The Journey Between the Headlines

The ups, the downs, and everything they taught me - reflections from my journey so far.

People usually write about their journey at two moments: when they raise money, and when they exit. I've come to feel the most honest writing happens at a third moment - when the dust has settled and you can finally see clearly what actually happened. This is me, trying to do that.

Where it started

I come from a family where nobody had ever done business - no dhanda of any kind. Farmers and government jobs, that was our world. There was no uncle to call for advice, no dinner-table talk of markets or companies. So when I started out, I didn't know how to make a pitch. I didn't know what a PPT for investors even looked like. Honestly, I didn't know that raising funds was a thing you could do :) Everything - every single thing - I learned along the way, mostly by getting it wrong first.

My entrepreneurial life began at IIT Kharagpur - not in a garage, but in a hostel room, juggling academics with ideas that refused to leave me alone. While still a student, I started iwanttutor and eStudyCorner, connecting students with tutors for personalised learning. Then came dateIITians, and later COGXIO - yes, I built dating platforms, of all things, in an India that wasn't quite sure how to talk about them yet. I ran LivingStylish, a lifestyle magazine, because I've always believed content and community are as much a product as software is. I also built LiveOnGO, a health and finance product - my first real brush with the two sectors that would later define Artivatic.

All of these eventually came together under Fullerene Solutions, a consulting and analytics firm I built as the umbrella - part portfolio, part laboratory, part survival vehicle. Along the way I worked on projects with organisations like DRDO and IOCL, learning how large institutions think while my own ventures taught me how scrappy ones survive.

Some of these worked a little, most didn't, and every single one taught me something no classroom could: that building is a habit, not an event. You don't become a founder the day you register a company. You become one the day you stop being able to not build.

Those early ventures - the ones nobody remembers - were my real MBA. An edtech platform taught me distribution. A dating app taught me consumer psychology. A magazine taught me storytelling. A consulting firm taught me cash flow discipline.

And sales - I learned sales the hard way, in every form it comes. B2C taught me speed and emotion. B2B taught me patience and process. B2B2C taught me how to keep multiple layers aligned at once. And B2G, which came later, taught me endurance - government sales is a marathon where the finish line keeps moving, but when the impact lands, it lands at scale. Each model humbles you in its own way. Together, they taught me how to sell before I had a product, how to survive when the bank balance said I shouldn't, and how to start again on a Monday after everything collapsed on a Friday.

Artivatic: the defining chapter

In 2017-18, carrying everything those earlier ventures had taught me, I started Artivatic with a simple conviction: insurance and healthcare in India ran on decisions that were slow, opaque, and human-limited, and AI could change that. We built an end-to-end platform for underwriting, claims, risk, and onboarding - long before "AI" was a word every pitch deck opened with.

It was brutal and beautiful. Explaining AI to industry leaders in 2018 was like selling umbrellas in a drought - everyone agreed rain might come someday. We fought for every enterprise logo, every renewal, every believer. The 0-to-1 phase tests your ideas. The 1-to-10 phase tests your stamina. And the 10-to-100 phase - the one nobody warns you about - tests your soul.

In 2022, Artivatic was acquired. On paper, that's the happy ending. A founder from a small-town background, building an AI company, being acquired by a larger group. The LinkedIn version writes itself.

The real version is more complicated - and the complication was mostly inside my own head.

What acquisition actually taught me

Here is the lesson I paid the most for: an acquisition is not the merging of two companies. It is the meeting of many perspectives - and I had prepared for only one of them: mine.

When I sold the company, I carried a vision into the new house - of what the combined entity could become, of the product reaching a scale I couldn't reach alone, of my team growing under a bigger umbrella. What I hadn't fully appreciated is simple in hindsight: everyone in a large organisation sees the same opportunity through their own lens - their targets, their timelines, their priorities. That's not a flaw in people. That's just how organisations work. My mistake was assuming my vision would translate on its own, without me building the alignment, the structure, and the shared incentives to carry it.

The vision I had - the one I sold the company for, not just the price I sold it at - didn't fully reach the ground. Looking back, a big part of that is on me. I treated the signing of the deal as the finish line, when it was actually the starting line of a much harder job: integration. Visions don't survive on passion alone inside a larger system. They survive on alignment - and alignment has to be designed, not assumed. I hadn't designed it.

I don't say any of this with bitterness, and I hold no complaints against anyone. Everyone I worked with was doing their job sincerely within their own context. If I could go back and tell my 2022 self one thing, it would be this: the deal is the beginning of the work, not the end of it - and building alignment is the founder's job, before and after the signature.

Trust, but not blindly

I grew up believing trust is the foundation of everything in business. I still believe that. But my definition has matured.

Earlier, my trust was binary - I either trusted someone fully or not at all. And when you trust fully, you stop verifying, stop documenting, stop asking uncomfortable questions, because asking feels like an insult to the relationship.

That's not trust. That's abdication dressed up as loyalty.

Real trust - the kind that survives business - is trust with eyes open. Trust the person, verify the process. Trust the intent, document the agreement. Trust the relationship, but respect the reality that every person, however good, operates inside their own responsibilities, pressures, and priorities. Expecting anyone to carry my vision as their own, without me creating the shared ground for it, was my naivety - not their failure.

Learning this cost me. But it was my lesson to learn, and I'd rather learn it at this stage of life than never learn it at all.

The people who became the journey

If I audit fifteen years honestly, the highest-return investment I ever made wasn't in any product or any stock. It was in people.

I attended countless networking events over the years - hackathons, founder meetups, industry conferences. Most conversations there go nowhere, and that's fine. But a handful of connections travel with you for years, resurfacing at moments you could never have predicted - as a customer, an investor, an advisor, a door-opener, or simply a friend who picks up the phone at midnight. You can never tell in advance which handshake will matter. So you show up genuinely for all of them.

What I'm most grateful for is that I didn't just collect contacts - I built relationships. Long-term connections, genuine friendships, people who have seen me at my best and my worst and stayed. Building relations takes years; trust is always the key, and there are no shortcuts to it. A network built on transactions empties itself. A network built on trust compounds - quietly, like everything valuable does.

The chapters in between

There's a phase of the founder journey that rarely makes it into articles: the quieter middle stretches, after the big milestones, when the rhythm of your work changes completely. A founder inside a larger structure is like a river entering a reservoir - the water is the same, but the flow changes. You go from taking twenty decisions a day to waiting for alignment on two. That adjustment asks more of you emotionally than any funding winter I've faced. Nobody prepares you for it, and no term sheet mentions it. I've lived those stretches too, and they've taught me things the highs never could.

But when I zoom out, I also see what the journey did deliver - and I hold on to that with genuine gratitude. My investors, who backed me when AI in insurance sounded like science fiction, got their exit. My team - people who trusted a young founder with their careers - landed on solid ground, with careers that continued and grew. That matters to me more than any headline number. A founder's real balance sheet is the people who bet on him and didn't regret it.

And here's a truth I've made peace with: not every merger is a money-making story. Some are learning stories. Mine has been both, in different proportions than I'd planned. Things don't always work as planned - and accepting that isn't defeat, it's wisdom.

The unexpected turns

If you had asked me five years ago where I'd be today, I would have given you a confident, detailed answer. And I would have been completely wrong.

Life after an acquisition doesn't follow a script. You explore things you never planned to explore. You work in rooms you never imagined sitting in. You discover interests - in infrastructure, in policy, in writing, in things far from your original domain - that reshape how you think. Some doors you knocked on stayed shut. Some doors you never knocked on swung open.

I've stopped treating unexpected turns as detours. They're the actual road. The straight line I imagined at 25 was the fiction. Steve Jobs said it best:

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward."

Standing here today, the dots connect in ways I could never have drawn in advance - the edtech years, the consumer products, the health and finance experiments, the AI conviction, the acquisition. Each one was preparing me for something I couldn't yet see.

What maturity actually feels like

Nobody tells you that maturity in business feels less like winning and more like calming down.

I used to be aggressive - in meetings, in negotiations, in how I pushed for outcomes. The aggression hasn't disappeared, and I don't want it to. But it has changed its address. It now lives in my work, not in my words. I channel it into building, into deadlines, into standards - not into rooms and relationships.

I've learned where to speak and where not to. Where to stay quiet and let silence do the negotiating. Where to take the call myself and where to let others own the decision. These sound like small things, but they took me a decade and a half to learn - and I've come to believe they matter as much as any strategy or skill.

And let me say this honestly: I have never been the smartest person in the room. I've met so many people sharper than me - quicker minds, better degrees, stronger instincts. What I could control was simpler: keep showing up, keep learning, keep going when things looked hopeless. If my journey proves anything, it's that consistency and hunger can take an ordinary person a very long way.

I react less. I assume less. I need less validation. I've learned to sit with ambiguity without forcing a premature answer. I've learned that speed matters, but direction matters more, and that most of my early mistakes came not from moving slowly but from moving fast in the wrong direction because standing still felt unbearable.

Learning, I've realised, is not a phase - it's a constant. If everything else in my life has changed - cities, sectors, roles, companies - one thing has stayed exactly where it was: the hunger to keep learning. New skills, new technologies, new sectors, new ways of thinking - I chase them all, always. I learn something every single day, often from people junior to me, often from failures smaller than the ones that made headlines in my head. The day you think you've graduated from learning is the day you start declining.

And somewhere along the way, I made a quiet decision that changed everything: I choose to be happy. Not happy because everything worked out - plenty didn't - but happy as a discipline. I love learning, I love life, and I've decided my energy belongs to the future, not the past. The past is a teacher, not an address. I visit it for lessons; I don't live there.

What's next

People sometimes ask me what's next. My honest answer: I'm fully present in the chapter I'm in, and I've stopped trying to write future pages in advance. The journey continues exactly where I am - and what lies further ahead, I don't need to know yet. I've learned to be genuinely comfortable with that. Some seasons of life are for sowing, some for harvesting, and some simply for letting the roots grow deeper. Kabir understood this centuries ago:

धीरे-धीरे रे मना, धीरे सब कुछ होय,माली सींचे सौ घड़ा, ऋतु आए फल होय।Slowly, slowly, O mind - everything happens in its own time. The gardener may pour a hundred pots of water, but the fruit comes only in its season.

These years have given me not a roadmap, but a set of lessons - earned the expensive way. That alignment matters more than agreements. That trust needs structure, not just sentiment. That a vision has to survive contact with the real world, not just live in someone's head. The acquisition, the integration that taught me more than the build did, the people, the unexpected turns - none of it feels like a list of scars anymore. It feels like an education I didn't know I had enrolled in.

The first innings taught me how to build. The middle innings taught me how the world actually works. Whatever life brings next, it will find a wiser player at the crease.

To every founder reading this who is somewhere in the middle of their own messy chapter: the setback you're in right now is probably not the ending you fear. It's the education you didn't order. Take the lesson. Stay in the game.

The journey continues. It always does.

- Layak Singh

Thank you for reading. If this resonated with you, I write regularly about entrepreneurship, AI, and lessons from the journey - you can explore more articles on this site or connect with me on LinkedIn. And if you're a founder in the middle of your own messy chapter, I'd genuinely love to hear your story.