We were neighbours twice

The founding of Pivot & Anchor, as told by Spruha Chitturu · May 2026

This is one half of the story. Sairam will tell his own at some point, and the two together will be the whole of it. Until then, this is mine.

The first time, it was an accident of where our families landed. 2009, LB Nagar, Hyderabad. I was nine and Sairam was fourteen. Someone had started a cricket game in the parking lot of our apartment building and we both joined. He's been my closest friend for sixteen years.

The second time, it was a choice. We both came back to Hyderabad as adults and picked apartments two minutes apart in Kondapur — different blocks, same neighbourhood. Six years now. Pivot & Anchor gets built either at his desk or mine, two minutes down the road.

The company exists because the friendship did first. I want to be honest about that, because I think most founder stories pretend the order was the other way around.

He's a younger sibling too. I think that's why the five-year age gap never felt like one. He talked to me like a peer from the first conversation. Sixteen years later he still does.

I didn't choose software for romantic reasons.

I was in the middle of an automobile engineering degree at Manipal when COVID hit, and the long stretch of empty lockdown time gave me space to look at where I was heading. The placement offers in automobile didn't add up to the life I wanted. The software offers did. I spent the next two years teaching myself — YouTube, Udemy, daily — without knowing whether I'd like it.

It turned out I did. But the reason I started was practical. Software is one of the few fields where the cost of entry is your attention, not your family's money. For someone without capital, that mattered more than passion.

Placements came around. None of mine landed. I applied to ten or fifteen companies a day for months. My parents were supportive in the way Indian parents are when they're worried but choose not to say so. I had no track record to base my confidence on, and somehow I held it anyway. I'm still not sure where that came from. I'm glad it stayed.

I got an offer from Care India in September 2022. The work didn't match the pay, and that made me uneasy about the company itself, so I kept applying. By the 26th of the same month I had an offer from Head Digital Works, building A23 — online rummy, millions of users, real scale. I took it and stayed for three years.

I learned more at A23 than I had in any previous four years combined.

The way you stop being treated like a junior on a software team is by being handed something everyone expects to be small and turning it into something that wasn't. Within a month of joining, I was given the Rummy leaderboards. The React team had always been the smaller team at A23 — iOS and Android took the marquee work — and leaderboards were a quick web-based feature to avoid app store submissions.

We shipped it well and shipped it fast. After that came the wallet, transaction summaries, bonus flows, and eventually A23 Poker — a separate product from Rummy, a real business in its own right. The React team stopped being the small team.

In October 2025, India announced a ban on online gaming. The next day it was law. We were told to go home for ten days. When we came back, the company let most people go with generous severance. They offered me a place to stay, with a thirty-percent pay cut.

I said no.

The offer was kind. But the company I'd be staying at wasn't the company I'd joined, and the whole reason I'd started learning software in the first place was so I could eventually build my own thing. Taking that offer was the slow road back to the same problem.

I went home and called Sairam.

We'd already been building software together for years by then.

It started, like most things between us, because of something stupid. I was back in Hyderabad in 2022 looking for jobs, and my brother and I wanted Sairam to play Dota with us one night. He said he was busy — he had to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for his job. I'd been writing code daily for two years. I told him I'd teach him the next day, come play tonight. We played all night. The next day we started writing software together.

The first thing we built was Jot Journal — a journaling app for iOS and Android. We worked on it on weekends and after work for two or three years. By the time it was live with about ten thousand downloads, we realised we needed a company to own it, mostly for the legal and taxation parts of releasing paid apps internationally. We incorporated Pivot & Anchor in April 2024.

The name comes from how we work together. I pivot. Often, sometimes too often. Sairam is the anchored one — values, foundations, the friend who reminds me to stay in my lane when I'm about to chase the next shiny thing for the wrong reason. The first time we said the words out loud we realised the dynamic isn't unique to us. Most people have one of these natures more than the other. Most teams need both and only have one. We had both because we were both.

For the first year, Pivot & Anchor was more an envelope than a studio. A legal wrapper around our weekend projects.

When I left A23, the wrapper became the work.

The last six months have been gigs, networking, building a client book, writing software for people who hire us. Some of the work overlaps with what we'd build for ourselves anyway. Some of it pays for the runway to figure out what we want to build for ourselves. We've been deliberate about the difference.

What nobody warned me about cleanly enough is that the code is the easy part. Quoting work without underselling yourself, negotiating without flinching, collecting on invoices that have been outstanding for weeks, building a foundation strong enough that the rest can stand on it — none of that shows up in a fixed paycheque on a fixed day. All of it is uncertain. The compensation for the uncertainty is that everything you build is yours.

Touch wood — things are turning out. We have work. We have a few clients we respect. The studio is starting to look like a real thing.

Sairam is serving his notice period at Enmovil as I write this. He finishes in a few weeks. After that, both of us are doing this full-time. Both of us building Pivot & Anchor instead of building for someone else.

People ask whether a friendship survives becoming a business. Sixteen years in, I can say it doesn't just survive — it gets sharper. We argue about software the way we used to argue about Dota. We trust each other to say when one of us is being stupid. Nothing builds up because nothing has room to. He's two minutes away down the block.

The hardest part of starting a company is the business itself. The easiest part is who I'm doing it with.

We started by accident in 2009 in a parking lot.

We started, for real, in April 2024.

We started, for keeps, in October 2025.

We're still starting.

— Pivot & Anchor

This was Spruha's half of how Pivot & Anchor began. Sairam's half is still being written.