The long, unlikely version.

It starts in the control room of a multi-fuel thermal power plant — coal, oil, gas, three fuel paths and a great deal of steam — and ends, for now, somewhere between attention matrices and the warm side of a Pink Floyd record. In Between: a business education from IIM, then years of driving business strategiesacross industries. Then founding an insurtech company.

Around the day jobs there’s been a parallel life — teaching physics and chemistry, and advising or co-building startups in ed-tech, lending, logistics, shipping, furniture, luthiery, and studio management. Different industries, same instinct: find the system, find the leverage, build.

Underneath all of it: a guitarist and composer who builds tube amplifiers and transmission-line speakers by hand. The name is a double meaning — David Gilmour’s black Stratocaster, and the engineer’s habit of taking a black-box system apart until it stops being one.