Last month I had one of those Tuesdays. The calendar read like a caricature of a founder’s week. 7am call with a mid-market AI company in Austin.
9am customer kickoff in SF.
11am pipeline review with our US lead.
A lunch I didn’t really need to be at. Investor update at 4pm.
The kind of day that looks productive on LinkedIn and feels like nothing on the inside.
What the calendar didn’t say is what was happening at 11pm my time, which was mid-morning Wednesday in Bangalore.
I opened Slack and there was a thread the team had been working on since they got into the office that morning.
A customer in Chicago had asked for a pricing structure we hadn’t shipped before.
The team had already talked the customer through what we could reasonably do, held the line on margin, and kept the thread warm.
What they were waiting on was a commercial sign-off that sits with me by design.
A few hours of company life had happened without me, and the team had handled it cleanly. At an early stage, a few hours is forever.
What I had missed, from the other side of the world, was not the decision. It was the context around it.
The stuff you only pick up when you’re in the thread as it’s happening, not reading it later
That gap is the piece of my job the India-to-global playbook does not tell you about.
Every deck I read before we moved said some version of the same thing. Go global from day one.
Relocate the founder. Hire in the US. Flip to Delaware. Pick your VCs carefully. Then the deck ends.
But the deck is about the move. The work is about what happens after the move, when your customers are in Palo Alto and your team is in Bangalore, and you have to build a single company out of two continents that sit twelve and a half hours apart.
That second half, the half nobody writes about, is most of the job.
This is what I would actually tell a founder who’s about to do this.
Let me say this upfront, because the contrarian version of this essay (the “you don’t really need SF” version) would be dishonest if I wrote it.
You do need SF. Or New York, or London, depending on who buys from you.
For B2B SaaS selling mid-market to enterprise, there is no version of “I’ll build in India and fly in quarterly” that actually works over twelve months.
Product is downstream of customer conversations, and customer conversations happen in coffee shops, at dinners, and at events you are not going to get invited to from 8.5K miles away.
We moved. It was the right call. If you have a few paying customers in the US and you are still debating, stop debating.
The math gets worse every month you wait, and the longer you delay, the more you build a product that is one cycle behind what your customers actually need.
Rajesh Jain at Netcore has said this with the weight of regret.
Netcore waited twenty-five years before opening a US office in 2019, and Jain’s line on it is simply that “the company could have grown bigger, and faster if it had gone to the US market a few years earlier.”
I think he’s right. The only thing the playbook has wrong is not the move. It’s everything it leaves unsaid about the move.
Week two after the move, I noticed something odd. Not that the team had slowed down. If anything, they were working harder than they ever had. What had slowed down was the rhythm between us.
Debates that used to close in 15 mins during a hallway conversation were now turning into 2-day Slack threads.
Product calls that would have happened on a whiteboard were happening in async docs. The docs were sharper. The instinct around them was thinner.
It took me about three weeks to see it clearly. The team was shipping, customers were happy, nothing was technically wrong.
But I was watching decisions land on the roadmap that I hadn’t been in the room for when they were shaped.
A pricing debate had closed. A customer escalation had been handled cleanly, start to finish, while I was on a flight.
A product direction had formed without me. Each of those was the right call. The team was operating exactly the way a good team should.
What I was losing was not control. I had the control I needed. What I was losing was presence.
The 5 minutes corridor chat that used to turn a half-formed idea into a sharp one does not scale across twelve and a half hours. The team had adapted. I hadn’t yet noticed that I had to.
Here is the part I still think about. Customer conversations were in SF. The “what should we build next” shape was forming during those conversations, in the moments in between.
The team in Bangalore was reading the notes the next morning. Notes are fine for decisions. They are not fine for deciding what to build next.
And the person who used to translate between the two was me, sitting in Bangalore hearing about customer calls the evening after that didn’t exist in the org anymore.
The fix isn’t more Slack. The fix is accepting that you are now running two operating systems and building real mechanics to keep them in sync.
For us it came down to two things. Maximizing the window where both geographies are actually awake, and being deliberate about how the founder spends those hours.
The calls that need me go into that window. Everything else has a clear owner on one side of the ocean with the authority to decide without me.
It means my team has full authority to make product and ops calls without me, and I actually honour that when I’m asleep in SF at 2am IST.
None of this is in the India-to-global playbook. The playbook tells you to relocate. It doesn’t tell you what you’re leaving behind, or what it costs to carry it with you.
For the first 4 months after we moved, I was working 16 to 18 hour days. SF mornings with customers. Afternoons on pipeline and investors.
Then evening calls with the India team on what was my night and their morning. I used to sleep from about 1am to 6am and do it all over again the next day.
I don’t recommend it. I also don’t fully regret it. In the first stretch of going global, there is no substitute for the founder being present in both geographies.
You are the glue while the company is still learning to run itself across continents. If you skip this phase, you hand the work to people who aren’t ready for it and then you’re debugging a different, worse set of problems three months later.
There is an expiration date on that schedule, though, and it’s shorter than you think. Around month 3, I realised I was getting worse at the thing I actually get paid to do, which is make decisions.
I was taking customer calls that didn’t need a CEO in the room, and sitting through technical deep-dives Nikhil was better placed to run alone. The calls I made at 11pm India time were measurably worse than the ones I made at 11am SF time.
Fatigue does not announce itself. It just quietly lowers the ceiling of what your best day looks like.
The fix was giving up things I thought I couldn’t.
I let Nikhil run the technical half of most customer conversations without me in the room.
I accepted that scaling myself meant letting people do things I used to do, and trusting them with the judgement I used to apply.
If you are thinking about going SF-first and you are a single founder, my real advice is: don’t. You need at least two, and ideally three.
One who lives in the customer market. One who lives in the team. Someone has to absorb the chaos of the third thing that breaks. We have three co-founders, and on most weeks it still feels thin.
In India, a coffee meeting with a specific ask is normal. You call someone, you tell them what you need, they help or they don’t, and everyone moves on with their day. It is efficient. It’s also transactional in a way that’s hard to see until you leave it.
In SF, the first 6 to 8 months of networking is not transactional. It is reputation-building.
The people who responded to my cold asks in the first month were mostly other Indian founders (responding out of solidarity) or people who were themselves selling something.
The people I actually wanted to reach, operators at companies I wanted as customers, investors I respected, did not respond to direct asks. They responded to value.
The version that works here is help-first. You show up to random events before you know which ones are the right ones.
You write in public. You offer introductions before you ask for them. You do this for months before any of it starts paying off, and you have to be okay with the runway.
The playbook says “move to SF for the network.” What the playbook does not say is that the network is not there when you land. You build it, slowly, and the first three months are mostly embarrassing.
I went to events where I knew nobody and left with nobody’s number. I sent DMs to people who never replied.
I eventually figured out which spaces had the right density of the people I wanted to meet and started spending my nights there instead of the big-tent conferences. That shift took maybe four months.
The cost of the network is real. Nobody puts it on the cap-ex line, but it’s there.
I’ll be honest about this one because it’s still live.
The company we were in India, the one with whiteboards, same-day decisions, everyone in the office until 10pm because they wanted to be, does not exist in the same form anymore.
What we have now is better in some ways (closer to customers, more operational maturity, sharper focus) and worse in others (more distance, more process, less of the electric energy you only get when eighteen people share a room).
Some of that is growth and would have happened anyway. Some of it is specifically about splitting across continents, and I think that part is a tax you pay whether you like it or not.
What we’re doing about it (and I don’t know yet if it’s enough) is small and ongoing. I fly back roughly every eight weeks for a full week in Bangalore.
Our monthly all-hands runs from India with me physically there, not dialed in. When we hire in India, we hire people who can run a function, not execute a spec. None of it replaces the old feeling, but all of it helps.
The India team is the heart of this company. SF is the arm that reaches the customer. Neither can atrophy. The hardest non-product thing I spend my time on right now is making sure the arm does not forget where the heart is.
The playbook says: go global from day one, relocate, hire in the US, raise in dollars, flip to Delaware.
Most of that is still roughly right. I would not tell a founder to skip the move.
What the playbook should also say, and doesn’t: the real work starts the week after you move. You will underestimate the cost of holding two operating systems together.
You will burn out if you try to be present in both for too long. You will lose velocity in the geography you left, and the team there will feel it before you do.
Your network in the new city will not exist on day one, and you will spend months looking like a stranger at the table.
The reporting lines you set up for one office will quietly stop working. The culture you built will bend, and you will have to decide, on purpose, which parts of it to fight for.
None of this is a reason not to go. We went. I’d go again. I’d just go with my eyes open about the half nobody writes about.
If I had to compress everything above into one line for a founder making this call today: SF-first is a capital-allocation decision. India-still is an operational one. You have to do both well, and the second one is harder.
That’s what I’ve got this week.
If any of this is familiar, or if you’re two customers in and staring at the move, hit reply and tell me what’s on your desk. I read every one.
— Manish
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Two things I’ve been reading and genuinely loved!
Peep Laja on LinkedIn this week: “Your competitor’s pricing page isn’t a strategy. It’s a survey of one.” His study of 50 B2B SaaS leaders: 76% let competitor pricing shape theirs, and 34% said underpricing and waiting too long to fix it was their biggest regret.
So you’re benchmarking against people who probably priced wrong in the first place. I keep coming back to this, it’s sitting underneath most of the pricing conversations I’m in right now.
Elena Verna this week with a question every B2B founder should be chewing on: should MCP be in your ICP? Her idea is that agents are becoming the user on the other end of your product, and they don’t care about your onboarding, UI, or brand.
They evaluate output, speed, reliability, and format. The line that I had to stop and read twice was “If an agent can reproduce your core functionality without ever touching your product, what exactly are you defending?” I sent this to 3 founders still optimizing for human-only journeys.