Founder Story:A Life Between Realities

I’ve spent much of my life learning how to move between realities. I grew up as the first-generation son of Indian immigrants who had achieved the American dream without ever fully escaping the fear of losing it. At home, safety and certainty mattered deeply. Outside our door, I was growing up in an America defined by possibility and abundance. I learned both languages early: protect what you have, and imagine what could be.

Being a bi-cultural kid also taught me another kind of translation. The contexts I entered weren’t going to adapt to me, so I learned to adapt to them—to observe before speaking, understand what a room valued, meet people where they were, and find common ground between people who seemed far apart. Code-switching made me part anthropologist, part mediator, part diplomat. Humor helped too; I learned early that laughter can shorten the distance between people.

But adaptation has a cost. Moving between cultures meant never feeling completely claimed by either one. Eventually, I learned that belonging to myself had to come before belonging with anyone else. That has made it easier to enter rooms where I am different, stand beside people whose experiences or convictions aren’t my own, and remain curious without needing either of us to disappear.

I also learned that safety doesn’t always come from making yourself smaller. Some of the most consequential moments of my life have come from doing the opposite: saying what I see, stepping into uncertainty, and trusting that honesty can create its own kind of belonging.

Those instincts followed me into my career. I’ve worked across research, strategy, and design; across retail, banking, healthcare, global health, and humanitarian work; from boardrooms and innovation labs to communities and refugee settings. I’ve repeatedly found myself drawn to the edges—new businesses, unfamiliar contexts, difficult problems, places where the answer isn’t obvious and the burden of proof is high.

I’m drawn there because I recognize the territory.

And across those very different settings, I kept seeing the same thing. Intelligent, committed people could look at the same situation and experience fundamentally different realities. Their differences weren’t irrational. They came from what people had lived, what they feared losing, what they were responsible for, what their systems rewarded, and what they could see from where they stood.

For years, I thought my job was to design better processes to help people collaborate. Eventually, I realized the process often wasn’t the real problem. People were being asked to solve something together before they had made visible the realities they were solving it from.

The Precondition grew from that realization—and, in hindsight, from much more than my professional life. It brings together the tensions I inherited, the ones I created, and the ones I’ve spent a lifetime learning to navigate: scarcity and abundance, adaptation and authenticity, belonging and independence, safety and bravery.