About Me
About Me
CURRENTLY
Co-Founder & CTO - Silver Oak Health
I run product, technology and information security at Silver Oak Health. Basically everything that has to hold at 3am when nobody is watching. 600+ companies now trust us with the mental wellbeing of 4.5 million of their employees. 70,000 therapy sessions a year, in 14+ Indian languages, at 99.99% uptime. Built without venture money, in a country where bootstrapped usually means stuck. The constraint made the company better, though that only becomes obvious in hindsight. The part nobody tells you is that the hard problems were almost never technology problems.
Angel Investor
Backing early-stage founders with my own money. Enterprise tech, consumer, future of work. I look for people who understand their customers properly and are solving boring but important problems. People first, always. I have also sat through enough pitches now to know that the founders who say we will figure it out usually do not.
Exploring
How AI actually changes the way businesses get built. Not the keynote version of that question, the version where it changes what you hire for, how you sell, and what stops being worth doing at all. What it takes to build technology companies from India for the world. Products, not services. I write and speak about all of it as I work it out, rather than after.
IN THE PAST
MyFirstCampus, my first company
A computer-adaptive assessment platform to help companies find good people straight out of college. Got into SAP's Startup Studio, grew it to 18 people. I was 22 and had no real idea how to manage even one of them. Ran 18 months, then it did not. The market was not ready and honestly neither was I. Most expensive education of my life, and also the most useful, which is an annoying thing to be true.
SAP, twice
First as a software engineer, learning how software gets built when thousands of companies need it not to break. Then back in as Product Owner on one of their AI suites, probably the youngest they had at 26. I once showed a client a redesign I was proud of. Fewer clicks, cleaner screens, very startup. He looked at it and asked, where are all my buttons? That is the whole lesson. Enterprise software is not about user experience, it is about user confidence. When somebody's job depends on your software behaving identically every Tuesday at 9am, what you call innovation feels like risk to them.
Before that
Started building websites for money in 11th grade. HTML, then WordPress, then things called Drupal and Joomla. Somebody would ask, I would build it. Engineering from a college you have not heard of, and I kept building through it anyway.
Army kid. Grew up moving between army schools across India, which is its own kind of education.
Ran Restart India , a national hackathon to get solutions built quickly.
Built TheCovidAnalytics dashboard during peak pandemic chaos to make data understandable
WHAT I BELIEVE
Enterprise software is about user confidence, not user experience.
AI does not replace judgment. It just makes bad judgment faster.
India is not one market. It is 28.
Constraints do not make you scrappy. They make you correct.
The best business lessons come from the things that contradict what the frameworks told you.
WHEN I AM NOT BUILDING
Delivered TEDx talk on why you will never be happy, and why not every problem needs a solution
Spent time at IIM Bangalore learning about business. The best strategies come from actually talking to customers, not slide decks
Read somewhere between 40 and 50 books a year. Most are useless, but the three or four that land, really land.
Big fan of Urdu poetry, Published a 2025 Shayari Calendar, because the world needs more Urdu poetry and fewer pitch decks.
Spend a fair amount of time defending the opinion that chai is not a beverage, it is a emotion.
Originally from Pilani, a sleepy desert town in Rajasthan whose biggest claim to fame is BITS. Now based in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India (but with better weather and spicier food :-P).
SAY HELLO
Tell me who you are and what is on your mind. I cannot promise to answer everything, but if there is a fit, you will hear back within a week. I can be reaced on vijay.sharma18[at]alumni.iimb.ac.in or on Linkedin
Read my writings → See where I Speak →
बोल कि लब आज़ाद हैं तेरे, बोल ज़बान अब तक तेरी है
Speak, for your lips are free; speak, your tongue is still your own.
~ Faiz Ahmed Faiz
CURRENTLY
Co-Founder & CTO - Silver Oak Health
I run product, technology and information security at Silver Oak Health.. Basically everything that has to hold at 3am when nobody is watching. 600+ companies now trust us with the mental wellbeing of 4.5 million of their employees. 70,000 therapy sessions a year, in 14+ Indian languages, at 99.99% uptime. Built without venture money, in a country where bootstrapped usually means stuck. The constraint made the company better, though that only becomes obvious in hindsight. The part nobody tells you is that the hard problems were almost never technology problems.
Angel Investor
Backing early-stage founders with my own money. Enterprise tech, consumer, future of work. I look for people who understand their customers properly and are solving boring but important problems. People first, always. I have also sat through enough pitches now to know that the founders who say we will figure it out usually do not.
Exploring
How AI actually changes the way businesses get built. Not the keynote version of that question, the version where it changes what you hire for, how you sell, and what stops being worth doing at all. What it takes to build technology companies from India for the world. Products, not services. I write and speak about all of it as I work it out, rather than after.
IN THE PAST
MyFirstCampus, my first company
A computer-adaptive assessment platform to help companies find good people straight out of college. Got into SAP's Startup Studio, grew it to 18 people. I was 22 and had no real idea how to manage even one of them. Ran 18 months, then it did not. The market was not ready and honestly neither was I. Most expensive education of my life, and also the most useful, which is an annoying thing to be true.
SAP, twice
First as a software engineer, learning how software gets built when thousands of companies need it not to break. Then back in as Product Owner on one of their AI suites, probably the youngest they had at 26. I once showed a client a redesign I was proud of. Fewer clicks, cleaner screens, very startup. He looked at it and asked, where are all my buttons? That is the whole lesson. Enterprise software is not about user experience, it is about user confidence. When somebody's job depends on your software behaving identically every Tuesday at 9am, what you call innovation feels like risk to them.
Before any of it
Army kid. Grew up moving between army schools across India, which is its own kind of education.
Started building websites for money in 11th grade. HTML, then WordPress, then things called Drupal and Joomla. Somebody would ask, I would build it. Engineering from a college you have not heard of, and I kept building through it anyway.
Ran Restart India , a national hackathon to get solutions built quickly.
Built TheCovidAnalytics dashboard during peak pandemic chaos to make data understandable
WHAT I BELIEVE
Enterprise software is about user confidence, not user experience.
AI does not replace judgment. It just makes bad judgment faster.
India is not one market. It is 28.
Constraints do not make you scrappy. They make you correct.
The best business lessons come from the things that contradict what the frameworks told you.
WHEN I AM NOT BUILDING
Delivered a TEDx talk on why you will never be happy, and why not every problem needs a solution
Spent time at IIM Bangalore learning about business. The best strategies come from actually talking to customers, not slide decks
Read somewhere between 40 and 50 books a year. Most are useless, but the three or four that land, really land.
Big fan of Urdu poetry, Published a 2025 Shayari Calendar, because the world needs more Urdu poetry and fewer pitch decks.
Spend a fair amount of time defending the opinion that chai is not a beverage, it is a emotion.
Originally from Pilani, a sleepy desert town in Rajasthan whose biggest claim to fame is BITS. Now based in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India (but with better weather and spicier food :-P).
SAY HELLO
Tell me who you are and what is on your mind. I cannot promise to answer everything, but if there is a fit, you will hear back within a week. I can be reached on vijay.sharma18[at]alumni.iimb.ac.in or on Linkedin
बोल कि लब आज़ाद हैं तेरे, बोल ज़बान अब तक तेरी है
Speak, for your lips are free; speak, your tongue is still your own.
~ Faiz Ahmed Faiz