From a ₹11 web studio to leading marketing at a listed financial giant.

I come from a Marwari family where both my parents built their own things — my father a real-estate builder (and, improbably, a PhD in chemicals), my mother a criminal lawyer at the Bombay High Court. Academically strong, both of them. Their son was not. School kept telling me what I wasn’t good at, so at a very early age I went looking for the things I was.

The turning point wasn’t a person. It was a broadband connection — my reward for passing the 10th. To everyone else it was a utility. To me it was a portal. Tech blogs, design forums, Photoshop at 2am. Design became the first language I was actually fluent in, and a scrappy blog about the ads around me became the first place I noticed how brands talk.

Then I noticed something on the street. The kirana store, the paan shop, the chaiwala — their idea of a logo was Times New Roman in red. It bothered me, because I’d started to believe that good design could level the playing field. Make a corner shop look like it belonged. So at 17, still in college, I started a studio with my closest friend Dhruv Thakkar and priced our websites at ₹11 — the first rickshaw meter in Mumbai.

₹11 was never about the money. It was the smallest amount that would make someone take it seriously.The pricing decision that explains most of my career

That’s the whole idea, really. Not eleven rupees — the instinct underneath it: a price can be a message, a constraint can be a statement, and perception is a lever most businesses leave lying on the floor. The Times of India and CNBC’s Young Turks picked it up. Forty-odd clients followed. For the first time I felt seen for how I saw the world rather than how I scored.

I wanted more than a portfolio; I wanted exposure. So I made a PowerPoint and pitched my parents on London the way I’d pitch a client. They took the gamble. Coventry, then a master’s at Westminster, and a first real look at how brands are built with nuance — and how much I still didn’t know. London’s real lesson was humility: however much you think you know, you’re always a student.

I came back to India certain I’d start my own agency — and then ran straight into a piece of Marwari wisdom: before you lead, learn to follow. So I did. What was meant to be ‘a couple of years’ became a decade across Webchutney, Jack in the Box, Ogilvy, Isobar, White Rivers Media and The Glitch. I wasn’t clocking in. I was absorbing — trying to get two decades of craft into one, learning how great brands are made, how stories get sharpened, how teams get led.

The decade did its job almost too well. One afternoon, across the table from a senior client, we’d delivered a strong campaign — good numbers, good creative — and I caught myself not thinking about the next campaign at all. I was reworking his business: acquisition, retention, the P&L, where brand perception actually moved money. I’d stopped thinking like an agency man and started thinking like an owner. That was the tell. I didn’t want to pitch brands. I wanted to be accountable for one.

When Motilal Oswal called, they weren’t looking for a ‘marketing person.’ They wanted a builder — someone to take a legacy brand and reimagine how it lives in people’s minds, and willing to let me do it my way. Nothing to inherit — no team, no retainer, no strategy deck. A clean slate, and a mandate I still use as a compass: make marketing matter.

Four years on, that same ₹11 instinct is running at a very different scale — a 35-person in-house team built from zero, a 40-year-old brand modernised, a broking business repositioned as wealth, media turned into stages instead of eyeballs, and AI used to make institutional expertise speak five Indian languages. The chaiwala grew up into a listed financial institution. The idea underneath didn’t change at all.