An old friend asked me recently why I do what I do. It was a fair question. We were talking late, and I had been working until four in the morning the night before. It was a Saturday. The day of the week doesn't really matter to me anymore, and he wanted to know why.

To answer that honestly, I have to go further back than Kurieta.

I was born in India, in a middle-class family. Nobody in my family, immediate or extended, had ever left the country to study. That wasn't the path. The path was IIT, and I was preparing for it the way every kid around me was preparing for it.

Then one of my professors pulled me aside. He told me I was a practical person, a hands-on person, and that the education system I was in might not give me what I needed. He suggested I talk to a former student of his who had gone to Georgia Tech. That student lived ten minutes from me. I walked over the same day.

Twenty-four hours later, at sixteen years old, I had made the decision. I told my father. He said he trusted my judgment, and that was enough.

I came to Purdue for mechanical engineering. I thought I would eventually do a PhD in nanotechnology. That isn't what happened.

I changed majors three times. I tried mechanical, then electrical, then computer engineering because I loved coding. Sophomore year I realized I didn't love any of it the way I needed to. Junior year I realized I couldn't do something I didn't enjoy, and I didn't know what to do about that. I was too young, too far from home, and didn't have the guidance to figure it out cleanly.

I got dropped out of Purdue.

I went to India for six months without telling my family the full picture. I was still trying to handle everything myself, which is, looking back, the same instinct that drives most of what I do now. Eventually I found industrial engineering. Supply chain. Operations.

For the first time, something fit. I came back, finished with a 4.0, got into grad school on a full scholarship, and had a Deloitte offer waiting for me. For an industrial engineer right out of college, that is the dream job. I turned it down. I went back to India to set up a manufacturing unit for a company I had interned with the previous two summers.

My monthly expenses were more than what I was earning. My parents could not understand the decision. I told them it wasn't about the money. It was about learning something I couldn't learn on the inside of a consulting firm. That decision is where Kurieta started, even though I didn't know it at the time. Working inside that company, and a few others alongside it, I started to recognize something. Small and mid-sized companies were in the same position I had been in at sixteen. Smart people, real problems, no map. The information they needed existed somewhere, but it wasn't reaching them.

The people who could have helped were chasing Big Four fees instead. I used to tell young people that network is net worth. Nobody had told me that when I needed it. Nobody was telling these companies either.

That is what Kurieta was built for.

Not to become a billion-dollar company. Not to raise money. Not to be a startup story. To help the people no one else was helping.

Two years ago I took on a client, a husband and wife who ran a catering service for fraternities and sororities in Indiana. She was the chef. He was working a day job as a warehouse manager. They came to Kurieta and asked us to build them an app. Their competitors had apps, they said, and they were losing customers. I asked them a few questions. They didn't have a website. Their business email was a Gmail address. They were asking for an app. I told them they didn't need an app. They needed a basic brand first. Then a website. Then a web portal. And only then, if there was budget left, an app. That was the progression. Building the app first would not have solved anything. I wasn't charging them for the conversation.

Most consulting firms in that situation would have quoted the app and taken the work. He listened. He made the call in twenty-four hours, the same way I had at sixteen, and they executed. In one year their company went from four hundred thousand dollars in revenue to one point two million. That mattered more to me than a two hundred thousand dollar check from a company I had saved ten million for.

It still does. That is why Kurieta exists, and that is why I am still up at four in the morning on a Saturday.