Krishnan's Personal Website

In the year 2011, I lost my maternal grandfather. Few days later I also had to shutdown my company. In a matter of few weeks I was jobless and also mourning a family member’s loss.

This is when I reached out to my last boss through his website. I wanted to get into Linux system administration and hence reached out to him, hoping that I would get an opportunity. How I landed on his website is a totally different story.

While filling up the contact form on his website I had no idea that I would get a reply from a real human. Contact forms are notorious to have your emails buried deep down in someone’s inbox or might end up as spam in the recipient’s inbox.

Anyway, I went ahead and filled up the contact form and left it at that.

To my surprise I received an email the next day. We exchanged emails and I started working with my new boss from the 1st of September 2011. His name is Warren.

While working with Warren I obviously learnt about managing Linux servers and the opensource world.

But the one most important thing that I learnt from him was to become a good consultant, actually a good independent consultant. This one lesson was the key for my growth post my days of working with Warren. I was able to create opportunities on my own.

It helped me in building successful businesses and launch software products on my own. From my days of working with Warren, I was able to configure and manage a Linux server, deploy and host web applications, sell products to customers. Which means I was able to launch products on my own.

The period from 2011 to 2013 (the period I worked with Warren) were the golden days for me, both professionally and personally.

But by the end of 2013 Warren decided to move out of India the company that we worked for was acquired by a competitor. Things didn’t go well for me with the new company so I moved out.

I was back to looking for job opportunities and could not find much that I could fit into. I even applied for a job at Freshworks (it was Freshdesk back then and was comparatively a smaller team).

Every effort of mine was a dead end. So with all options exhausted I decided to venture out on my own. I got an investor in and started my company. In the next few weeks we even got our first customer.

As I was training a bunch of users at my client’s office, I got a call from Freshdesk asking me to come for an interview. The irony with my life is I get bombarded with job opportunities when I don’t need one and when I’m actually looking for a job, there is hardly anyone out there who wants to hire me. :-)

Things got busy with the new company and I lost touch with a lot of people and above all lost touch with my old boss, Warren.

On 15th of July 2019, I received a message on LinkedIn from Warren. He was coming to India and wanted to meet me. I was surprised and excited at the same time. It’s been 6 long years since we worked together.

I met him at a bar in the hotel on the 20th of July 2019. I was an hour late. I walked into the bar and I was happy to see him after a long time. We had a few drinks and talked for nearly 3 hours. It was a good meeting. I was happy to get connected to Warren once again after almost 6 years.

We took some snaps said our goodbyes and he walked towards the lift and I towards the car park. I have not had a boss after Warren, he taught me enough that I had been doing fine without a boss since then.