Motor winder. Salesman. Founder.
In that order, and still all three.
A Diploma in Electrical Engineering from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, and a job market that judged the grooming, not the grades. So: motor winding mechanic. The tricks of life, learned rewinding burnt motors and reading the customers who carried them in. Rock bottom isn't a metaphor here. It's a workshop floor in Gujarat.
A site job pulled me to Mumbai, and the bag did the rest: straight into sales. The first lesson that stuck has never left: it is humans we deal with, and that requires a very different approach. Everything else is catalogue.
ABB, then Schneider Electric: trainings in France, Beijing and beyond, and a backbone I still teach today: Consult, Adapt, Sell & Help. I've watched the whole era go by from inside it, from the 286 to the age of AI. At home, the day's stress left through poems written in Hindi, performed for an audience of four.
Gewiss Gulf brought me over to run GCC marketing, into a teapot of cultures and nationalities. Then a deliberate choice of scale: better a lion in a small jungle than a dog in a big one. The smaller companies gave me a bigger say, and a close-up education in exactly what not to build.
Unceremoniously, from an organization I had brought back from the deathbed. They felt I was taking over the people and the processes. In a way that was true; it was never deliberate. The relationships had become the guiding light, and that scared the owners. This is the zero my freedom philosophy was forged in.
Through every turbulence, one constant. Together we built an organization true to people, employees and customers alike, run as a movement, not a portfolio. One sentence does the work of the entire strategy: we shall be the easiest company to work with.
Khaleej Times named Leisung a Best Place to Work. The same year the team proposed, designed and built XP Zentrum, an experiential technology centre in Dubai Silicon Oasis, bottom-up, in-house, in eight months. I take pride not in building this company, but in being part of it while it was being built.
An MBA from the University of Wolverhampton, a PhD in progress, and a strategic-advisor seat at every board I touch. The diploma from Vadodara finally has company.
These are not one company's rules; they are mine. They travel with me into every business I build or advise, written into payroll and policy, not pinned on a poster.
My salary is capped at twenty times the lowest-paid person in the company. If I want a raise, the floor rises first.
The newest joiner and the founder carry the same medical insurance. Health is not a hierarchy.
Nobody sits behind a door, including me. A flat organization isn't a slogan; it's furniture.
Employees share them. An organization is made to support a community; money is the byproduct, not the point.
Any employee who wants to re-educate themselves does it at the company's cost. Books build people; so do degrees.
Health, family, faith, hard days: the rulebook assumes people are human. Nobody should need courage to ask for what life requires.
Where these ethics run at full strength: attrition under one percent, and a Khaleej Times Best Place to Work award in 2024. Run a company like a family, then come and tell me it can't be done.
Experiential technology · Founder & CEO
The core, and the one desk where I still run the day-to-day. Founded 2014 with Suchi. Boardrooms, control rooms and experience centres across the Gulf, and XP Zentrum in Dubai Silicon Oasis, technology as never seen before, or maybe in some movies. Visits by appointment.
www.leisung.com
Products · Samyukta, CEO
Products built to withstand the wish lists of customers, run by our daughter Samyukta, the creative genius of the family, with an eye for details I never had. My seat here is strategic consultant: strategy, people and culture. The sales floor is entirely hers.
www.yugenav.com
Distribution · Sammit, at the helm
Sammit's show, not mine. The techie genius of the family built this distribution engine hands-on, through its ups and downs, and takes every decision in it. Between our companies the only paperwork that travels is quotations and invoices, the way it works between any two independent businesses.
www.vithran.com
Applied AI · products already live
An AI company built quietly. Multiple products developed, deployed and in daily use, now being grown as an independent brand in its own right. The work is out there; the name is not. Yet.
Consumer · under wraps
A consumer brand being assembled like a system, factory to shelf. Category, market, name: all sealed for now. When it lands, you'll know why this panel stayed dark.
Hospitality · Kuttikanam · opening January 2027
A dream we have carried for years, now rising on a cliff at Kuttikanam, where the mist stays on duty all 365 days. Villas of two floors and two bedrooms, an infinity pool staring straight into the mountains, a pantry, and hospitality at the level we would want for ourselves. People use the word paradise too easily; this place has earned it. No name yet. Bookings open with the new year, 2027.
While the world locked its doors against a virus, my reports arrived with a headline of their own: cancer, stage 3A. Coming out the other side was a miracle with many names on it: God first, then family and friends who refused to let me fight alone, and a will power that decided there was more left to give. I walked in a patient and walked out permanently indebted. These photos aren't from a project; they are the project. Everything else on this wall is a bonus innings, and I bat like it.
The shortlist was real: étoile, quad, drömmar, fyra, çar stêr, each name weighed for its meaning at a table in the food court of Mirdif City Centre. The one that stayed came from my favourite country, Luxembourg: small, quietly powerful, rich and happy. Léisung is Luxembourgish for solution, the most apt of them all, because the language carries a promise I've run the company on ever since: et gëtt ëmmer eng Léisung, there is always a solution. Twelve years on, I'll say it plainly: we are the Luxembourg of the AV industry.
Business builds you; studying sharpens you differently. Long after most people close their books, I opened mine again: completed the UK Level 7 diploma, then capped it with an MBA. Cap, gown, tassel, the whole ceremony: earned, not honorary. And because not every classroom has walls, I took my Level 1 coaching certificate from the ICC, the highest authority in world cricket. One qualification for the boardroom, one for the pitch. Both were earned the same way: showing up to learn when nobody was asking me to.
XP Zentrum · sixty seconds inside the room
Our experience centre in Dubai Silicon Oasis. Nobody hands you a brochure at the door; the building does the talking. Immersive rooms that swallow you whole, LED you can stand close enough to touch, surfaces that answer back when you do. Sixty seconds inside does what a hundred slides never could. Press play. This is the actual room.
A beauty flagship with the largest shopfront we'd ever taken on: around fifty metres of it, wrapped in LED. We supplied the walls, the curved pillars and the entire digital signage estate, and delivered it through the hardest stretch of the pandemic, on schedule. The date stamps on these photos read March 2020. The screens never noticed, and years later, we still run the content on every one of them.
One of the world's most renowned café chains (you have almost certainly held its cup) depends on us across more than 800 stores: every new launch, every refurbishment, year after year. That kind of dependence is never won by a low quote. It's built by a culture that treats the second order as the real contract, where retention isn't a KPI you chase, it's the way the company breathes. Of everything on this wall, few things make me prouder than being the call they make without thinking twice.
Strip away the tech talk and we build three things. One takes a giant wall of screens and makes it behave like a single obedient canvas: touch it and it listens; cut the network and it doesn't even blink. One runs the signs and menus you see in stores: hundreds of screens across cities, updated from one desk, so nobody climbs a ladder with a USB stick again. And one sits in the meeting with you, writes down who said what, and hands everyone the minutes before the coffee goes cold. No names here; each one gets its own launch. But every line of every one of them is ours.
Every ERP I'd ever seen forced the company to bend around the software. So we built Sentinel the other way: an ERP shaped around how Leisung actually runs: projects, service, HR, tasking and a live scoreboard, with LEAH, its AI, fixing workflows from the inside. Built entirely on Base44, every security lock in place, a new-found love for vibe coding that Base44 honoured with their Builder Cap. That's a real screenshot: it's pulling up the CEO for being late. Nobody outranks the system. That's the point.
The result can be. But you decide with what you know at that moment, and the only real failure is not deciding at all. Risk doesn't wait for you; it accumulates.
Data takes you to the door; intuition walks through it. Anyone claiming a hundred percent of either is selling something.
The success books are everywhere. The sharper curriculum is the failure list: take every bad manager you've met and eliminate their traits from your own book, one deduction at a time.
Every process that routes through me is a defect I haven't fixed yet. The goal is a company that would mildly notice my absence.
In my pipeline a deal moves from F to A only on ticked proof: twelve verifiable facts, each worth its exact ten percent. Optimism is not a data point.
The Magic of Thinking Big. Think and Grow Rich. Gandhi's Experiments with Truth. You will never sit across from the greats, but you can borrow their thought process. Books also build the scarcest skill left: patience.
Not money: the confidence that if everything burned down tomorrow, I could rebuild it from a bench. Once you have that, fear stops making your decisions. I call every day of this my retired life.
There's no college for it; I've looked. Thirty-five years of doors, deals and site handovers were the coursework. I hire for it first, and I still don't know how it's built.
Before the companies, there was the craft: selling, and then teaching it. The backbone was drilled into me in Schneider classrooms from France to Beijing: Consult, Adapt, Sell & Help. It has outlasted every technology shift since the 286. I train sales teams the way I run pipelines: on evidence. Discovery that produces facts, proposals that answer them, stages that move only on proof, judged the only fair way, by what the team closes after.
Inside Leisung it runs as a standing programme: case-based thinking classes, De Bono's tools, FIRO-B profiling, building people who exercise judgment when nobody is watching. Outside, I take sessions for teams that want the same. If your pipeline is a list of hopes, that's fixable.
Ask about the next sessionThrough every turbulence, the jungles, the exits, the zeros, Suchi has been the only constant. She co-founded Leisung with me and has co-signed every hard decision since; the company has two founders and one standard. What we built together began as a promise to be true to people. The company is simply that promise, incorporated.
Samyukta, our daughter, runs Yugen as CEO: the creative genius of the family, with an eye for details I never had. Sammit, her husband, is the techie genius who heads Vithran through its ups and downs. The next generation isn't waiting its turn; it's already on the field.
Click a picture to bring it close. Click again to put it back.
"Live for the next excitement", the line I've said on every stage, isn't mine. It's Shantanu's. Our son has Down syndrome. He also has a six-pack, a Special Olympics gymnast's discipline, and a basketball and badminton game better than his father's. Every morning he shows the rest of us what the motto actually means.
This section stays short on purpose. They're people, not content.
T20s on Dubai mornings, batting first if I can help it. These are match frames, not a photoshoot: whites, morning light, and the odd trophy that followed. Judge the cover drive yourself.
Click a picture to bring it close. Click again to put it back.
Career stats live on CricHeroes. The averages don't lie. Full match footage is on YouTube.
Weekdays run 4:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.: gym, office, home. Strength work keeps the pull-ups honest; the weekend belongs to the crease. Nothing fancy; showing up is the programme.
The pressure valve nobody outside the family knew about: poems written in Hindi at the end of hard days, performed for an audience of four. Some things are not for LinkedIn.
English for contracts, Malayalam for home, Hindi and Urdu for the site banter. Gujarati and Tamil came free with a childhood spent in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, and the Bangalore years built up my Kannada. Switching is half the job in this city.
Not a blog; a shelf. Short pieces, added when there's something worth keeping. Click one to read it whole.
Poems, mostly in Hindi, for when a thought needs fewer words. They arrive at the end of hard days and are added whenever they do. Click a title to read it whole.
Short notes from people I have worked with, built with, trained, or played cricket beside. Every note is read by me first; only the ones I am allowed to share are pinned.