I've been thinking about this for a while now — this question of whom to work with, or more specifically, whom to work under. Because when you're looking for a job, or when you're trying to figure out the next step, there exist N number of people building companies or startups or running successful teams out there, and the natural instinct is to think, okay, I can work with any of those N people, anyone from that pool would be fine. But I don't think that's how it works, and I don't think that's how it should work either.

There are a few facts we can observe about any company or any founder. They got funding, they're running a product, they have some traction. And we don't always know whether the product is truly successful or not, but honestly, that's not the issue — many startups, even the ones I joined, were in the negative when I started, and they ultimately turned into very good numbers over time. So the absolute numbers of revenue or the portfolio or the assets, that's not a big deal for me. What I'm really trying to get at is something more qualitative about the leadership — the kind of leadership that gives you lifelong learning, that on a short-term basis genuinely inspires and influences the way you think and the way you work. And also, when you already have your own belief system, your own understanding, your own thought process, your own qualities that you've built over time, there will inevitably be some sort of tension or conflict between how you see the field, the work, the career, versus how the leader or the organization really looks at it. And that tension is actually where the interesting stuff happens, but only if the leader creates space for it rather than crushing it.

Now, another thing is — whatever you're interested in, you'll be able to find it in many places. If I'm interested in memory models, AI memory, there exist maybe hundreds of companies or teams working on such concepts right now. Same with forecasting, same with consumer platforms, customer data platforms — any category you pick, there exist tens and twenties of companies doing very well, and many of them would have gotten good funding too. But funding itself is a very subjective thing. It's not like there's some universally accepted metric that's actually measuring or comparing these companies on an absolute scale. It's more about how they sell the story, how they share the consistency of vision, how the investors understood it and then calculated their own bets. So there's really nothing definitive in saying, okay, they got better funding so ultimately that will be a great company. Everything is a very subjective experience. I was actually reading Rethinking Consciousness by Michael Graziano, where he talks about subjective experience, and I think through that lens, any company or any environment we associate ourselves with is fundamentally a subjective experience.

And there's also the reality that sometimes you're very early in your career and you may not have too many options or too much freedom to really choose. The decision-making at that stage may not consider all these philosophical things like free will or intention or "I have the choice." That freedom simply isn't there sometimes. For example, when I was going through my interviews in 2018, I had offers from Infosys, CTS, and Mu Sigma, and there was one core company through off-campus, but that was a very small company and I wasn't really in the mindset of getting into core instrumentation engineering work. So at that moment, I didn't have much intention or grand ambition driving my decision. I just liked — as a fresher, I genuinely just liked the ambiance of Mu Sigma. I didn't want to go to the typical IT companies. It wasn't some deep strategic calculation. It was just looking for something unique among the options I had, maybe some comfort in that uniqueness.

Intellectual Originality

But consider what happened after I joined Mu Sigma. The influence of that company's culture, the entire ecosystem — me versus the many seniors, the people in the same cohort, the business unit heads, the CEO Dhiraj Rajaram — that ecosystem shaped me in ways I couldn't have predicted. What inspired me at Mu Sigma was, number one, the belief system. They said learning over knowing. And that's something that still makes sense to me, maybe for many people. Because in a very rapidly changing landscape, learning is the only quality you can show consistently. It's far more durable than saying "I know this specific thing." Consider the trajectory of just the last couple of years — in 2024 it was prompt engineering, then agents, then context engineering, then RAG, then harness engineering, now memory engineering. Different terms keep coming. But fundamentally, by first principles, they all stem from one or two core concepts, and you'd just need a week or maybe a month to grasp the new framing. So I don't really believe in the approach of, "Have you built something crazy on this exact technology so you can join our team?" That tells me more about the limitations of the evaluator than about the candidate. And that was Mu Sigma's second principle — extreme experimentation, which gives you the freedom to both explore and exploit. And then the third was the interactive property, which is about how interdisciplinary, how collaborative, how cross-thinking you are.

I really liked all of that. And the experience itself was wholesome — sort of a consultant feel like BCG or McKinsey, combined with engineering experience where you build end-to-end pipelines, deployment, fine-tuning, optimization, front-end, back-end, whatever it takes. And on top of that, a research or scientist kind of feel where you explore things, experiment, and showcase to clients that something is working — just without the publishing part, because it was a revenue and growth focused environment with very specific outcome expectations. But beyond all of that, the central practice at Mu Sigma was reflecting on an everyday basis, and that gave me a sense of consciousness about what I am doing, what I should be doing, how things are happening, and why I should be doing them. It gave me direction about where I'm heading. The conversations with Dhiraj, conversations with BU heads, really helped me, and they all had that confidence and enablement — at the age of 20 or 21, I got to work with CXOs and heads of data science at client organizations, got to present to them, and that builds a very real confidence in you. And there was no fear of judgment on an everyday basis. Everyone around you was just one or two years older, and as you kept doing things, trust got built up, and more opportunities opened up and people started taking you to different problem statements. So those three years and eleven months at Mu Sigma gave me a deep sense of how to see the entire landscape of data science, machine learning, AI — how a company and a team should work, and how as an individual I should see this world full of opportunities. There was always this philosophical grounding too, like attention to the second law of thermodynamics — entropy is not going to decrease, which means there is no end of problems. Even as AI automates things, new problems emerge, which means boundless opportunities for anyone willing to engage. Such thoughtful, philosophical, and also very pragmatic ideas really influenced me a lot.

From there, when I was interviewing for my next role, I had conversations with companies like Kmart, PayPal, Jio, and a few others. But I ended up at Captain Fresh, where Parag — my hiring manager and product manager — interviewed me over a couple of rounds, and I was also connecting with Venu. The conversations with them gave me genuine hope that even though it was a startup environment, they didn't seem to be hiring for some task manager or task executor role. It was more like, "Let's go at this particular problem together." And through around one and a quarter to one and a half years with Captain Fresh, especially working with Parag, it was like multiple roles and we explored problems together. There were no restrictions from him. And importantly, he didn't impose the very toxic patterns that typical product managers sometimes bring — the relentless productivity pressure, the "ship it, ship it" mentality. He actually gave the freedom to let things emerge through experiments and brainstorming. That's how we were able to do things at Captain Fresh.

And now, over time, I've become more curious about Captain Fresh's founder Uttam. During my time there, I didn't get much chance to interact with him because he was so busy taking the company to the next level — when I was there, they were moving towards positive EBITDA, acquiring companies, running transformations and experiments. But following his thoughts through podcasts and interviews since then, he's really someone very sane and disciplined in execution and in his thought process toward building that protein capital market and seafood supply chain. It's genuinely intriguing, and it's not the rage-baiting kind of thing that has become so common these days. We're honestly tired of founders doing rage-baiting and doing nonsense to gain attention and creating that very intimidating feel. Uttam is different — he worked with bigger companies, on the IPO side of things, and his execution is very neat, disciplined, and he lets the tech team and the work itself evolve and surface naturally. I really felt that, and I wish I'd had more interactions with him. I had just one one-on-one when I was about to leave the company, and he genuinely respected and appreciated my curiosity about getting into generative AI and core AI work. Even though there were many things going on at the company at that time — business acquisitions, building their own CRM, various tech products — I felt the scope for deeper AI work could have been much better, and that's why I eventually moved on.

Then I was interviewing again for many companies, and one day I found myself interviewed by the entire team at Informatica, and had a chance to interact with Arjun and Kali from the leadership team. That conversation really resonated with me because of two things — the environment itself, and the fact that these people showed genuine respect and empathy to the person sitting in front of them. And around twenty months at Informatica was really good. There was no number-chasing situation, but more of an outcomes orientation — how have we actually helped people? And I got the sort of space to share my thoughts freely. What I really liked was that from co-workers to the CEO of the company, I was given genuine freedom to ask questions and share my perspective — why are we doing this, why are we not doing that — right up to the SVP of a specific vertical. Every month there would be leadership connects and meetings, and they were all very open to discussion, open to experiments. I felt like what I had experienced and valued before was continuing here too, and there was no chaotic management. It was very neat. And though uncertainty is always there in any company, what mattered was how patient and how cool and how disciplined the leadership was in tackling uncertain situations — not letting the volatility of the external world make them unstable or make the team stumble. That steadiness was genuinely great to experience.

Now, why I'm sharing all this backstory — over time, I've been observing a lot of founders on X and LinkedIn who are expressing their ideas and content, and most of them make me feel quite uncomfortable, sometimes even intimidated. Why are they not able to have basic empathy and respect towards employees, towards teams, towards fellow humans? It's become this culture of validating people against how many lines of code they've shipped, how many PRs they've merged, "I fired everyone and did it all myself." And even those commit numbers and output metrics are inflated — if you have money and token limits, you can just sit in front of an AI coding tool and keep producing. But you cannot hold that same standard against someone who doesn't have access to such tools, someone working with free open-source models or a $20 AI subscription. The asymmetry is real and the judgment is unfair.

And the collaboration in these environments is minimal, almost nonexistent. It's more like, "I have something in my mind, you have to execute it." Instead of considering their team members as collaborators in a problem-solving journey, they just think of people as systems — give them an input, expect an output. There's no freedom for people to explore or come up with their own approach to executing something. I'm honestly not sure why some founders behave this way. And honestly, there's nothing to get from them as inspiration. Maybe they're consistent and putting in effort, but that's something you can do yourself. There's nothing where you say, "Oh, this is how they see the world," or "This is how they ideate a specific solution," or "This is their intellectual uniqueness." Nothing. It's just that they have twelve hours of attention span focused on one specific problem, while the people they're evaluating have to prep for multiple aspects, be categorical about multiple skill sets, maximize across many dimensions just to increase their likelihood of being hired. The leverage is completely asymmetric.

Legacy of Execution

When the leadership doesn't show any real engineering journey or transformational thinking from before the AI wave — when they didn't do anything notable in thought or execution before, and it's just that AI gave them some superpower and they built something and got into the SF ecosystem — and now every day they're just improving their ability to be performative about engaging with others and stealing attention... that doesn't give me any sort of attraction or even curiosity. There's no "Oh, I have to work with this person because they have some unique style of doing things or some unique thought process or skill sets to learn from." Nothing. It's just capital and the ability to steal attention and extraordinary marketing and narrative-setting skills. But from first principles, am I getting something? Am I getting some sort of energy from seeing how they took some chaotic, crappy problem and turned it into a real possibility for a market? No.

Compare that with people like Elon Musk or professors who are building labs — people like Yann LeCun and many others who have years and years of academic and research contributions that naturally turned into companies, or people who bring decades of domain experience into their ventures. That shows discipline, involvement, and — importantly — these people tend to have empathy and respect for others. They value how deep you are in your subject, how unique your thought process is, how interdisciplinary your thinking is. They validate you in a completely different sense, and I see real alignment with them.

Just a couple of days back, I was having a conversation for an interview with someone who is both a faculty member at a university and part of a startup. With him, I could genuinely feel that we were conversing on the same wavelength, on the same line. I wasn't compelling myself or pushing myself to fake something or perform something for the sake of the interview. And he also wasn't trying to be intimidating or playing the game of "let me lock you here because my job is to reject as many people as possible until I find something extraordinary." It was just a very good, natural conversation with real enablement and empathy built into it.

But then you see the rage-baiting that fills our feeds these days — "I fired people because I can do everything with AI," "This is garbage, we rebuilt everything from scratch." I genuinely don't see the point of working in such companies. There has to be something beyond just "you pay me money." There has to be some mutual, natural collaboration, some alignment of wavelength. Not someone who is just doing it for attention-seeking and gaming the system. And this isn't just a hypothesis — I can actually validate it from what I've observed. Whoever is a founder and is constantly attention-seeking and rage-baiting and intimidating the ecosystem is typically gaming the system with inflated numbers. You will not be able to build yourself working under them. Maybe you'll get some reflected attention or limelight because they're in the limelight and you just go stand next to them. But that's not growth.

And this whole ecosystem, especially in San Francisco and the Bay Area, where on an everyday basis all the conversations and connections carry this subtext of "I have to talk to this person because I can get a job" or "I have to connect because I can get some relevance" — I don't really like that. Why should every conversation require me to prepare something to impress someone just to get an opportunity? I don't buy into that. But I also acknowledge that's how the collective narration works right now.

So what I'm really saying is this — all we need is leadership that is very original. When we choose to work under someone, when they're part of the hierarchy taking the company forward, there has to be something mutual and very natural in the collaboration, a genuine alignment of wavelength, rather than someone who is just doing it for attention-seeking and gaming the system. The leaders worth working under are the ones who leave you with something beyond the paycheck and beyond the resume line — a way of seeing problems, a philosophical orientation, a confidence that compounds over years. Mu Sigma gave me the consciousness of daily reflection. Captain Fresh gave me proof that freedom and experimentation beat top-down mandates. Informatica gave me evidence that steadiness and openness scale. And it's not just about what they gave me in the moment — it's that the influence of those environments and those leaders is still shaping how I think and how I evaluate everything, even now.

I'm not looking for any one of N options from N companies. I'm looking for that rare alignment where the collaboration is natural, where depth is valued, where the work itself and the people doing the work are genuinely the point. That's a harder search. But honestly, it's the only one that makes sense to me.