When Su-Kam was at its peak — reaching ₹1,200 crore in revenue and expanding operations across 90 countries — I was surrounded by hundreds of people every day. Engineers, salespeople, finance teams, distributors, and investors. My calendar was packed. My phone never stopped.

But there was an uncomfortable truth that nobody tells you about being a founder: success doesn’t always cure isolation. Sometimes, it deepens it. However, my approach to that isolation was different from the traditional corporate “performance.”

Breaking the ‘Sitting Boss’ Culture

In many Indian offices, there is a deep-seated culture of the “Sitting Boss.” Employees feel they must stay late just to impress the leader, or that they can’t leave until the boss does. Even the peon would wait outside my door, clocking hours simply because I was still in the chair.

I made it a point to destroy that culture. I used to sit and tell everyone to leave—even my peon. I wanted them to have lives, but more importantly, I wanted to remove the theater of productivity. I didn’t need people staying back to impress me. I needed results. This created a unique environment where, as the company grew to a ₹1,200 crore empire, I often found myself sitting alone in the office by choice, not by compulsion.

The AI Paradigm: Why I No Longer Need a Secretary

For decades, the mark of a successful executive was the size of their support staff. You needed secretaries to manage information, assistants to filter communication, and researchers to find data. But the paradigm of knowledge has shifted completely.

Now, with AI around us, that entire structure has been upended. Specifically after the advent of Claude, the paradigm of assistance has changed forever. I no longer need a secretary to manage my thoughts or my data. AI has become the ultimate collaborator—one that doesn’t just manage a schedule but enhances the very quality of my knowledge.

The transition from a ₹1,200 crore organization with massive human overhead to a lean, AI-empowered workflow is not just a change in tools; it’s a change in how we think. AI provides the ‘complete picture’ that I once had to carry alone. It offers instant synthesis, deep technical knowledge, and objective analysis without the need for a boardroom full of people.

A New Kind of Freedom

Today, working alone doesn’t mean being lonely. It means being efficient. By leveraging AI, I can achieve results that were previously impossible without a massive team. The weight I used to carry alone in those late-night office sessions is now shared with an intelligent system that never tires and never tries to ‘impress’ me.

To every founder: The isolation you feel isn’t a burden to be endured—it’s an opportunity to lean into the new paradigm. You don’t need a crowd to build an empire anymore; you need vision and the right intelligence by your side.