We were neighbours twice

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.

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.

I got an offer from Head Digital Works building A23. Online rummy, millions of users, real scale. I took it and stayed for three years. 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. We shipped the leaderboards well and fast; then the wallet, transaction summaries, bonus flows, and eventually A23 Poker. The React team stopped being the small team.

In October 2025, India announced a ban on online gaming. The next day it was law. The company let most people go with generous severance, and offered me a place to stay with a thirty-percent pay cut. I said no. The company I'd be staying at wasn't the company I'd joined, and the whole reason I'd started learning software was so I could eventually build my own thing.

I went home and called Sairam.

We'd already been building software together for years. The first thing we built was Jot Journal, a journaling app for iOS and Android, weekends and after work for two or three years. By the time it was live with about ten thousand downloads, we needed a company to own it. 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. 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.

When I left A23, the wrapper became the work. 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. None of that shows up in a fixed paycheque on a fixed day. The compensation for the uncertainty is that everything you build is yours.

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. 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.