This is the final post in the series I started a few years back when I left US and landed in India (see first part, second part and third part). It has been an inordinately long time since I wrote last in this series, and it must be attributed to my lack of perspective on things that were unfolding in my journey. It took me time to make sense of some things

In My Last Post 20 Months Back, I Had Outlined a Few Options Around Rejigging My Portfolio And I Had To Choose One Or More

Continue to stay 1-person army and try to become high-end (thereby increasing my per-hour revenue)
Hire and grow Palash into a consulting practice
Rejig my portfolio by moving from people-intensive offering to technology-intensive offering

It turns out that I had not accounted for vagaries of my mind I ended up making a choice that was not on the list by any stretch of imagination.

I had been helping one of my friends since 2013 in building the product around his idea for virtual trials. As I was pursuing rejig of my portfolio,



he was busy pitching the idea to potential investors and participating in events. He got good traction on both the front and my weekly technical meeting with his team turned slowly into conversations around whether I can come on board in a more significant capacity. Discussions continued for a few months, and he did a great job in selling the idea to me I was always intrigued by the thought of bringing offline shopping experience to online shopping world, and I liked the fact that image processing technology can be a way to do so, at least for a specific category of goods out there (jewellery, eyewear, other fashion accessories).

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Other that the technology attraction, there were 2 other reasons that I think made me agree to join him:

This was going to be a real startup experience. What I was doing was soft startup of sorts – I was controlling the financial risk by consulting on the side, and hence the pressure to perform might not have been there. T

📌 My Independence – End of a beginning (Jun)
🏢 Career Bloom
📍 Jun