Seventeen Years
Today
@capillarytech goes public. Seventeen years since three kids fresh out of college decided to start something in the wreckage of 2008.
I wasn't there for the second half.. the harder half.
@AneeshBReddy steered this ship through storms I can only imagine. I'm grateful beyond words.
What I remember most isn't the milestones. It's the texture of those early days.
Merchants in Kolkata who humored us when we had nothing. Durga Puja 2008, camped outside police headquarters chasing traffic updates. Pan IIT at IIT Madras where our scrappy SMS service caught fire. That first angel check of ₹15 lakhs from IIT Kharagpur that we paid back in crores.
We had no idea what we were doing. Just energy, naivety, and this strange refusal to think small.
Then Aditya Birla and Future Group said yes. Right after Lehman fell. I still don't know why they trusted us.
The apartment in CV Raman Nagar with no water during the day. Chai walks in BTM Layout with
@shubhmalhotraa, Abhilash, Prakhar,
@pigol1.. trying to figure out if we were building something or just fooling ourselves.
Then loyalty took off.
That first campaign—₹11 lakhs in incremental sales, one weekend, fully attributed. That's when we saw it. A chance meeting with
@KartheeMadasamy at CCD led to the
@Qualcomm QPrize. We were shocked when we won.
The business grew, but we stayed scrappy. That tiny hotel in Dadar because it was cheapest. The Bangalore home-office. The Gurgaon apartment where Ajay held the fort. Holed up in Bur Dubai searching for product-market fit. The exhilaration when
@sequoia (now
@peakxvpartners) and
@NorwestVP bet on us, alongside angels like
@RajanAnandan, Venkat, KS, and Harminder.
But what I really remember are the crazy things.
Flooding someone in Gujarat with hundreds of thousands of texts. The new hire who nearly wiped our database on day one—later led all of engineering (take a bow,
@pigol1). Anant building a POS system on an Excel sheet to close a deal. Sujatha, our first female hire, making sure our office was no longer a dorm room. Building loyalty systems where internet barely worked—the magic of "nightly sync."
We were pirates, not professionals. That's what made it magic.
Like humans, companies find their early years most thrilling. The teenage years? Brutal. But at seventeen, she's finally ready—scarred, wiser, infinitely stronger.
We remember our failures more than our wins. We carry the scar tissue.
But today, we celebrate.
What a journey, Capillary family. What a journey.