Natasha Shetty

Most people pick a lane. Product. Or sales. Or technology. Or marketing. I never had that option and honestly, I am glad. I started at IBM. Large scale, global operations, structured to the bone. It taught me how serious organisations are built and how technology holds them together. But it also showed me something else. At a certain size, change moves at a crawl. Every small decision buried under layers of approval. That frustration did not break me. It redirected me. What followed was 11 years of building from scratch, largely alone at first. No team. No playbook. Just a company that needed to grow and one person to figure it out. I built the sales function, set up operations, defined the product, learned marketing the hard way, and eventually hired and led the 50+ people who came after. Somewhere in the middle of that journey, I took the opportunity to help a friend at a design thinking company. I was there to write case studies and help build a website. Nothing grand. But watching how media, design, and storytelling came together completely changed how I saw business. I brought that back with me and it showed. Honestly, removing donkey work has been my thing since college. If something can be automated, why are we still doing it manually. One of the biggest highlights was when the growth targets came into picture, I knew immediately that Excel sheets were never going to get us there. Never. The team was not ready for a full switch and I understood that. So instead of forcing it, I used the AI tools myself, made sense of the data, and converted it into a language they already understood and could act on. Slowly the comfort grew. The adoption followed. And so did the 320%. Hundreds of escalations, recoveries, and rebuilds across those years. The kind of sustained pressure that takes everything you have. I started as a developer. I had no business becoming a CTO,