Around 1998, a few friends and I had just finished high school and were trying to figure out what came next.
One idea was simple.
Every evening, collect vegetable orders from households in our neighbourhood. Wake up before dawn, go to the market when fresh produce arrived from farms, sort the orders, and deliver before 6am.
My friends weren't willing to wake up that early.
The idea disappeared.
Years later, when grocery delivery became common and mainstream, I felt the familiar sting of the question every entrepreneur eventually asks themselves: what if we had tried?
A few years after that, I watched my parents spend enormous amounts of time and energy helping friends and relatives coordinate weddings — venues, invitations, shopping, catering, photography, transportation. I thought: what if someone just did all of this? One team, one point of contact, from the day two families agreed to a match until the last guest left.
Nobody around me believed it would work.
And the script was clear: degree, job, stability.
I followed it.
In 2020, I tried again.
A logistics platform for LCL and LTL shipments — helping smaller shippers move cargo without paying for a full container.
I spoke to freight forwarders. Some didn't respond. Some dismissed it.
We eventually participated in the ZeBOX innovation challenge. The feedback was specific and honest: the problem wasn't the technology. It was convincing multiple stakeholders to participate in a system that only worked if everyone showed up.
At the time I read that as criticism.
Looking back, it was the most precise description of why the idea was hard.
Technology is often the easy part.
Getting people to participate in a system is much harder.
In 2021, my cousin and I started a small catering business — home-cooked food, delivered to apartments in Chennai and later Bengaluru.
This one actually worked.
Not dramatically. Around ₹30,000 a month in recurring revenue, rising during festivals.
But for the first time I experienced something the other ideas never gave me: customers who came back. Not because of the idea. Because the food was good and it arrived on time.
Value delivered directly. No platform required. No stakeholders to align.
For a long time I looked back at these four attempts and told myself a simple story: I had good ideas. I was too early, too cautious, too busy building a career to pursue them properly. I missed the window.
That story felt true. It also wasn't particularly useful.
The more honest pattern only became visible much later, while I was working on a new venture called Aikiyam.
As we spent time understanding why hiring so often breaks down, I found myself returning to the same question again and again: what prevents people from making confident decisions when the stakes are high?
That's when I realised the vegetable idea, the wedding planner, and the logistics platform all shared the same structural challenge: they required multiple parties to trust and coordinate before the system delivered value. That creates a much harder starting point because you need adoption from several sides before anyone experiences the full benefit.
The catering business worked because it didn't have that problem. My cousin and I delivered the value directly. One customer, one meal, one relationship at a time.
I wasn't chasing different businesses across 25 years.
I was repeatedly drawn to the same class of problem — how do people make decisions when they don't have enough information to trust what's in front of them? — and repeatedly learning which version of that problem I could actually solve, and which required resources and timing I didn't have.
Aikiyam is a hiring intelligence company. We help engineering teams build evidence-backed signal on candidates before interviews begin.
Underneath that, it's the same problem I've been circling for 25 years: a trust and information gap between two parties who need to make a decision together.
The difference this time is that I'm not trying to build the marketplace first.
I'm starting with the direct service — delivering a Signal Profile for one company, one hire at a time — and letting the infrastructure emerge from real outcomes. The way the catering business worked before it could ever have been a platform.
The ideas I didn't pursue eventually appeared in different forms, built by people who had the timing, resources, conviction, or circumstances that I didn't.
I used to think that meant I missed opportunities.
Now I think it means I was in early training for a problem I wasn't ready to solve yet.
Aikiyam isn't the first startup idea I've had.
It's the first one built on everything the previous ones taught me — chief among them, that a good idea means nothing if you can't deliver value to a customer.