Sixteen years of the same question, asked in different businesses: what should this company do about technology?
My first client, and still a client. Sixteen years, one manufacturer, three technology eras. It went from paper and phone calls to Google Workspace and a rebuilt site that brings in enquiries on its own.
Nothing about that was a single project. It was a long sequence of small decisions about what to adopt, what to ignore, and when the business was ready for it. The second and third of those saved more money than the first ever made.
"Allan has been our technology advisor since 2010. Through every change in how this business runs, he has been the person we ask first. We have never had reason to look for anyone else."
Sams Techno MechPharmaceutical machinery manufacturing, India
Sixteen years with one client says more than any single project could. It means the advice held up each time it mattered.
I built the initial technology stack in the company's first two years, working out of a small office in BKC. The business went on to raise over $190 million.
I returned some years later to advise the technology function as it scaled. The problem by then was not code. Business teams needed technology to solve business problems; technology teams needed to know which outcomes counted. Much of the work was translating each side into the other's language.
Technology cannot run ahead of the business or behind it. Whichever way they drift, someone is paying for the distance.
A two-wheeler servicing business operating across Mumbai, Thane, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Venture-funded, a team of thirty at its peak.
COVID removed the path forward. Rather than keep deploying capital into a business whose economics had stopped working, I chose to wind it down. Investors took partial returns. Every employee was settled. Those same investors have since offered to fund my next venture.
Stopping well takes more discipline than starting. You learn more about people from how a business ends than from how it grows.
Work delivered, directly and through my companies, for TCS, Deutsche Bank, Sika AG, Dish Network, HPCL, BPCL, University of Mumbai, Miami University, BMC and the Government of India.
Across India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Sweden, Hungary, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Indonesia.
I run seven active ventures across technology, healthcare, SaaS, AI, sales, marketing and creative production. None has more than five people. All of them are heavily AI-assisted, and none of them requires me day to day.
When I advise a founder on where AI creates real value, I am not describing something I read about. I am describing how my own businesses are built.
The real test of an AI strategy is how small a team can run a serious business without the quality slipping.