I Spent Nearly 20 Years in Corporate Technology. Then I Decided to Build Something of My Own.

Some journeys begin with a business idea. Mine began much earlier, watching my father build businesses, my elder brother expand one, and eventually discovering that I wanted to build something of my own. The first entrepreneur I ever knew My father was a street vendor. He started as a salesman on the streets, gradually moved into a small shop, and eventually established a wholesale business. He built it step by step, through hard work, relationships, trust, and an uncompromising commitment to his name and reputation. He did not have the advantages that many entrepreneurs have today. There were no sophisticated business plans, technology platforms, investor networks, or startup ecosystems to rely on. There was determination, an understanding of customers, and the willingness to keep going. But what I remember most is not simply how he built the business. It is how he treated the people who worked with him. Business was never just about the numbers. He valued his employees and the people around him. Even when things were difficult, he did not see people as disposable resources. And his entrepreneurial journey did not stop with wholesale. Building again, even after 60 After establishing the wholesale business, my father decided to take another major risk: entering the hotel industry. At an age when many people would naturally prefer stability, he chose to step into a different business, learn a new industry, and start building again. He began with one hotel. Today, he is focused on expanding that business, moving from one hotel to another. I genuinely admire that instinct. It takes courage to build something from scratch. It takes a different kind of courage to do it again after you have already spent years building another business, particularly when you are over 60. His journey has never been free of pressure. There have been periods when revenue was uncertain, expected outcomes did not materialize, and cash flow was challenging. Running multiple businesses brings its own responsibilities and uncertainties. Yet, even during those difficult periods, he did not simply push employees out because the numbers were not working as expected. That has stayed with me. He taught me, without necessarily putting it into words, that business is not only about what you build. It is also about the people who stand alongside you while you build it. My elder brother's journey: taking responsibility and expanding the business My elder brother chose a different path from us. After completing his Bachelor's in Commerce, he took responsibility for carrying forward the family business. But he did much more than simply continue what had already been built. He expanded it tremendously, taking it from a relatively small wholesale operation in one city to a much wider wholesale network across the region in India. That growth came through his own effort, commitment, and business decisions. He took responsibility and worked to build the business to a completely different scale. The business continues to do very well, and we are immensely proud of what he has accomplished. His journey is another important lesson for me: taking something that already exists and growing it substantially requires its own entrepreneurial instinct, hard work, and determination. My other sibling and I were given a different opportunity. We were encouraged to pursue higher education, follow our interests, and build professional careers. So, while my elder brother carried forward and expanded the family business, we chose the education and corporate career route. I studied, graduated, pursued postgraduate education, and eventually completed an Executive MBA. At that stage of my life, business looked like a difficult and uncertain path. I remember thinking that I would rather build a professional career than go through the struggles of running a business. Life, as it often does, had a different plan. Nearly 20 years in corporate life For almost 20 years, I was part of the Oracle family. It was an important chapter of my professional life. I had the opportunity to work with enterprise customers, technology teams, sales organizations, and business leaders across different markets. My experience covered cloud architecture, data platforms, enterprise solutions, customer engagements, solution engineering, and technology transformation. I learned how large organizations operate, how technology decisions influence business outcomes, and how to translate complex technical challenges into practical solutions. I also had the opportunity to work with talented people and develop relationships that I continue to value. Corporate life gave me a strong foundation. It taught me discipline, structure, customer engagement, execution, and the importance of understanding business requirements before proposing technology. But over time, I started feeling that something was missing. I had spent years helping organizations design, build, and transform their technology environments. I understood the enterprise technology landscape, and I had accumulated experience across different areas. Yet, I increasingly felt the urge to create something of my own. There were the usual professional challenges, organizational expectations, changing priorities, and the realities of working in a large corporate environment. Eventually, restructuring and a reduction in force brought that chapter to an end for me, along with many other colleagues. It was not a performance-related departure. It was an organizational decision. I could have simply focused on finding another corporate role, and I did consider that path. But something had changed. I started asking myself a different question: What if I used everything I had learned over the years to build something that solves real problems for others? Perhaps my father's business instinct had never really left me. The first step: building AlgoRaider My first serious step into entrepreneurship was AlgoRaider. Website: https://algoraider.online The idea came from a problem I understood through my own exposure to financial markets, trading strategies, and technology. Building an algorithmic trading strategy is not always straightforward. Traders may understand the strategy they want to execute, but translating that idea into structured logic, testing it, analyzing risk, and connecting it to a broker can become complicated. I wanted to make that process more accessible. AlgoRaider is an AI-assisted algorithmic trading strategy platform designed to help users move from natural-language strategy ideas to structured trading logic. The platform brings together capabilities such as: Creating strategies using natural language. Translating trading ideas into structured strategy logic. Backtesting and analyzing strategy performance. Understanding potential payoff and risk. Connecting with supported brokers for deployment and execution. What began as an idea gradually turned into a technology platform. There were many things to figure out: product architecture, AI integration, strategy generation, broker APIs, execution workflows, data, testing, and the overall user experience. One of the more challenging parts was broker integration. Different brokers have different APIs, authentication methods, execution models, and technical requirements. Over time, we expanded our integration efforts to more than 20 brokers. We also started exploring opportunities beyond traditional markets, including crypto algorithmic trading. There is still a lot to build, improve, and validate. I do not see AlgoRaider as a finished product. It is an evolving platform shaped by real-world requirements, experimentation, and user feedback. But the most important thing for me was that I had moved from thinking about building something to actually building it. An unexpected problem led to CloudSlasher While developing AlgoRaider, another problem started becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Infrastructure costs. As the platform evolved, its infrastructure footprint expanded across cloud providers. Different services, compute resources, databases, environments, and workloads were distributed across cloud platforms. I was working with a limited budget. I needed to control infrastructure spending without compromising product functionality, performance, or the experience I wanted to deliver. I started looking more closely at where the money was going. Which resources were being underutilized? Which services were consuming more than expected? Where was infrastructure unnecessarily provisioned? What could be optimized without introducing operational risks? The more I investigated, the more I realized how difficult it can be to get a meaningful picture of infrastructure costs across multiple cloud environments. That led to another question: If I am finding this difficult while having years of cloud architecture experience, how difficult must it be for smaller engineering teams and organizations without dedicated FinOps resources? That was the beginning of CloudSlasher. Website: https://cloudslasher.com CloudSlasher is a multi-cloud cost optimization and FinOps platform. The idea is to help organizations understand their cloud infrastructure, identify waste and underutilization, evaluate optimization opportunities, and move toward practical remediation. It is designed to work across major cloud environments, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes. One thing I noticed while exploring the cloud cost optimization landscape was that many tools are good at presenting dashboards, highlighting spending patterns, and recommending potential savings. But identifying a problem and actually addressing it are two different things. An engineering team may receive a recommendation to resize a resource, change an infrastructure configuration, or eliminate unnecessary capacity. But someone still needs to assess the impact, validate the proposed change, and implement it safely. I wanted to address that gap. CloudSlasher is being developed around a workflow that goes beyond simply showing cost recommendations: Discover and analyze infrastructure across cloud environments. Identify potential cost leaks, waste, and underutilized resources. Explore optimization scenarios through what-if analysis. Generate infrastructure remediation plans using Terraform and OpenTofu. Support GitOps-based workflows through pull requests that teams can review and approve. The objective is not to make infrastructure changes blindly. It is to help teams understand the opportunity, evaluate the proposed changes, and retain control over implementation. My background in cloud architecture, enterprise infrastructure, and customer-facing solution engineering has helped shape how I approach this problem. I have spent years working with enterprise cloud environments. I understand that optimization cannot be considered in isolation. Cost matters, but so do availability, security, performance, governance, and operational stability. A cheaper infrastructure configuration is not necessarily a better one if it compromises the business. CloudSlasher is an attempt to bring those considerations together. And once again, the idea started with a problem I was trying to solve for myself. The business I want to build is also about people As I work on these platforms, I often find myself thinking about my father. I have watched him build businesses under pressure. I have seen him take risks, enter new industries, and continue expanding even at an age when many people might choose to slow down. I have also seen my elder brother take responsibility for the family business and expand it through his own efforts. These experiences have shaped my understanding of entrepreneurship. I believe businesses must be sustainable. Revenue matters. Profitability matters. Cash flow matters. Without financial discipline, even a good business idea cannot survive for long. But I also believe that people should never become just numbers on a spreadsheet. Employees have families, financial responsibilities, ambitions, and lives outside the workplace. They contribute their time, experience, and effort to building something. I want to create an environment where people feel that their contribution matters. If someone has helped build the company and wants to continue being part of that journey, I would want to stand by them for as long as we can make that work. There will always be difficult business decisions. Entrepreneurship is not easy, and good intentions alone do not guarantee success. But I do not want to build a business where people are treated as disposable simply because a spreadsheet looks better that way. That is a value I have carried from watching my father. Still building, still learning I am not writing this as someone who has reached the destination. Both AlgoRaider and CloudSlasher are ongoing journeys. There are products to improve, customers to understand, feedback to incorporate, technical challenges to solve, and markets to explore. There are days when things move forward and days when they do not. There are decisions that work and decisions that need to be revisited. That is the reality of building something. I am also learning that entrepreneurship is very different from working within an established organization. You are responsible for the idea, the product, the technology, the customer, the finances, and the decisions that connect them all. There is no established structure to fall back on every time something goes wrong. But there is also something incredibly rewarding about taking a problem, working through it, and seeing an idea gradually become something real. I may not have inherited my father's business, and I have enormous respect for what my father and elder brother have built. But perhaps I inherited something else. I inherited my father's instinct to build, his willingness to take risks, and his belief that the people who help build a business matter. My journey is different. The industry is different. The technology is different. But the values I want to carry forward are familiar. Build something meaningful. Solve real problems. Create value for others. Grow sustainably. Respect the people who build it with you. And never compromise the reputation you work so hard to establish. Build the business. Respect the people. Protect the reputation. Never lose sight of why you started. A little about my background My journey has been shaped by both education and experience. I hold a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Mathematics, which I completed as a scholarship holder, a Master's in Computer Applications (MCA), and an Executive MBA from SP Jain School of Global Management, Dubai. Over the years, I've combined this academic foundation with nearly 20 years of experience in enterprise technology, cloud architecture, data platforms, and solution engineering. Today, I'm applying that experience to building technology products of my own. I'm sharing this journey to connect with people who are building, experimenting, and solving real-world problems through technology. I'm always happy to exchange ideas, hear different perspectives, and connect with fellow builders, developers, and entrepreneurs. If you'd like to connect or share your thoughts, feel free to reach out. Email: info@algotheta.com Website: https://algotheta.com AlgoRaider: https://algoraider.online CloudSlasher: https://cloudslasher.com