I grew up hearing
margins at dinner.
Some families pass down recipes. Mine passed down a balance sheet. This is the story of what I did with it.
Three generations
at one table.
My grandfather laid the first brick of Sehgal & Co. My father turned bricks into buildings across the city. My brother runs the sites today.
Dinner was never a break from the business. It was the boardroom. Land prices. Labour costs. Which vendor slipped, which project bled. I didn’t study business first. I absorbed it.
“Cash flow was table talk. Risk was a bedtime story.”
Then they handed
me the ledgers.
At nineteen I stopped listening and started running the numbers: four years in project finance and operations, with five to eight concurrent residential and commercial projects, each one a live P&L.
At the same time,
I built my own thing.
Quality STEM education doesn’t reach most of India’s smaller cities. I founded JarWiz to change that, and ran it for four years alongside the ledgers, through a Microsoft-backed startup program.
A mentor-enabled operating model meant every new school added reach without adding fixed cost.
“The table taught me how a business survives. JarWiz taught me how one is born.”
Cambridge. A real client.
A real stage.
The client was Oban Market, a microfinance marketplace serving 1,500+ daily users. We mapped customer journeys, partner handoffs and order-flow gaps to the monetization levers that actually mattered, then ranked four initiatives the way a client would have to: feasibility, compliance risk, customer impact, unit economics.
Dinner-table instinct, tested against a real client. It held.
Can the ocean pay
for its own cleanup?
Our venture, Aeronautica, began as an ocean-cleanup concept. My job as co-founder: make it a business. I modelled a diversified revenue strategy across four segments and stress-tested every cost driver, revenue channel and stakeholder incentive until a sustainability idea read like an investment case.
Then I did the least expected thing: engineering school.
A master’s in aerospace systems engineering at Michigan sounds like a detour from consulting. It isn’t. It is the sharpest tool at the table: the discipline of proving claims, certified (INCOSE ASEP) and applied daily.
And I couldn’t stop finding businesses. At Michigan’s Space Physics Research Laboratory, I spotted a revenue opportunity in underutilised testing facilities, and built the go-to-market and engagement-operations platform to capture it.
Everyone at the table can read a market. I can also model one.
The table taught me business.
Engineering taught me proof.
I’m looking for the room where both matter. If you’re building one, let’s talk.
There is another side to this story. Meet the engineer ↗