A talk I have been living for thirty years

Some talks you write in a few weeks. This one, I have been living for thirty years.

On 28 August, I will be speaking at TEDx Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai.

I am not sharing the title here. That stays for the room. But if you remember Easytools, you already have half the hint. The other half is AI.

There is something fitting about going back to an engineering campus for this. My own years in electronics and communication engineering, some 400 kilometres away in Chennai, are where most of what I will talk about actually began. Not in a classroom, but in the freelance projects I took on for local clients while still a student, writing software for people who needed something to work, not something to impress.

Long before any of that, there was a publishing house. My grandfather started it in 1929, and my father ran it for over fifty years. I grew up around the hum of printing presses and a very specific kind of discipline, the kind where if a customer found a printing error in a book bought years earlier, you replaced it without a single question asked. I did not think of it as a business lesson at the time. It was just how our house worked.

A year after college, I built my first product, a shareware security app called EasyPass. It found buyers in over fifty countries, which told a twenty-something engineer in Chennai something he had no real way of grasping before then, that the internet did not care where you sat while you built something. It also taught me the other lesson early, the uncomfortable one. A collaborator copied the code and sold a version of it under his own name. Setbacks and success, I learned, tend to travel together from day one.

By the late 1990s, that first product had grown into Easytools.com, freeware and shareware sold online through Vishwak Associates, the company that would later become Vishwak Solutions, at a time when most Indian businesses were still deciding whether the internet was worth taking seriously, and a dial-up connection here involved a government department in one way or another. Nobody called what I did a startup then. Nobody called it product-led growth either. I was just trying to get software into people’s hands around the world, using whatever the internet allowed at the time, and carrying forward a habit I had absorbed without knowing it, that you own the problem fully and never make the customer feel at fault for it.

Three decades on, I am still working through some version of the same question, just with faster internet and higher stakes.

More details closer to the date. If you are around Madurai on the 28th, I would love to see you there.