The Businesses Nobody Asks About
Before the audits and the kitchens, there was an ice brand, a newspaper, a tile factory and a hardware trading desk. None of them made it onto a résumé until now.
The clean version of my career goes: audit, restaurants, cloud kitchens, capital, now AI. Linear, sensible, a straight line you could draw on a slide. It’s also missing about half of what actually happened.
Praxis Technologies traded computer hardware between the UAE and India — cabinets, mice, keyboards, the unglamorous plumbing of every office that existed before laptops got cheap. It was the first business I ever ran, and the first place I learned that margin is not a detail, it’s the whole game. You can move a lot of boxes and still lose money if you don’t understand your own costs. I understood mine because I had no choice.
Perfect Ice was my father’s before it was mine. A D2C ice brand with home delivery — production, cold-chain, last-mile, all under one roof. I revived it rather than founded it, which is its own kind of lesson: inheriting a business teaches you things that starting one from scratch doesn’t, mostly about which parts of an operation were actually load-bearing and which just looked that way. Demand spiked on the two hottest days of the year and disappeared the rest. You learn to respect a business with a brutal seasonality curve.
Delhi on the Go was a free daily newspaper for metro commuters. Content, print, distribution — and a business model that lived entirely on advertising, which means you learn very quickly whether anyone actually wants what you’re printing, because there’s no subscription cushion to hide behind.
Marblex India manufactured concrete pavers, including for the Commonwealth Games. Heavy industry, machinery, a completely different rhythm from anything else I’ve done — no software, no brand, just physical output you can drop on your foot.
None of these are on a pitch deck anywhere. They didn’t lead to funding rounds or acquisitions. What they gave me instead was range: I’ve now sat inside a trading desk, a food brand, a media business and a factory, and the thing that’s true across all four is the thing I keep coming back to on this site — the businesses that work are the ones where somebody understood the actual mechanics, not the story. Everything after this — the audits, the restaurants, the kitchens, ClarityHQ — was built on instincts these four gave me first.