The Person Who Saw Me Hustling

When I started working on Wouch in March 2025, I was working alone.

The team that exists today did not exist then. The platform was a notebook, a research document, a series of long mornings at a desk in New Delhi trying to articulate what I knew needed to be built without yet knowing how to build it.

The first person who joined me was not a co-founder, not an engineer, not a designer. He was the person who had been my service delivery leader when I started my corporate journey in 2008. We had worked together for some years; he had become a friend over the long arc that follows the working relationship. He had since left and was based in San Francisco. He was the first person I called about Wouch.

I want to write about the specific thing he did, because it was specific.

For approximately eight months, from March through October of 2025, I worked on Wouch at a pace that, in retrospect, was not sustainable. I was working sixteen to seventeen hours a day, seven days a week, with no breaks. The days had a rhythm I held tightly: I would get up twice during a working day for short walks, for breakfast and for dinner. The rest of the time I was at the desk. There were no weekends. There were no holidays. There were no afternoons off.

I was building Wouch because I needed to build Wouch. I was also building Wouch because I needed to be building something, in a way that was about more than what I was building. The pace I was working at was, in part, the pace of a person who could not afford to slow down.

He saw this. He did not, at any point in those eight months, tell me to slow down. He did not lecture. He did not coach. He did not perform the role of the wise advisor who knows better. What he did was three specific things.

He showed up on calls and asked specific questions about Wouch—the engine, the safety architecture, the matching logic, the decisions I was making. He treated the work as work, not as a coping mechanism. He held the work to a high standard. He did not let me publish anything underbaked.

He also, separately, called me at irregular intervals, not on a schedule, and asked how I was actually doing. Not 'how is the work going'—how I was doing. He listened without trying to fix. He did not turn the calls into therapy. He just asked.

And he stayed. Over those eight months, through the periods when I was the most difficult to be around, through the periods when the platform was not yet what it would become, through the periods when I was unclear whether what I was building was real—he stayed.

I do not know what Wouch would have become without him. I know what it has become with him. The substrate of the platform includes his attention. Not as a feature; as a fact.

I am writing this piece because the substrate of a platform like Wouch is built partly out of the relationships the founder has during the building. The Refusal Register, the Decision Log, the careful posture toward users, these are downstream of having had someone in my life who modeled what it looks like to be present, to hold standards, and to stay.

He knows who he is. This piece is partly to him.