Capillary turns seventeen today. I was there when she was born, and I'm here as she steps into adulthood. She was fierce from the start—hungry, impatient, audacious, forever a step ahead. I'm confident she'll endure whatever comes as long as she stays true to that core.
Three stories I remember:
The Product That Never Was
We sold lifecycle marketing to a major food chain via PowerPoint. Then we executed it manually. One of our team—gone now, sadly—segmented sixty-four campaigns using Excel. Sixty-four separate spreadsheets feeding unique messages to each customer group.
I'd just come from college, where I assumed professionals had everything figured out. This shattered that. We were honest with the client: "Parts of this we'll do manually today while we build it out." They accepted it because the MVP delivered real results.
Later I read Steve Jobs saying the world was built by people no smarter than you—just more persistent. That's what I learned here: imperfect execution that solves the problem beats perfect execution that arrives too late. You create demand first, then build what customers actually need.
Sixty-Four Pages in One Year
I'd never traveled internationally until someone took a chance on me to lead a new geography. I'm the kind of person who still gets excited just sitting on a plane—I come from enough dirt that being 30,000 feet up feels like a marvel.
That year I filled every page of a 64-leaf passport. Mostly Africa. I cold-emailed prospects from India claiming "my director is in the area." I was always in the area when someone said yes.
The moment that stands out: closing my first deal in Cape Town. I built the business case myself, created the presentations, worked from IT to marketing to CEO to founder. Then closed it. Before that I'd been account management—what we now call customer success. This was pure hunting.
Everyone else in other regions were stalwarts walking in with pilots and deals. Little me, sent from India to figure things out, actually closed something. I called my boss. He told me to get a drink and celebrate.
That deal became a long-term customer. More importantly, it proved I belonged.
Those travels shaped me beyond work. I visited Kruger National Park, got interested in wildlife, tried photography, eventually picked up angling because I wanted to be close to the outdoors—not as a tourist but as a participant. That curiosity came from being given the chance to explore.
The Birthday They Remembered
The Delhi ops team worked out of the same apartment—true startup living. My girlfriend had a birthday coming. I'm not forthcoming about personal things, but somehow two of the founders found out.
Between meetings, they slipped away, bought a gift, and gave it to me. They knew I'd been in meetings all day and hadn't gotten her anything.
That girlfriend and I have two kids now.
What stays with me isn't just the gesture—it's what it revealed about who they were. Founders obsessed with building the company, yet emotionally intelligent enough to notice what mattered to their people. They didn't create culture through slogans. Culture came from how they behaved, who they promoted, how they talked.
I've watched them mature from hungry salespeople doing four meetings a day to leaders who multiply impact through others. One of them got deep into running, then meditation, and shared it all generously—not to manufacture culture but because that's who he is.
At Thirty-Four
I believe Capillary can become one of the most innovative companies to come out of India. Not in the Infosys mold—dollar arbitrage and scale—but in the Zoho mold: solving actual problems, maturing into new directions, taking on international competition.
I'd love to see her have Nokia's endurance—a company that started in lumber in 1865 and survived through rubber, cables, phones, now network infrastructure. Not by staying rigid, but by staying anchored to problem-solving while everything else evolved.
Maybe at thirty-four Capillary won't even be in martech. Maybe we'll be building AI products for climate change. I'd be okay with that, as long as the core remains: customer-obsessed, problem-solving, audacious.
I cannot wait to watch her grow. I cannot wait to see which three stories I'll choose when she turns thirty-four.
Disclaimer: Names, places, and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy. These are true events rendered with fictional elements.