The morning I knew
Going independent in 2016 after six years running a listed real estate company — what changed, and what stayed.
One morning in 2016, I knew.
For close to two and a half years, we had been building toward a single agreement: bringing branded residences to one of our township projects. Done right, it would have reset the bar for that segment in India. The signing itself was the kind of moment you don't easily forget — a room in London, a contract that carried two years of conviction, a board approval that had come through two days before, a feeling that everything we had planned was finally about to actually move.
I came back to Mumbai. And almost immediately, I was told that for some reason, we couldn't go ahead.
That morning was the moment I knew the seat wasn't mine anymore.
What I was proud of
The chair at Kolte-Patil Developers Limited was a good one.
When I joined as CEO in 2010, KPDL was a hundred-crore company. By the time I left in 2016, we were a thousand-crore company. The stock price followed, and the team scaled the benchmarks for sales, execution, and new project launches at the same time. I had inherited a company with a great value system and one of the most decent promoter groups in Indian real estate. After the IPO, the company had drifted a little off course. A real part of my work was getting it back to the place that genuinely belonged to it.
In 2015 we ran NestFest — a single-developer exhibition no one in Indian real estate had attempted at that scale. It generated real bookings and reset the playbook for how we sold projects. IIMA later wrote a case study on it. We had championed KPDL's entry into Mumbai back in 2012, with close to nine projects in pipeline by the time I left.
What made any of it possible was something less measurable than the numbers: the working freedom the promoters gave the professional team. It was unusual for an Indian family business, and it built a symbiotic dynamic — the company pushed us to stretch our professional learning, and we in turn pushed the company outward. None of the milestones above happens without that.
It was a good seat. That's why it was hard to leave.
The wall I couldn't move
Somewhere around 2014, it became clear that the next decade of real estate was going to look very different from the last one.
The advertising channel was already moving. When I started, we sold projects through print and outdoor hoardings. By 2011 or 2012, Google ads, Facebook, SEO, and digital lead generation had become the centre of customer acquisition. Real estate companies that hadn't noticed yet were going to find themselves behind in a few years.
At the same time, project sizes were growing, and Excel, Word and Microsoft Project — the tools the previous decade had used to run developments — weren't enough anymore. We needed a real governance and project-management system. So I signed up with IBM to run a business process transformation exercise.
It started well. We got the system. We didn't get the transformation underneath it.
The reason wasn't strategic. It was human. A large part of our workforce had been with the company for a long, long time. The mindset shift the next decade required met with quiet resistance — not loud opposition, just inertia that bent every decision back toward the older way. After a while I realized the wall I was trying to move wasn't actually a wall. It was the foundation. And you don't transform a foundation; you build a new one.
That was the moment the answer began to form.
The morning, again
The branded-residences agreement was the last thing I was holding onto — the proof that maybe, with one more big win, the transformation could be forced from the inside.
When the agreement collapsed the morning after London, I stopped holding on. It was time to hand the reins to someone who could lead KPDL into its next chapter on its own terms. I wasn't going to be that person, and the company deserved someone who would be.
The first year, on my own
The first year independent was answered with three questions, not three plans.
The first was financial. What are the bare minimum annual expenses for my family, and how do I make sure the adverse effects of my decisions don't rub off on the people I love most? That was the most difficult thing. I had to know the floor before I could build a ceiling.
The second was directional. Where do I actually start? Real estate is a massive, capital-intensive industry with so many moving parts that when you're between roles, everything looks like a starting point. Most of those starting points aren't yours. Figuring out which two or three actually were mine was the key.
The third was about the team. Above all, I needed people who believed in me. Beyond that, people with high willpower, who were agile, and who understood the nuances of starting from zero — a very specific kind of person. They're not always the ones you'd hire for a large established company. Often they're the opposite.
Years on
Two things have come into focus that 2016-me wouldn't have fully understood.
The first is about what the chair actually is. A CEO chair is a platform for impact — the leverage to deploy capital and people at scale on problems an existing company is built to tackle. After a while, the platform can start to feel like part of you. It isn't. A founder's chair gives you something different: the freedom to aim at problems too big to fit inside any existing platform — and the work of building new ones for them. The years since have been that work, on terms I chose.
The second is about problems. As CEO, I felt I could counter most problems that came my way. Those were, in hindsight, maybe two out of ten on the difficulty scale. As a founder, you spend your day on the remaining eight. Every morning brings a new one. The years have taught me that every morning, I am on the lookout for a new missile, and the only thing I know for certain is that it will come from a direction I haven't seen before.
I'm now building three companies in parallel — TRU Realty, TREOS, and Infradawn Capital — across the development, technology, and capital sides of Indian real estate. None of them existed when I left the chair.
If someone asked me whether it was worth it, I would say this: the worst day as a founder is harder than the worst day as a CEO. But the day is yours — the missteps, the wins, and the seat itself. Years on, that ownership has turned out to matter more than I expected.
P.S. — Missiles acche hain. The one on the morning of 2016 propelled me. The ones every morning now propel my companies.