followed it step by step.

What I did have was conviction.

A very stubborn, almost unreasonable level of belief that something in the e-commerce world was fundamentally broken, and that it did not have to stay that way.

I had seen too many founders doing everything right on the surface, working hard, spending money, trying different strategies, and still feeling like they were flying blind, making decisions without clarity, and hoping something would eventually click.

That never sat right with me.

Because I knew that with the right systems, the right data, and the right level of execution, growth did not have to feel like guesswork.

I knew we could build something that gave founders clarity, direction, and actual control over their growth, using AI and data in a way that was practical and actionable, not just theoretical.

But knowing something in your head and building it in the real world are two completely different things.

The Reality of Building as an Immigrant

Building a company is already one of the hardest things you can choose to do.

Building a company as an immigrant adds an entirely new layer of complexity that people do not always talk about openly.

You are not just building a business, you are also learning how to exist and operate in a completely new system at the same time.

Every form feels confusing the first time you see it. Every process takes longer than it should. Every mistake feels heavier because you know you do not have infinite chances to get it right.

You do not start with the same network. You do not start with the same familiarity. You do not start with the same level of comfort.

And yet, there is this quiet understanding that you have already come too far to turn back, so stopping is not even a real option.

So you keep going.

The Part of the Journey No One Sees

There is always a polished version of a founder story that gets shared publicly, the version that highlights the wins, the milestones, the recognition, and the outcomes that make everything look like it followed a logical path.

Then there is the real version.

The version where things break more often than they work. The version where you question your decisions, your direction, and sometimes even yourself. The version where progress feels painfully slow, and you wonder if you are just forcing something that is not meant to happen.

Xena was not built in moments where everything felt clear and certain.

It was built in moments where nothing made sense, but stopping still did not feel like an option.

It was built in long nights where the only thing pushing you forward was a belief that things could eventually work out if you just stayed in the game long enough.

It was built in early mornings where you had to reset mentally and start again, even when the previous day did not give you much to build on.

And over time, without any single dramatic turning point, something started to come together.

When People Start Believing Before There Is Proof

In the early stages, you are the only one who fully believes in what you are building, and that can feel incredibly isolating at times.

But then, slowly, that starts to change.

A customer decides to trust you, even when you do not have a long track record. An investor backs you, even when the numbers are still small. A team member joins you, choosing uncertainty over stability because they see something in the vision.

Those moments are not just milestones, they are validations of belief.

Because they are not based on what you have already proven.

They are based on what you could become.

And to every investor, advisor, customer, and friend who backed me when Xena was still just an idea taking shape, I carry that with me every single day.

You saw something when it was not obvious.

And that means more than any metric ever could.

This Was Never Me Alone

When I received the Kentucky Colonel recognition, it did not feel like a personal achievement in the way people usually describe awards.

It felt like a reflection of everything and everyone that made this journey possible.

To my team at Xena, this belongs to you just as much as it belongs to me, because you were there in the moments when things were uncertain, when progress was slow, and when belief was the only thing we had.

You built this with me, consistently, patiently, and relentlessly, through every sprint, every challenge, and every late night that did not show up in any highlight reel.

To my family, thank you for standing by me even when this path did not make complete sense from the outside, and even when the outcomes were not always predictable or immediate.

That kind of support is something you do not fully understand until you need it.

What This Moment Actually Means

This recognition is not about a title or a certificate sitting somewhere on a wall.

It is a reminder of how far a single idea can travel when you stay committed to it long enough.

From a neighborhood in Kochi to a stage in Kentucky.

From a thought that only existed in your head to something that impacts real people and real businesses.

From being unknown to being acknowledged, not because everything went perfectly, but because you kept moving forward even when things did not.

For Every Immigrant Founder Trying to Figure It Out

This moment is not just mine.

It belongs to every immigrant founder who is trying to build something meaningful in an environment that does not feel familiar yet.

To the ones navigating systems they are still learning. To the ones building with limited resources. To the ones who have been told they are too early, too different, or too naive.

There is nothing wrong with feeling that way.

It is part of the process.

And more importantly, it does not define how far you can go.

Just Gratitude

To the Commonwealth of Kentucky, thank you for recognizing a journey that started thousands of miles away, and for seeing something in a young founder from Kerala trying to build something meaningful here.

That means more than I can put into words.

The Journey Is Far From Over

This does not feel like the end of anything.

If anything, it feels like a small checkpoint in a much longer journey that is still unfolding.

Because recognition does not build companies.

Execution does.

And there is still so much left to build, so much left to figure out, and so much left to earn.

But today, I am allowing myself to pause for a moment.

To look back.

To take it in.

And to feel grateful.

For the journey. For the people. For the belief that made all of this possible.

From Kochi to Kentucky.

And we are still just getting started.

-

To infinity and beyond.

Akhil

I think most people are wired like me.

Most people want to work hard toward something they genuinely care about. They want to pour their energy into building something meaningful. They take pride in craftsmanship, consistency, and progress that compounds quietly over time. They are modest by default. They do not enjoy bragging. They are often a little introverted, even if they can show up confidently when needed. They want a balanced and fulfilling life where work matters but does not consume everything. Above all, they want to be respected for the quality of their work and for the type of person they are.

That feels like a reasonable aspiration.

And yet, modern entrepreneurship pushes us in the opposite direction.

If you are building a company today, especially a startup, silence is punished. Quiet competence does not travel far. Great work done invisibly might as well not exist. The market does not reward restraint. It rewards visibility.

So we are forced into a paradox.

To grow, we must talk about our work. To attract clients, we must explain our value publicly. To build a network, we must show up repeatedly and consistently. To create community, we must be seen.

If we do not do these things, growth slows. Opportunities pass us by. People who would genuinely benefit from what we are building never find us. The silence becomes costly.

And so we speak up.

We post about what we are working on. We share milestones. We talk about lessons learned. We sometimes talk about wins.

Because if we do not, who will?

There is no invisible system broadcasting your progress. There is no automatic announcement that goes out when you cross an important milestone. There is no neutral narrator telling the world that your team is doing meaningful work.

There is only what you choose to share.

This is where it gets uncomfortable for me.

If I never publicly talk about how Xena is doing, how would anyone know? If I never mention that we crossed a million in revenue, that we work with more than 50 brands, that customers consistently find real value in what we have built, what signal does the market receive?

Silence does not communicate humility. It communicates absence.

And yet, sharing those things puts me in an awkward internal space.

Every time I write a post about growth or traction, there is a voice in my head questioning it. A voice that wonders if this sounds like bragging. A voice that says this feels slightly cringe, at least internally. A voice that reminds me this is not how I would naturally talk in a private conversation.

It feels out of character.

I did not get into building companies because I wanted attention. I did not start this journey to perform success. I care deeply about the work itself. I care about customers. I care about building something durable, honest, and useful.

But the reality is that intent does not matter if impact never reaches the people it is meant to serve.

This creates a constant balancing act.

On one side is authenticity. On the other side is visibility.

On one side is staying true to who I am. On the other side is doing what is necessary for the company to grow.

Reconciling those two things is harder than most people admit.

There is a quiet guilt that comes with posting wins. Even when the goal is clarity or context, it can feel self promotional. There is also a quiet resentment toward the idea that good work alone should be enough, even though experience proves it is not.

I suspect many founders feel this exact same tension.

Quiet builders living in a loud world. People who would rather let the work speak, while knowing the work cannot speak unless you give it a microphone. People who value substance but are forced to learn distribution.

Over time, I have started to realize that visibility does not have to mean arrogance. Sharing progress does not automatically mean you are seeking validation. Talking about your work can be an act of responsibility, especially when others rely on the company you are building.

Your team deserves momentum. Your customers deserve clarity. Your future partners deserve context.

Staying silent helps no one.

That does not mean the discomfort goes away.

I am still figuring out how to talk about wins without losing myself in the process. How to be visible without becoming performative. How to communicate progress without turning it into noise. How to share enough so the right people find us, without oversharing in a way that feels misaligned.

There is no perfect formula. There is only ongoing calibration.

Some days it feels natural. Some days it feels forced. Some days I hit publish and immediately want to close the app. Other days I am reminded that a single post led to a meaningful conversation, a new client, or someone reaching out saying they felt less alone.

Those moments matter.

For now, I am choosing to see sharing as part of the work. Not ego driven. Not attention seeking. Just a necessary extension of building something in public.

If you feel this tension too, you are not broken. You are not alone. You are probably just a thoughtful person trying to build something real in an environment that rewards volume over depth.

I do not have a clean answer yet.

But I am learning that staying quiet does not protect authenticity. It often just hides it.

And maybe the goal is not to eliminate the discomfort, but to move forward with it, honestly, imperfectly, and in a way that still feels like you.

Keep at it founders!

Akhil

I have learned that this season is not dramatic. It does not arrive with chaos or explosions. It arrives quietly. It shows up as slow weeks, muted Slack notifications, polite investor passes, and dashboards that refuse to move. It is exhausting because there is no single fire to put out. You are doing the work. You are showing up. You are trying to improve. The results simply refuse to cooperate.

What makes this phase dangerous is not the lack of progress. It is the stories you start telling yourself. You begin to wonder if you misread the market. You question whether you are cut out for this. You replay past decisions with the benefit of hindsight and punish yourself for choices that felt reasonable at the time. Doubt becomes background noise, constant and draining.

The hardest part is that this season does not care how smart you are. It does not care how hard you work. It does not care how badly you want it. Everyone who builds something meaningful runs into this wall. The difference between founders who eventually break through and those who quietly disappear often comes down to a single unglamorous skill. The ability to keep going when there is no external validation.

There were moments where I expected effort to translate into momentum, and it simply did not. I assumed one more feature, one more customer call, one more pitch deck revision would unlock the next chapter. Instead, progress came in inches. Sometimes it came in lessons rather than wins. Sometimes it came disguised as rejection. Those were the moments that forced me to realize that startups are not sprinting competitions. They are endurance tests.

You start to understand that consistency matters more than motivation. Motivation is fleeting. It responds to good weeks and disappears during quiet ones. Consistency is what carries you through when enthusiasm runs dry. Showing up every day, even when the outcome feels uncertain, compounds in ways that are impossible to see in real time.

There is also a quiet discipline that develops in this phase. You stop chasing every shiny idea. You focus on fundamentals. You talk to customers more. You simplify messaging. You cut distractions. You learn to separate activity from progress. This is where founders are forged, away from the spotlight, refining instincts and sharpening judgment.

One uncomfortable truth is that no one is coming to rescue your startup. There is no perfect moment when confidence magically returns and everything clicks at once. The work stays the same. The uncertainty stays the same. What changes is your relationship with it. You become more tolerant of ambiguity. You stop needing constant reassurance. You learn to operate while unsure.

I have found that staying in the game increases the odds in ways that are difficult to quantify. Every extra month you survive teaches you something you did not know before. Every customer conversation adds texture to your understanding. Every mistake removes an illusion. Momentum often arrives after a long period of invisibility. From the outside it looks sudden. From the inside it feels overdue.

This is also the phase where ego slowly fades. You care less about being right and more about being effective. You stop trying to sound impressive and start trying to be useful. That shift alone can unlock progress. Markets reward clarity and persistence far more than cleverness.

The founders who make it are rarely the loudest or the most confident early on. They are the ones who stayed when it would have been reasonable to quit. They are the ones who kept building when traction was unclear. They are the ones who treated slow periods as part of the process rather than proof of failure.

If you are in that season right now, where effort feels disconnected from outcomes, know this. You are not broken. Your startup is not uniquely cursed. This is the work. Keep talking to customers. Keep refining the product. Keep learning from small signals. Keep going even when progress feels invisible.

One day you will look back and realize that this was the stretch that taught you how to endure. And endurance, more than talent or timing, is what keeps a startup alive long enough to succeed.

Keep going

Akhil