Three weeks before the Aichi-Nagoya Games opened, I sat down and made a bet in public. I called the piece “The Fire Returns to Asia,” and in it I told anyone reading that India would land somewhere between 100 and 112 medals, that beating Hangzhou’s record of 107 was more likely than not, and that 24 to 30 golds was a coin flip tilting slightly in our favour. I was specific about the sports too. Archery would need five golds just to match Hangzhou. Shooting would dip from 22 medals to something closer to 15 or 18, with Manu Bhaker and Esha Singh carrying the discipline’s best gold hopes. Boxing, badminton, hockey, kabaddi and cricket would all be as strong as Hangzhou, maybe stronger.
I want to come back to that bet before this piece is done, because a prediction only means something if you’re willing to grade it afterward. But first, the story, because for nine days it looked like I’d badly misjudged the whole thing.
Nine days in, India sat 12th on the medal table. Twelfth. Behind Kazakhstan. Behind Chinese Taipei. For a country carrying the weight of a historic 107-medal haul from three years earlier, that number on the screen felt like a verdict nobody wanted to read out loud, and it felt like my own prediction piece had aged badly within a week of being published.
Shooting told the story first, and not the way I’d hoped. I’d written that the discipline would land somewhere between 15 and 18 medals, a managed decline from Hangzhou’s 22. The medals arrived roughly on schedule by the end, 15 in total, but the golds did not. Five days went by without a single one, and for a discipline carrying genuine world champions in pistol and rifle, that’s not a minor stumble. That’s a program built on some of the most consistent performers in the world failing to convert pedigree into podiums exactly when it mattered, and it set an uneasy tone for everything that followed.
Athletics was the sport where I got the direction right and the scale badly wrong. I’d expected the golds to dip from Hangzhou’s six, because losing Neeraj removes a certain gold and there’s no quietly replacing an Olympic and world champion. What I didn’t expect was for the dip to turn into a collapse. One gold against nine silvers and fourteen bronzes. Twenty four medals is not a small return, and in a strange way it matches the “respectable volume” I’d forecast. But a program that finds the podium twenty four times and the top step only once is a program that kept circling the thing it actually came for, and in the medal table that gets printed in the newspapers, that counts for a lot less than the number twenty four suggests.
Then there were the disciplines that simply didn’t show up at all. I’d grouped badminton with boxing, hockey, kabaddi and cricket as sports that would be as strong as Hangzhou or stronger. Three of those four calls held up completely. Badminton did not. It left with a single bronze, no gold, nothing close to what a growing talent base and real individual players on tour should have produced. Tennis left with nothing. Table tennis managed one bronze, same as badminton. For a country with real strength building in all three sports, that’s a hard set of results to explain away, and the honest answer is probably the one that applies to most underperformance at a multi-sport Games: the draw was unkind in places, the form wasn’t there in others, and sometimes the better athlete on the day was simply standing across the net.
Squash stings a little more than the others, because India has genuine pedigree here. The team events, where we’ve historically matched the best in Asia, came away with silvers and bronzes but no gold, and anyone who has followed Indian squash over the past decade knows that’s a shortfall against what the pipeline should be delivering.
Nine days of that, and 12th place stopped looking like an anomaly. It started looking like a fair reflection of how the Games were actually going, and like a fair rebuke of a prediction piece written three weeks earlier with more hope than evidence behind the headline number.
Then something changed, and it changed fast, in two bursts that will get replayed for years.
On October 2nd, India won six golds in a single day. The women’s hockey team ended a forty four year wait for gold. A teenager won India’s first ever women’s individual recurve archery title. Wrestling and boxing supplied the rest between them. India’s previous best single day at any Asian Games had brought three golds, at the Hangzhou 2022 Games. This doubled it, in one afternoon, and nobody saw it coming on the morning of October 2nd, least of all me.
The very next day, October 3rd, India delivered five more golds across five different sports, including Pranavi Urs’s historic individual golf gold, finishing fifteen under par across four rounds, with the team adding a silver alongside it. Two more Olympic quotas for LA 2028 were confirmed the same day. Archery finished the Games on top of its own medal table outright, five golds from nine total medals, exactly the number I’d said we needed just to match Hangzhou, and we didn’t just match it, we topped the discipline entirely.
Boxing and wrestling deserve to be read together, because they tell two versions of the same thing: a discipline doing better than it looked capable of nine days earlier. Boxing topped its own medal table outright, three golds and three bronzes, Lovlina Borgohain, Parveen Hooda and Ankush Panghal all winning on that one October afternoon, ahead of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, who each managed two golds. Wrestling’s tally reads smaller on paper, two golds from Aman Sehrawat and Sujeet Kalkal, two silvers, two bronzes, six medals in total, but it’s India’s best wrestling haul at any Asian Games since 1962, and it came from a squad that had already lost entire weight categories to pre-Games doping suspensions before a single bout was wrestled. Six medals out of a weakened squad isn’t a consolation prize. It’s a program finding a way to still show up.
Hockey deserves to be told as two separate stories, because the two golds arrived on two different days for two different reasons. The women’s gold on October 2nd carried the heavier historical weight, their first Asian Games title in forty four years, a result that says the program has crossed from promising to genuinely elite rather than merely improving. The men closed the Games on the final day, beating Malaysia 5-1, continuing a decade-long rebuild into a genuine force. Kabaddi matched both, with the men’s team beating Iran 40-34 and the women’s team beating Iran 37-34 in the same window, two golds exactly as I’d predicted, maybe the one call in this entire piece that aged perfectly. Cricket closed it out the way a cricket nation expects, the men beating Pakistan on the final day to defend their title, a result that was always going to dominate the headlines back home regardless of what happened in the other fifty plus disciplines competing for attention that week.
Final tally: 85 medals. 21 gold, 27 silver, 37 bronze. Second best haul in the country’s history, behind only the 107 from Hangzhou. Fourth place overall, exactly where we finished three years ago, with a smaller pile of medals to show for it this time.
Now here’s the number that matters more than the final count, and it’s the one that should actually decide how this Games gets remembered. Among Olympic program events specifically, the ones that carry weight into LA 2028, India won seventeen golds this time against twelve in Hangzhou. That gold haul now makes up 81 percent of India’s total golds, up from 43 percent three years ago. A separate but related number tells the medal story more broadly: Olympic events accounted for 72 percent of India’s overall medal count this time, up from 61 percent in Hangzhou, on a smaller base of 61 medals against 65. Fewer total medals from these events, in other words, but a sharply higher share of them turning into gold, and a sharply higher share of everything India won coming from the sports that actually matter for the next Olympics. That’s not a country winning less. That’s a country winning narrower and sharper, in exactly the direction that pays off two years from now.
So, back to the bet. I was wrong about the scale, not quietly wrong but wrong by a real margin. 85 medals against a floor I’d set at 100. 21 golds against a floor of 24. I called shooting’s decline roughly right in number and badly wrong in timing, I called athletics’ direction right and its depth badly wrong, and I called badminton’s strength with real confidence and no business doing so. But I was right about archery needing five golds to hold its ground, and we didn’t just hold it, we topped the table. I was right that hockey, kabaddi and cricket would be as strong as Hangzhou or stronger, and two of those three were stronger by a margin I hadn’t actually allowed for in the piece. The pattern, if there is one, is that I trusted the macro number more than I trusted the sports I actually know, and the sports I know came through while the top-line arithmetic didn’t.
The worry from these Games is obvious and I won’t dress it up. A team that needs nine days to find its rhythm at a multi-sport Games is leaving performance on the table early that a better prepared campaign would have banked before anyone started counting days. Shooting’s gold drought, the near shutout in racket sports, the missed depth in athletics, these aren’t footnotes to wave away with the archery and hockey golds that came later. They’re the actual homework for the next four years, and no prediction piece I write before LA 2028 should pretend otherwise.
The optimism is just as real, and it’s not the kind that needs rounding up to feel good. A country that can produce eleven golds across two days, more than half its final gold count inside forty eight hours, that can end a forty four year wait for hockey gold and open a new chapter in Olympic golf in the same week, has genuine, broad based strength across more disciplines than it’s had at any point since these Games began mattering to the national conversation. The quotas banked in hockey and archery mean LA 2028 starts with places already secured rather than qualification campaigns still to be run. That’s real value, locked in now, regardless of how the next two years of form go.
My own target for the next two editions of these Games is top three, and I’ll say plainly that it requires closing the gap in shooting, finding genuine depth in racket sports, and most of all finding the Aichi-Nagoya version of this team on day one instead of day eleven. The talent that produced the final five days clearly exists inside this contingent. The job now is building a program that doesn’t need to fall to 12th before it remembers how to find it, and writing a prediction piece in four years that trusts the sports I actually understand a little more than the headline number I want to be true.
LA 2028 is the next real marker. The quotas are banked. The harder work, closing the distance between the team that showed up for the first nine days and the one that showed up for the last five, starts now. And the next time I put a number in print before a Games begins, I’ll remember exactly how this one went.
Tom found the problem on a Tuesday in the last week of September, which, as it turned out, was about the most expensive week of the year to find anything.
He was the head of ecommerce and technology at a homeware and gifting retailer in Leeds. Good brand, loyal customers, a website doing a little over eighteen million pounds a year. And like most gifting businesses, a shape to the year that anyone who’s worked in retail will recognise instantly: steady for nine months, then nearly forty percent of the annual revenue arriving between October and December.
The problem wasn’t dramatic. That was part of what made it dangerous.
One of his two engineers, a quiet, careful man called Sam, had been looking at checkout logs for an unrelated reason and noticed something odd. On mobile, at the step where customers type a postcode and pick their address from a list, the address lookup service was timing out. Not often. About one mobile checkout in forty. When it happened, the customer saw a spinner that never finished. Some of them tried again. Roughly half of them didn’t. They just closed the tab.
Sam brought it to Tom with a laptop and a slightly apologetic face, the way good engineers do when they’ve found something nobody asked them to find.
“How long has this been happening?” Tom asked.
Sam scrolled. “At least since June. Maybe longer. The logs don’t go back further.”
Tom is not one person. Like Daniel, Priya and Hannah from the last few weeks, he’s a composite of the heads of technology and ecommerce I’ve sat across from over the years, built from real conversations so the story holds together. But the decision he’s about to face is one I’ve watched real people face every single autumn for a very long time, and it’s the reason I wanted to write this in the last week of September rather than any other.
Tom’s company, like a great many businesses in India and plenty in the UK, ran its financial year from April to March. Which meant that on the first of October, Q3 began. And Q3, October to December, is where the year is really won or lost: peak season, the busiest weeks, the least patient customers, and year-end pressure building underneath all of it, ahead of Q4, when the whole year gets judged. Whatever you haven’t fixed by the time Q3 starts, you’ll be running through it at full speed.
Within about four days of Sam’s discovery, Tom was hearing three completely different answers to the same question, and all three of them sounded reasonable.
The first came from his CFO. Tom raised the checkout issue in their weekly catch-up and got the answer he’d half expected. “Not now. The change freeze starts on the thirty-first of October. The last thing we need is somebody poking around the checkout six weeks before Black Friday. Log it, and do it properly in January.”
It’s worth saying that this is not a foolish position. Change freezes before peak exist for very good reasons. Almost every retailer who’s been around long enough has a story about a well-intentioned change in November that took the site down on the busiest weekend of the year. The CFO was trying to protect the quarter. His instinct was to wait, and in a lot of situations, waiting is exactly right.
The second voice came from a vendor. By coincidence, or perhaps not, an email arrived that same week from a platform agency Tom had spoken to briefly in the spring. It was a well-written email. It talked about peak season, about competitors “already on modern stacks,” about the risk of “going into Christmas on a platform that can’t keep up.” It proposed a full replatform, starting immediately, with a discount for signing before the end of October. Six months of work, the email said, but they could “prioritise the checkout rebuild” to get something live before peak.
I’ve been in sales for twenty-seven years. I know exactly how that email gets written, and why it arrives in late September. The urgency in it was real, but it didn’t belong to Tom. It belonged to a sales team with a quarter to close. A six-month replatform started in October doesn’t land before Christmas. It lands in the middle of Christmas, half built, with your checkout team split between the old system and the new one at exactly the moment you need all of them on one.
The third voice was Sam’s. It was the quietest of the three, and it came with a complication. Sam thought the fix was small. Swap the address lookup provider for one that handled load better, put the new one behind a switch so it could be turned off instantly, and roll it out gradually. Three weeks of careful work, maybe a little less. But Sam had also told Tom, a fortnight earlier, that he’d accepted a job in Manchester. His last day was the fourteenth of November.
Sam was the only person in the building who fully understood the checkout.
So there it was. Wait until January and the start of Q4, when the person who understood the checkout would be gone. Rebuild everything now, on somebody else’s sales calendar. Or try to squeeze a careful fix into the four and a half weeks before the freeze, with an engineer who was already halfway out of the door.
Tom told me later that for about three days he really didn’t know which of them was right, and that the uncomfortable truth was that each of them was right about something.
What broke the deadlock was not a meeting. It was Tom sitting at his kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon with a spreadsheet, doing something none of the three voices had done yet. He put a price on waiting.
He’d realised that everyone was arguing about the cost of acting. The CFO was worried about the risk of changing the checkout. The vendor was selling the cost of not modernising. Sam was worried about whether three weeks was enough. Nobody had actually written down what it would cost to leave things exactly as they were.
So he did the arithmetic, and it went roughly like this.
In a normal month, the site had about four hundred thousand mobile sessions. Mobile converted at around two percent, so about eight thousand mobile orders a month, at an average order value of about sixty pounds.
One mobile checkout in forty was hitting the timeout, and about half of those customers were leaving. That’s a little over one percent of mobile orders, about a hundred orders a month, or roughly six thousand pounds a month walking quietly out of the door.
Six thousand pounds a month is annoying. It’s not a crisis. Over three ordinary months, it’s eighteen thousand pounds, and if you’d asked Tom in July, he’d probably have agreed with the CFO that it could wait until the new year.
But October, November and December are not ordinary months. Tom pulled last year’s traffic. October ran at about one and a fifth times a normal month. November and December each ran at about two and a half times. Put those multipliers against the same leak, and the three months of Q3 weren’t worth three normal months of lost orders. They were worth a little over six.
Thirty-seven thousand pounds, instead of eighteen.
The same problem, left alone for the same three months, would cost roughly double, purely because of which three months they were.
And then Sam added the part that made Tom put his pen down. The timeouts weren’t random. They got worse under load. On one busy Saturday in September, the failure rate had jumped from one in forty to about one in fifteen for a couple of hours. On Black Friday, with several times the traffic, nobody could say how bad it would get. The honest answer was: at least double, and possibly a great deal more, at precisely the moment it would hurt most.
Then there was January. Waiting until January didn’t just mean living with the leak through peak. It meant doing the fix after Sam had gone, with someone who’d never touched the checkout, reading code they didn’t write, in a quarter when the business would already be explaining its year. The fix itself would take longer and cost more. The waiting would have made both halves of the problem more expensive: the leak, and the repair.
I want to be careful with the word “double,” because I’m about to lean on it. There’s no law of nature that says delay costs exactly twice as much. For some businesses, with flat traffic and no peak, waiting a quarter costs almost nothing, and they should wait. For others, it’s a great deal worse than double. Tom’s number happened to come out at roughly twice, on traffic alone, before load and before Sam’s leaving date. Your number will be different. The point isn’t the multiple. The point is that the price of the same problem is almost never constant across the calendar, and most people have never looked at which part of the calendar they’re about to wait through.
What Tom worked out that Sunday, and what I think is the most useful thing in this whole story, was a way of telling the three voices apart.
Every one of them was urgent about something. The question was whose clock each urgency was running on.
The vendor’s urgency ran on the vendor’s clock. The discount expired because their quarter ended, not because anything in Tom’s business changed on the thirty-first of October. That’s the kind of urgency you can almost always afford to wait out. Nothing gets worse for you while their offer expires.
The CFO’s caution ran on a real clock, the change freeze, but it was protecting against the wrong risk. It priced the danger of touching the checkout, and it priced the danger of waiting at zero.
The leak itself ran on Tom’s own clock. It got worse every week that traffic rose, and it would get worse again the day Sam left. That’s the kind of urgency you can’t wait out, because the thing itself is deteriorating while you wait.
So the test Tom arrived at, which I’ve since borrowed and used more times than I can count, is a simple one. When someone tells you something is urgent, ask whose clock it’s running on. If the urgency belongs to the person selling to you, it’s usually safe to wait, and often smart to. If it belongs to your own systems, your customers, or the people who know how things work, you’re probably already late.
Tom went back to the CFO on Monday morning with one page. Not a deck. One page, with the arithmetic on it, and a proposal that wasn’t any of the three options he’d been offered.
Not a replatform. He’d already replied to the vendor, politely, saying he’d look at modernisation properly in the new year, with a proper assessment first, and not before. He told me that sending that email felt oddly good, like refusing to be rushed by someone who wasn’t going to be there when it went wrong.
Not January either. January meant paying the peak price for the leak and then paying more for a slower fix without Sam.
Instead, a small, reversible fix, now, designed specifically so the CFO’s real worry, touching the checkout before peak, could be answered on its own terms.
The new address lookup would sit behind a switch that anyone on the team could turn off in seconds, putting every customer straight back on the old one. It would go live to ten percent of mobile traffic first, then half, then everyone, with a hard deadline: fully live by the twenty-first of October, which left ten clear days of watching it before the freeze on the thirty-first. If anything looked wrong at any stage, the switch went off and they’d wait until January after all, having lost nothing but a few weeks of effort.
And the part Tom was proudest of: Sam wouldn’t build it alone. The second engineer, Aisha, would build it with him, side by side, every line. By the time Sam left for Manchester, the person who knew the checkout best wouldn’t be leaving. It would be Aisha, and she’d have learned it the only way people really learn a system, by changing it with someone who already understood it.
The CFO read the page twice. He asked one question: “If this goes wrong on the twentieth of November, how long until it’s back the way it was?”
“About ten seconds,” Tom said. “We’ve tested it.”
The CFO signed it off before lunch.
I’d love to tell you it went perfectly. It nearly did.
The first ten percent went live on the fourteenth of October. Within a day, the timeout rate for that slice of customers dropped from one in forty to something too small to measure on a normal Tuesday. On the sixteenth, Aisha noticed that a handful of addresses in rural Scotland were being formatted differently by the new provider, which was upsetting the courier’s label printer. They turned the switch off for four hours, fixed the formatting, and turned it back on. Nobody outside the team ever knew.
That’s what a switch is for. It turns a potential disaster into a slightly irritating afternoon.
Everyone was on the new lookup by the twentieth, a day early. The freeze came down on the thirty-first with ten days of clean data behind it. Sam left on the fourteenth of November with a leaving card, a curry, and a checkout that someone else fully understood.
Tom watched the dashboard for most of Black Friday, the way you do. Traffic ran at several times a normal day. At the peak hour, the old address lookup would, by Sam’s September estimates, have been failing somewhere between one checkout in fifteen and one in ten.
The new one failed less than once in a thousand.
When Tom ran the numbers in January, the recovered mobile orders across the quarter came to a little over forty thousand pounds by his own reckoning, slightly more than his kitchen-table estimate, because peak load had been heavier than the year before. The fix had cost three weeks of two engineers’ time. And the thing that doesn’t show up on any spreadsheet: in January, when the business started its proper modernisation assessment, the person leading the checkout workstream already knew the checkout inside out, because she’d rebuilt a piece of it in October.
The vendor emailed again in January too, as it happens. Different discount, same deadline language. Tom forwarded it to the assessment folder and got on with his day.
It would be easy to take the wrong lesson from this and say: always act before peak. That isn’t what Tom did, and it isn’t what I’d tell you.
He said no to one urgent thing and yes to another, and the difference between them wasn’t how loud they were. It was whose clock they ran on, and what waiting would actually cost.
Here’s the method, stripped down to the parts you can use this week.
Write down the thing you’ve been putting off. Not all of them. The one that nags at you. There’s almost always one.
Ask whose clock it’s on. Does it get worse on its own as traffic rises, as load increases, or as someone who understands it gets closer to leaving? If yes, it’s on your clock. If the only deadline is somebody else’s offer or quarter end, it’s on theirs.
Price the wait, not just the fix. Take whatever it’s costing you in a normal month and multiply it by your own peak. Use last year’s traffic. For a lot of businesses, the next three months are worth considerably more than three normal ones. That multiplier is the real price of “we’ll do it in January.”
Split the fix. The choice is rarely between rebuilding everything now and doing nothing until the new year. There’s usually a small, reversible version you can do now, with a way to switch it off instantly, and a proper, assessed piece of work that belongs in the next quarter. Do the first before the freeze and plan the second calmly.
Check who’s leaving. If the person who understands the thing is going before the end of the year, the cheapest knowledge transfer you’ll ever get is having them fix it alongside someone who’s staying.
Not everything should be done before Thursday. If you can’t make the change reversible, if you can’t test it properly in the weeks you have, or if your traffic doesn’t really spike, then waiting until the new year is often the right call, and I’d tell you so. A rushed change in October that breaks something in November is worse than the leak it was trying to fix. The CFO in this story was right to be nervous. He just needed the other half of the sum.
So here’s the offer, and it’s the same one I’d have made to Tom that Sunday afternoon.
Send me the one thing you’ve been putting off, and a rough idea of how your traffic moves over the next three months. I’ll price the cost of waiting for you, properly, the way Tom did at his kitchen table: what it costs if you leave it until January, what a small reversible fix before your freeze would look like, and what should honestly wait for a proper assessment in the new year. You’ll have it in writing within a week.
And if the answer is that it can wait, which it sometimes is, I’ll tell you that too. You’ll have lost nothing but an email, and you’ll go into the busiest three months of the year knowing the price of what you’re carrying, rather than finding out on Black Friday.
Your Q3 starts on Thursday. The cheapest day this year to fix the thing on your mind is probably one of the next two.
At half past one in the morning, Hannah’s phone lit up on the bedside table with a notification from her bank.
£18.50, paid to her own company.
That part was normal. Hannah had been customer number seven of the coffee subscription business she now ran the technology for. She’d signed up on launch day to test the checkout, and she’d never cancelled, partly out of loyalty and partly because the coffee was good. Every month, in the small hours, the renewal job billed her along with everyone else. She usually slept through it.
She was awake that night only because it was the night the clocks went back, and she’d stayed up reading, enjoying the extra hour the way you do.
An hour later, just after the clocks rolled back, the phone lit up again.
£18.50, paid to her own company.
She picked it up and looked at the two notifications, one above the other. Same amount. Same merchant. And the same timestamp on both of them: 01:30.
It took her a few seconds to understand what she was looking at. When she did, she sat up very straight in bed, because she knew that if it had happened to customer number seven, it was happening, at that moment, to everyone.
Hannah isn’t one person. Like Daniel and Priya from the last few weeks, she’s a composite of the CTOs and heads of technology I’ve sat across from over the years, built from real conversations so the story holds together. But every beat of what happens to her next has happened, in one shape or another, to someone real. Some of it more than once.
Here’s the business, so you can feel the size of what was about to go wrong.
A specialty coffee subscription, based in Bristol, about twelve thousand four hundred active subscribers. Nothing enormous, but a real business with real margins, a warehouse team that started picking orders at six every Monday morning, and a board that had just approved a second roastery. Hannah ran technology with exactly one in-house engineer, Josh, who was very good and very tired, and who was that week on his first proper holiday in two years, in Lisbon.
The platform itself had been built by an agency about two years earlier. Good work, by everyone’s account. When the build finished, the agency did what agencies do: they moved the account across to their support desk and moved their best people on to the next project. The lead developer, a man called Marcus who understood every corner of the system, had left the agency altogether the following spring.
There was a support contract. Hannah had read it when it was signed. It promised a one-hour response, around the clock, for any P1 incident. It defined a P1, in the kind of clause nobody reads twice, as “complete or substantial unavailability of the service.”
There was monitoring, too. A tidy dashboard with green lights for the website, the checkout, the database, and the payment gateway. Hannah opened it on her phone at 01:33, with the two notifications still on her screen.
Every light was green.
And they were right to be. The site was up. The checkout was working. The database was healthy. The payment gateway was processing payments quickly and without a single error. By every measure anyone had thought to put on that dashboard, the system was working perfectly.
It was working perfectly at charging twelve thousand people twice.
It took the team most of the following week to reconstruct it, so let me give you the short version now.
The renewal job was set to run at 01:30 every night. Whoever set it up, two years earlier, had set that time in UK local time rather than in UTC, which is the kind of small, reasonable-looking decision that nobody would ever flag in a code review. On the night the clocks go back, the hour between one and two in the morning happens twice. The scheduler saw 01:30 arrive, ran the job, and then an hour later, when the clocks rolled back and 01:30 arrived again, it did exactly what it had been told to do and ran it again.
The renewal job took about two hours to work through every subscriber, oldest accounts first. Hannah, as customer number seven, had simply been one of the first people billed in the second run.
Which meant that as she sat there in bed, the job was working its way down the list at roughly a hundred customers a minute, and would keep going until it reached the end at around half past three.
Every minute she spent working out who to call was another hundred customers charged twice.
She rang the support line first, because that’s what the support line was for.
A polite, calm voice picked up within a few rings. She explained. He listened. Then he asked the question that was, in his defence, the question his job required him to ask.
“Is the site down?”
It wasn’t.
“Can customers log in and place orders?”
They could.
He was sorry. He could hear this was serious. But under the contract it wasn’t a P1, because the service was available. He’d log it as a P2, which meant it would be picked up by the platform team at the start of the next business day. Hannah asked when that was. It was Sunday morning. The next business day was Monday at nine, a little over thirty-one hours away.
She asked if he could stop the job himself. He couldn’t. He didn’t have access to the scheduler for her account. Only the platform team did, and the platform team worked business hours.
I want to be fair to that man, because it would be easy to make him the villain of this story, and he isn’t. He did his job exactly as it had been written. The problem was that his job had been written around a single question, is it down, and the thing happening to Hannah’s business that night wasn’t down. It was wrong. Nobody had ever written a contract, a dashboard, or a job description for wrong.
She called Josh. It rang out. She sent him a message, then another. Nothing. It was nearly two in the morning in Lisbon too, and he was asleep, as he had every right to be.
She searched her inbox for Marcus and found an address at the agency that bounced. She found him on LinkedIn and sent a message she knew he wouldn’t see until morning, if ever.
Then she found the handover document. Fourteen pages, written the week the project closed. Most of it was screenshots of the admin panel. Hannah scrolled through it on her phone, looking for anything about scheduled jobs, and found exactly one line: “Background jobs run on the worker server.”
That was it. Nothing about where the worker server lived. Nothing about how to stop a job once it started. Nothing about what to do if it did something it shouldn’t. The document had been written by people who knew the system so well that the important parts had never occurred to them as things that needed writing down.
It was 02:04. Somewhere around three and a half thousand customers had now been billed twice, and the number was still climbing.
Josh called back at twenty past two. His phone had been face down on a hotel bedside table, and the fourth vibration had finally woken him.
He understood inside about fifteen seconds. He also had a problem of his own: he’d left his laptop at home, deliberately, because it was his first holiday in two years and he’d promised his partner. All he had was his phone, and the hosting console wanted a hardware security key he didn’t have with him.
But Hannah had the admin credentials, sitting in the company password manager, for a console she had never once logged into.
So Josh talked her through it. Which menu. Which project. Which of the four servers with nearly identical names was the worker. At one point she found a large button marked “Restart” and asked if she should press it, and she heard him sit up in bed a thousand miles away. Don’t touch that, he said. A restart re-queues pending jobs. You’d make it worse.
It took them twenty-seven minutes, on a crackly hotel line, a head of technology who’d never touched the infrastructure being guided by an engineer who couldn’t, to find the right setting and scale the worker down to nothing.
At 02:47 the job stopped.
Hannah checked her bank app. Still two notifications. No third. She sat on the edge of the bed for a while and didn’t sleep again that night.
By Monday lunchtime, they had the numbers.
Just under eight thousand customers had been charged twice, about £147,000 taken that shouldn’t have been. The money itself could be refunded, and was, though refunding eight thousand card payments is its own small project with its own fees. The support inbox received over four hundred emails before ten on Monday morning, some confused, some furious, a few from people who’d gone overdrawn and been hit with charges by their own banks. Some customers didn’t email at all. They went straight to their bank and raised a chargeback, which costs a merchant a fee every time whether or not the merchant was at fault, and counts against them with their payment provider. And over the following fortnight, a little over two hundred customers quietly cancelled.
None of that is catastrophic for a business that size. But it was expensive, it was embarrassing, and it landed a fortnight before a board meeting about a second roastery.
The chair asked the question Hannah had known was coming since she sat up in bed on Sunday morning.
“Who owned this?”
Hannah told me later that she’d spent most of Monday night trying to answer that question fairly, and the honest answer she kept arriving at was: nobody.
Not nobody in the sense that people had been careless. Nobody in the sense that every single party had done precisely what they’d been asked to do, and the failure lived entirely in the space between them.
The agency had built the system well, handed it over, and moved on, which is what they were paid for. The support desk had applied its contract exactly as written, and by the contract’s own definition, nothing was wrong. The monitoring had reported, accurately, that everything it had been built to watch was healthy. Josh had been on a holiday he’d booked months in advance and was entitled to. Marcus had left for another job, as people do. And the one decision that actually caused the incident, a scheduled time set in local time rather than UTC, had been made two years earlier by someone nobody in the room could name, for a reason nobody could remember, and had then sat there quietly doing nothing wrong for two years, until the one night it did.
There was a moment in that meeting where one of the non-executives suggested, fairly gently, that the support vendor should be replaced and that perhaps someone ought to take responsibility.
This is the part of the story where Hannah wins, and I want to tell it carefully, because it would have been so easy for her to take the other road.
She could have fired the vendor. It would have been defensible, it would have felt like action, and the board would have been satisfied. Instead she said something close to this: if we replace the vendor and change nothing else, we’ll be back in this room in eighteen months, having the same conversation about a different Sunday. The vendor didn’t fail. Our ownership did. Give me sixty days to fix that, and I’ll come back and show you it’s fixed.
They gave her the sixty days.
I want to set this out properly, because it’s the useful part, and because none of it required a bigger budget. It required a few uncomfortable questions and the patience to act on the answers.
First, she found out what she actually had. Before changing anything, she ran a test. She asked two people, separately, and without warning, the same question: if our live product started doing something wrong, not down but wrong, at two in the morning on a Sunday, whose phone rings, and what’s the first thing they do?
She asked the vendor’s account manager. The answer was: you’d call us, and we’d log a ticket.
She asked Josh. His answer was: out of hours, that’s the vendor.
Each of them named the other. That was the whole diagnosis in two sentences. Both answers were reasonable, both people were competent, and between them they described a system in which nobody’s phone rang at all.
Second, she changed what counted as an emergency. The old question was, is it down? The new one was, is it taking money, sending things, or telling customers things it shouldn’t? If the answer to that was yes, it was the top priority, whatever the green lights said. Hannah put it to her board in one line I’ve since borrowed more than once: when the site goes down, we lose some sales for an hour. When the site goes wrong, we lose customers’ trust and create liabilities, and we might not notice for a very long time. Down is loud. Wrong is quiet. The contract had been written entirely around loud.
Third, she put a name on it. Not a rota, not a shared inbox, not a support tier. One named person, accountable for the live product, who knew why the system had been built the way it had and who would still be there next year. She moved the running of the platform to a provider that worked that way, and the first thing she asked their named lead to do was read every line of code that moved money or talked to customers, and tell her what could go wrong at two in the morning.
Fourth, she made stopping things boring. Every job that took money, sent emails, or touched orders now had a written, tested way to stop it, in plain language, on a single page, that someone who’d never seen the infrastructure could follow at two in the morning on a phone. And she tested it on exactly that person. She gave the page to her finance director, who has never written a line of code, set up a harmless test job, started a timer, and asked him to stop it. It took him six minutes. She told me that was the moment she started to sleep properly again.
Fifth, she went looking for the next Sunday before it arrived. The new named lead audited every scheduled job in the system. They found eleven set in local time. Eleven small, reasonable-looking decisions, each one waiting for a particular night of the year. All eleven were moved to UTC within the month.
When the sixty days were up, Hannah went back to the board. She didn’t bring a slide about the vendor. She brought the answers to the two-person test, asked again, and this time both people gave the same name.
The clocks went back again the following October.
Hannah was awake again. She admits it was on purpose. She lay there with her phone on the bedside table and watched it, the way you might watch a pot you’re fairly sure won’t boil over.
At 01:30, it lit up. £18.50, paid to her own company.
She waited. The clocks rolled back. 01:30 came around a second time.
Nothing.
Two minutes later, one more message arrived, this time from the named lead at the new provider. It was just after seven in the morning where he was, in Kolkata, and he’d been at his desk for a while.
Morning from our side. Clocks went back on yours. All eleven jobs ran once, as expected. Nothing for you to do. Go back to sleep.
She did.
I love that ending for a reason that has nothing to do with Kolkata being where my own company happens to be. It’s that the most important thing that happened that night was that nothing happened, and that someone who owned it was awake to confirm it. That’s what good ownership looks like from the outside. It’s almost completely boring. You only ever see it in the absence of a story.
I’ve been on the other end of Hannah’s phone call.
Years ago, on a Friday night, somewhere around two in the morning, my phone rang. It was a client of ours, John, calling from Dallas, and he was not happy. His database had gone down in the middle of a demo to his investors. He told me he’d been left with egg on his face in front of the people funding his company.
I called our delivery head. Within ten minutes he called me back: he, the project manager and the team would be in the office by six thirty. They worked from seven until two in the afternoon, and John woke up to a working system.
John stayed with us for a long time after that, and eventually became about thirty percent of our monthly revenue. But I’ve never believed he stayed because the database got fixed. Databases get fixed. He stayed because when it broke, one person picked up, and one person was accountable at six thirty in the morning, and he never once had to explain his problem to someone meeting it for the first time.
That’s the whole reason we run managed services the way we do. One named person, from the start, who stays for the life of the engagement and is personally accountable for whether the thing keeps working. Not because it sounds good in a proposal, but because I’ve seen, from both ends of the phone, what happens in the space where nobody owns it.
I’d be doing exactly the thing I’m warning you about if I told you every business needs a managed services provider. Plenty don’t.
If you have an in-house team with a real on-call rota, a runbook that a non-engineer can follow, and two people who’d give you the same name at two in the morning, you already have what Hannah built in her sixty days. Keep it, look after it, and don’t let anyone sell you a replacement for something that works.
If you’re earlier than that, still changing the product every week, you probably want a dedicated team that builds and runs together, not a support arrangement at all. And if you’re live, stable, and simply don’t have the people to watch it, that’s where an arrangement with a named owner and a proper service level earns its money. The question that decides which of these you need isn’t in our rate card. It’s this one: what would one hour of your system being wrong cost you? Not down. Wrong. Most people have never priced it. Hannah priced it at roughly £147,000 and two hundred customers, after the fact.
So here’s what I’d ask you to do this week, and it takes about ten minutes.
Pick two people. One on your side, and one on your vendor’s side if you have one, or two people on your own team if you don’t. Ask each of them, separately and without warning, the question Hannah asked: if our live product started doing something wrong, not down but wrong, at two in the morning on a Sunday, whose phone rings, and what’s the first thing they’d do?
Then compare the answers.
If you get the same name and the same first step, you have an owner. Well done, and you can stop reading here.
If you get two different names, you have what Hannah had: each side believes the other one has it covered. If you get a job title or a team name instead of a person, “support handles it,” then nobody is holding it at two in the morning. A title doesn’t wake up. And if you get a pause, followed by “that’s a good question,” then you already know.
And one more thing, because it’s a gift of timing. In the UK, the clocks go back on Sunday 25 October. In the US, they go back a week later, on Sunday 1 November. Between now and then, ask whoever looks after your systems a single question: is anything that moves money, sends messages, or touches orders scheduled in local time? It’s a short question with a short answer, and it’s a great deal cheaper to ask in September than at half past one on a Sunday morning.
If you run the test and you don’t like the answers, send them to me. I’ll tell you plainly whether you have an ownership gap, and what it would take to close it, even if the honest answer is that your own team can close it without us.
Hannah’s phone stayed dark that second October. I’d like yours to as well.
This morning, before the second cup of coffee, I opened Twitter and read nine hundred words from a man I’d never spoken to.
Carl Pei had posted an essay titled India Is Inevitable. I knew the name the way most of us in this business know it, the founder who left OnePlus, started Nothing in London, and built a cult around a transparent phone. What I didn’t expect was an essay that read less like a press release and more like a confession. He wasn’t selling me a product. He was making an argument, and it was a good one, and for about ten minutes I agreed with almost all of it.
He’d spent eight years in Shenzhen watching China do something no one had done before it, take a country that assembled other people’s electronics and turn it into one that designed its own. He watched it happen from the inside, and now he was betting that India was about to do the same thing, with his company’s budget brand, CMF, as the vehicle. Spin it out of Nothing entirely, majority Indian owned, headquartered here, its own engineering team, its own research and development, a hundred million phones a year as the target that turns a brand into a platform. Nothing stays on as a shareholder and a partner, not the parent.
I read it twice. And somewhere on the second read, a specific line stopped being inspiring and started being a test I couldn’t unsee.
Pei gives five questions, and he means them as a filter, not a slogan. Who actually engineers the structure of the device, the materials, the thermals, beyond picking a colour. Who selects the camera sensors and builds the software that turns raw sensor data into a photo people love. Who writes the operating system and commits to years of updates rather than shipping once and walking away. Who re-certifies the antennas every time the design changes, a detail so unglamorous that most brands never think to ask who owns it. And who sits across the table from the people making displays and chipsets, co-engineering the next generation rather than choosing from what already exists on a supplier’s shelf.
If the honest answer to most of those is “our manufacturing partner handles that,” Pei says, you’re not a phone company. You’re a customer with a logo. And the thing about that kind of company is that it can only ever compete on price, and there is always, eventually, someone cheaper.
I sat with that test longer than I expected to, because I’ve watched this exact failure happen in this country, in real time, close enough to remember the names.
Between 2015 and 2017, a wave of Indian smartphone brands had their moment. One of them briefly outsold Samsung in India. For about eighteen months it genuinely looked like the beginning of something, a homegrown industry finally arriving at scale, the kind of story this country loves to tell about itself.
Then the foreign brands showed up with something the domestic ones didn’t have. Not marketing. Not distribution. Engineering. A camera that was measurably better than last year’s. A design language that evolved instead of repeating. An operating system somebody was actually maintaining. The Indian brands, it turned out, had been doing exactly what Pei warns against, licensing an off-the-shelf design, swapping the back cover, putting their logo on the box. By 2025, the brands that had once led this market held less than one percent of it combined.
That’s not a story I read about. That’s a story I watched from inside this industry, the kind of collapse you don’t forget because you recognise the shape of it every time it threatens to repeat.
So when I read Pei’s five questions, I wasn’t reading them as praise for his ambition. I was reading them as the exact autopsy report I’d want run on his own company two years from now.
CMF’s actual paper trail so far doesn’t answer the test yet, it postpones it. What’s committed is a joint venture with an Indian contract manufacturer, a jobs number attached to assembly, and a promise, a real one, that research and development will happen here going forward. A promise is not the same claim as headcount. Majority ownership on a cap table tells you who gets paid if this works. It doesn’t tell you who’s in the room deciding what the camera pipeline looks like next year.
I want to be fair to him here, because this is exactly the kind of thing I’d want a mentor to say to me if I made a big public bet and left a gap in the argument. Pei set a test rigorous enough to indict the last decade’s failures. I intend to hold his own company to it. If two years from now the antenna certification, the OS roadmap, and the camera tuning are still sitting in London while India gets the assembly line and a local name on the box, this is 2015 again with a better story attached. If they’re not, if the engineering headcount actually moves here, this could be the real thing. I don’t know yet. Neither does he, honestly, not with certainty. That’s what makes it a bet and not a plan.
But here’s where the essay, for all its rigor, sent me looking in the wrong direction. And it took me a full day to see why.
Pei’s five questions aren’t really about phones. They’re about who owns the hard part. So I ran them again, against something else entirely, and the answers stopped me mid-thought.
Who wrote the software. India did. UPI isn’t a licensed platform with an Indian skin painted over someone else’s architecture, it’s homegrown, built by the National Payments Corporation of India from the rails up. Who owns the system and keeps improving it rather than freezing it after launch. NPCI does, and they’ve kept shipping, UPI Lite for people without steady connectivity, UPI 123PAY so a feature phone can pay a vendor, cross-border expansion into new countries this year. Has an ecosystem actually formed around it, the way Pei says ecosystems only form around whoever asks the hardest questions first. Completely. This August alone, UPI processed 24.51 billion transactions, a monthly number that’s nearly quadrupled in four years, and the IMF has already called it the world’s largest real-time payments system by volume.
Nobody handed India that. Nobody in Seoul or Shenzhen or London engineered UPI and then let India assemble it. India wrote the operating system for its own economy, in-house, from a blank page, and then didn’t stop iterating on it. That’s not a services story. That’s not even really a fintech story. That’s the exact five-question test Pei just wrote, already passed, sitting in plain sight, in an industry nobody thinks to compare to consumer electronics because it doesn’t come in a box you can photograph.
Extend that same logic one step further and you land on where I think this country’s real opportunity sits, and it isn’t in a factory.
Foundation models are a capital and compute race that the United States and China locked up years ago, and no honest read of the board says India shows up as the frontrunner there. But there’s a layer above the model that nobody has locked up yet, the work of actually getting AI into the hands of a billion people across dozens of languages, deployed, localised, governed responsibly rather than dumped on a population and left to cause damage. That layer rewards exactly the muscle India has already spent a decade building.
The numbers say this louder than I can. India’s Global Capability Centres generated close to 98 billion dollars in revenue this fiscal year and now account for over a third of the country’s AI hiring, adding nearly twice as many net employees as traditional IT services firms. Software and business services exports already sit near 205 billion dollars a year, 8.5 percent of GDP, built on the one resource no supply chain shortcut can replicate quickly, English-fluent engineering talent at a scale no other country can field. That’s not a moat someone else is fifteen years ahead on. That’s a moat India is standing inside of, right now, this fiscal year, getting wider every quarter.
I’ll say the part that makes this more than an armchair opinion. Brainium has spent the better part of the last year moving away from pure services delivery and toward AI middleware and applied agent products, and I’m telling you where I think the bigger pie sits partly because I’ve already put the company’s runway behind that answer. I could be exactly as wrong about that as I’ve just suggested Pei might be about hardware. The difference is I’m not asking you to wait a decade to find out whether the bet paid off. We’ll know inside two or three years, the same window I’d give CMF before I ask whether the engineering actually moved here.
Pei is right that India is inevitable. I don’t think he’s wrong about that claim for a single sentence, and if CMF does what it says it will, ships a hundred million India-engineered phones a year with the R&D actually sitting here, that’s a genuine national achievement and I’ll be the first to write the piece admitting I underestimated it.
But if you ask me to rank where the next decade’s real economic weight lands, a factory racing to catch a country with a ten-year head start, or a talent base that already wrote the operating system for its own economy and is now writing the deployment layer for AI, I’m not undecided. Applied AI implementation, vertical agents for sectors this country still badly underserves like healthcare and agriculture, and governance frameworks India can export the way it already exported UPI, that’s the bet with the shorter runway to proof and the deeper moat underneath it.
I read an essay this morning that made a rigorous case for a fifteen-year climb up a hill someone else is already standing on top of. What I keep coming back to is that India already owns the top of a different hill, and most of us are still looking at the wrong one.
Tomorrow, the flame lights up again. On September 19, 2026, the Paloma Mizuho Stadium in Nagoya will host the opening ceremony of the XX Asian Games, and for the third time an Indian contingent will walk in carrying not just a flag but the weight of a number: 28. That is how many gold medals India won at Hangzhou in 2023, still the best campaign in the country’s Asiad history. The question every Indian sports fan is asking this week is: can we go past it?
Let me take you through this properly. History first. Then the state of Indian sport walking into Japan. Then, sport by sport, where the medals are actually going to come from, and where they might not. And finally, an honest number.
The Asian Games did not begin in a boardroom in Lausanne or Kuwait City. It began with an Indian. At the 1948 London Olympics, Guru Dutt Sondhi, India’s IOC representative, proposed that Asian nations needed their own continental sporting stage, distinct from the Far Eastern Championship Games and West Asian Games that had come and gone between 1913 and 1938, disrupted by war and geopolitics. Sondhi’s proposal at London 1948 led China and the Philippines to meet on the sidelines, and out of that came a more inclusive competition. By 1949 the Asian Athletic Federation, soon renamed the Asian Games Federation, was formed, and India made the boldest move of all. It was India’s offer to host, made in February 1949, that actually set the wheels in motion.
So on March 4, 1951, at the National Stadium in New Delhi, 489 athletes from 11 nations gathered for what was officially called the First Asian Games, opened by Dr. Rajendra Prasad, India’s first President. Six sports were contested: athletics, aquatics, basketball, cycling, football and weightlifting, across 57 medal events. Boxing, ironically now one of India’s strongest medal sports, was considered but dropped that year. Nehru saw it as more than sport. Coming four years after Partition and independence, a fractured young nation needed a stage to announce itself, and a war-ravaged continent needed a reason to link arms rather than draw lines. That is the emotional DNA of these Games, something worth remembering every time we complain about a scoreline: the Asian Games were built as an act of unity, not just competition.
The administrative story that followed is instructive too. The Asian Games Federation ran the show from 1949 until it was dissolved in November 1982, when it was succeeded by the Olympic Council of Asia. That handover happened, fittingly, in New Delhi, which hosted the Games again in 1982. Since that modest beginning of 11 nations, the Asiad has grown into one of the largest multi-sport events on the planet, second only to the Olympics themselves. Aichi-Nagoya 2026 will host 46 nations and roughly 10,840 athletes across 469 events in 43 sports and 71 disciplines, a staggering leap from where it all started. This edition also marks the 75th anniversary of that original 1951 New Delhi Games. There is something poetic about that. Seventy-five years after India gave Asia this platform, India arrives as a genuine medal superpower on it.
For decades, India’s Asian Games story was one of quiet consistency rather than dominance. India actually finished second overall at the very first Games in 1951, winning 51 medals, 15 gold, 16 silver and 20 bronze, behind only Japan’s 60. It remains India’s best-ever finish in the overall medal table. India briefly touched third place again at Jakarta 1962 with 10 gold, 13 silver and 10 bronze, and that stayed India’s last top-three overall finish until Hangzhou, six decades later.
What followed was a long, unglamorous middle period. India’s medal count crept from 51 in 1951 to 57 in 1982, then 65 at Guangzhou in 2010. The country was competitive in patches, brilliant through individuals like P.T. Usha, who finished with four gold and seven silver medals across her career, and Leander Paes, whose five golds and eight total medals came in tennis, and sprint legend Milkha Singh, who won four Asian Games golds, but never assembled the strength in depth to threaten the continental elite.
Then came the inflection point. Jakarta-Palembang 2018 was the first real step change, with India winning 16 gold and 70 medals in total. And then Hangzhou happened. Delayed a year by COVID and finally staged in 2023, a 655-member Indian contingent turned in a campaign for the ages: 107 medals, 28 gold, 38 silver and 41 bronze, comfortably beating the previous record of 70 from Jakarta. It was only the second time in India’s history, across the Olympics, Commonwealth Games and Asian Games combined, that the country had crossed the 100-medal mark in a major multi-sport event. India finished fourth in the overall standings, behind a dominant China (201 gold), Japan (52) and South Korea (42), and only four nations broke the 100-medal barrier that year.
Look at where those 107 medals came from, because it tells you everything about the engine India is bringing to Japan. Shooting was the standout, delivering an unprecedented 22 medals including seven gold. Athletics remained the single biggest overall contributor with 29 medals, six gold, 14 silver and nine bronze. India topped the medal table outright in archery, cricket, kabaddi and hockey, and history was made in badminton, where Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty won India’s first-ever Asiad gold in the sport, while Jyothi Surekha Vennam and Ojas Deotale each claimed three gold medals apiece in compound archery. Squash, tennis and equestrian rounded out the golden haul. Across the entire history of the Games, athletics remains India’s most decorated sport by a wide margin, with 85 gold, 102 silver and 96 bronze, 283 medals in total, followed by shooting on 80 and wrestling on roughly 65. And in kabaddi, the sport India essentially owns at the Asiad, the country has won eight of the nine editions since it was introduced in 1990, losing only once, to Iran at Jakarta 2018.
That is the mountain India built. Now comes the harder part: climbing it again, from a higher base, with a few pieces missing.
This is the XX Asian Games, officially returning to the traditional four-year cycle after the pandemic pushed Hangzhou from 2022 into 2023. Nagoya becomes the third Japanese city to host after Tokyo in 1958 and Hiroshima in 1994. The motto, “Imagine One Asia,” runs from the opening ceremony on September 19 through closing on October 4, though competition in several disciplines, soft tennis, teqball, women’s cricket, actually started before the ceremony itself. Forty-three sports will be staged across 53 venues, some outside the main host prefecture entirely, making the real competition calendar considerably longer than the official 16-day window.
For India, the numbers on the ground are: this is India’s twentieth appearance at the Games, with a contingent of 503 athletes, competing across 36 sports. Genuinely large squads have gone in shooting, hockey and cricket.
There is also a bigger stake attached to this edition than mere medal count. Both the men’s and women’s hockey tournaments in Aichi-Nagoya double as continental qualification events for the LA 2028 Olympics, with tournament winners securing direct qualification. That turns Harmanpreet Singh’s men and Salima Tete’s women into something more than gold-medal contenders. They are playing for a ticket to Los Angeles.
India’s single biggest, most reliable gold medal of the last two Games will not be available this time. Two-time Olympic medallist and two-time defending Asian Games javelin champion Neeraj Chopra will miss Aichi-Nagoya entirely because of an ankle ligament injury. Chopra had won gold at both Jakarta 2018 and Hangzhou 2023 and was chasing a third straight title; he ended his 2026 season after the ligament tear during training, removing what was arguably India’s single most dependable gold-medal certainty.
This is not a small thing to wave away. Neeraj is not just a medal, he is a guaranteed gold, the kind of banker every ambitious medal tally needs. His absence means athletics has to find that gold elsewhere, and the honest picture is that nobody in the current javelin field, or arguably in Indian track and field as a whole, carries his individual certainty. The strongest remaining gold prospect in athletics is now the long jump, where both Murali Sreeshankar and Ancy Sojan enter as the Asian leaders this season. Beyond that, hopes rest on strong-but-not-certain names: steeplechaser Avinash Sable, 5000m specialist Parul Chaudhary, sprinters and race walkers who can win a medal but the gold is not assured the way Neeraj’s was.
The second uncomfortable truth, is that India’s preparation has been messier than Hangzhou’s. By early September, twelve Indian athletes had failed dope tests or been provisionally suspended since the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, spanning four weightlifters, two judokas, a shooter, a rower, two wrestlers, a distance runner and a wushu competitor. Wrestling took the heaviest direct hit, losing quota places in men’s 86kg freestyle, 130kg Greco-Roman and 67kg Greco-Roman, and shooting lost Gaurav Mansoori from the 10m air pistol event after a failed dope test, forcing a late reshuffle. None of this should overshadow the athletes who have done things right, but it is a real dent in depth, particularly in wrestling, a sport India has traditionally mined for reliable medals.
There is a redemption story buried in this too, and it is worth knowing because it will matter when you watch the mat this month. Aman Sehrawat, India’s brightest current wrestling star, was actually banned by the Wrestling Federation of India for a full year after a weight violation at the 2025 World Championships, a suspension that on paper would have run right through the start of these Games. The federation lifted that ban early in November 2025, and Sehrawat responded by winning his weight category comfortably at the national trials in June 2026 to book his Asiad ticket. That is a genuine comeback story, and it is exactly the kind of narrative that makes these Games worth following as a fan, not just a scoreboard-watcher.
Shooting. Hangzhou’s 22 medals from shooting, seven of them gold, was the single biggest driver of India’s record tally. This time the squad is different in composition but not in ambition. India has sent 30 shooters to Aichi-Nagoya, 12 in shotgun and 18 in rifle and pistol, competing across 27 medal events, headlined by Manu Bhaker, Rudrankksh Patil, Suruchi Singh and Esha Singh. There are notable absences: Hangzhou gold medallist Sift Kaur Samra, Paris 2024 medallists Sarabjot Singh and Swapnil Kusale, and reigning air pistol world champion Samrat Rana are all missing from this squad. The realistic read is that China remains the dominant force, having topped shooting’s medal table at the last twelve editions, and edged India in Hangzhou by seven medals largely because China won eight individual golds to India’s two, Palak Gulia and Sift Kaur Samra. The honest expectation this time is a slightly smaller but still substantial haul, something in the range of 15 to 18 medals rather than the full 22 of Hangzhou, with Manu Bhaker and Esha Singh as the sharpest individual gold prospects.
Athletics. Track and field delivered India’s largest medal haul of any sport at Hangzhou, 29 medals, and remains central to any assault on the century mark this time. Without Neeraj, the gold count here will almost certainly dip from six, but the depth built over the last Olympic cycle, in race walking, middle distance, throws and long jump, should keep the overall medal volume respectable even if the top step is harder to reach.
Archery. Archery produced five golds among India’s nine medals at Hangzhou, built almost entirely on compound dominance. This year the squad has been deliberately, refreshed. Defending champions Ojas Deotale in the men’s compound individual and mixed team missed selection entirely, finishing fifth in the trials, and Olympians Deepika Kumari and Atanu Das were also left out of the Games squad despite remaining in World Cup plans. What remains is still formidable: world No. 3 Jyothi Surekha Vennam leads the women’s compound squad after her triple-gold haul at Hangzhou, and the women’s recurve pairing of Ankita Bhakat and Kumkum Mohod recently upset China for gold at the Shanghai World Cup, a genuine signal of strength. Given India swept compound archery at Hangzhou, expectation is: anything under five golds here would count as falling short of India’s own new standard.
Wrestling. The mat has taken the worst of the pre-Games turbulence, losing three Olympic-weight quota places to doping cases. Yet the headline story is Aman Sehrawat’s return, alongside Asian Games silver medallist Deepak Punia and World No. 1 Sujeet Kalkal leading a squad that is smaller in numbers but still carries real individual quality, particularly on the freestyle side.
Boxing. India’s boxers land in Japan fresh off a record-breaking Commonwealth Games campaign, ten medals, seven gold and three silver, with Olympic medallist Lovlina Borgohain and CWG champion Sakshi Chaudhary leading the squad. This is arguably India’s best-form sport walking into the Games and a realistic multi-gold source.
Badminton. The men’s team fields Lakshya Sen, Ayush Shetty, HS Prannoy, Kidambi Srikanth and the reigning Asiad doubles gold medallists Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty, while two-time Olympic medallist PV Sindhu headlines the women’s challenge. Satwik-Chirag defending their historic doubles gold is one of the storylines of the Games.
Hockey. Harmanpreet Singh leads the men as defending champions, Salima Tete captains the women, and both are chasing gold not just for the podium but for direct LA 2028 qualification, which raises the intensity considerably.
Kabaddi and cricket. India defends titles in both men’s and women’s kabaddi and both cricket competitions, with Shreyas Iyer leading the men’s cricket team, which includes teenage sensation Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, and Harmanpreet Kaur captaining the women’s side. Barring upsets, these are among the safest gold prospects in the entire contingent.
Weightlifting is anchored by Olympic medallist Mirabai Chanu leading a five-member squad, a smaller but focused unit chasing a podium finish in the 49kg category.
And do not sleep on the fringe sports. Squash, chess and kurash are being flagged as genuine strong medal opportunities, and squash carries a lovely subplot in Anahat Singh, returning after helping India to team and mixed doubles bronze at Hangzhou, now a more mature and dangerous competitor.
The case for optimism is real. India’s shooting, badminton, boxing, hockey, kabaddi and cricket squads are all either as strong as Hangzhou or stronger. The stated official ambition is a second consecutive 100-medal haul, and independent assessments before the Games land in a 95 to 110 medal range as the realistic target. That range straddles the Hangzhou number almost exactly, which tells you the informed consensus is “similar total, harder gold count.”
The case for caution is equally real. Losing Neeraj removes a certain gold. The doping suspensions have quietly cost India entire weight categories in wrestling before a single bout has been fought. The archery squad has deliberately rotated out proven gold medal winners like Deotale, Deepika Kumari and Atanu Das for youth, a bet on the future that may cost golds in the present. And shooting, even at full strength, has never actually beaten China at the top of that particular table.
My projection: crossing 107 total medals is genuinely possible and, given the depth India has built across two Olympic cycles now, arguably more likely than not. Crossing 28 gold is the tougher ask. It requires archery to deliver close to Hangzhou levels despite fielding a newer squad, badminton and boxing to convert their current form into golds rather than minor-medal finishes, and at least one or two of the “second tier” sports, squash, wrestling, weightlifting, to overperform and cover for the certainty Neeraj used to provide alone. It is not a stretch to imagine India matching or nudging past 28 gold. It would be a mistake to assume it happens automatically just because the squad is bigger.
If I had to put a single number on it: somewhere between 100 and 112 total medals, and 24 to 30 gold, is where I expect India to land. Beating 28 gold is a coin flip that tilts slightly in India’s favour because of badminton and boxing’s current form; beating 107 medals is more likely than not because of the sheer breadth of the contingent across 36 sports.
Numbers aside, here is the bigger picture worth sitting with. China will win this medal table by a distance that no other nation, India included, is realistically closing anytime soon; China’s 201 gold at Hangzhou alone was nearly four times Japan’s second-place total. That is not a knock on India, it is a reminder of scale, investment and decades of systemic sporting infrastructure that China has built. India’s real competition is with itself, with the version of India that won 70 medals in 2018 and then blew past 100 in 2023. The question worth asking on October 4, when the flame goes out in Nagoya, is not just “did we beat 28,” but “did the depth we’re building, the young archers replacing legends, the boxers riding Commonwealth Games form, the badminton bench three deep, actually hold up under pressure.” That is the real story of Aichi-Nagoya for India. The scoreline will tell you the result. The performances against expectation, especially in the categories where India walked in without its biggest names, will tell you whether this was a one-off peak or the start of a genuine golden era.
Either way, for the next sixteen days, keep the TV on early mornings IST. This is India’s best generation of multi-sport athletes yet, tested, for the first time in a while, without its most bankable gold medal in the squad.
At some point in your forties, if you have enough friends, WhatsApp groups become a carousel of quiet intimidation.
One school friend just finished a half-marathon in Pune. A college batchmate has trekked to Kedarnath, again. A former colleague is on his third international trip this year, and he is posting reels from a boat somewhere off the coast of Croatia. Another friend, someone I used to share lecture notes with, has just taken up scuba diving “to push his boundaries.” At fifty.
I read all of this while drinking my morning tea at home, in Kolkata, having pushed precisely zero boundaries since breakfast.
And then comes the question. The one nobody actually asks out loud but which floats in the group chat like a ghost:
So… what’s on your bucket list?
I have been asked this in various forms over the years, at dinners, at school reunions, at business networking events where someone always feels the need to make the conversation “meaningful.” And every single time, I have felt a small but unmistakable pang of something. Not quite shame. Not quite envy. More like the feeling of showing up to an exam you forgot was happening.
Because honestly? I don’t have a bucket list.
Not a secret one. Not a half-written one in a forgotten Notes app. Nothing.
For a long time, I thought this was a problem. A personality flaw, almost. Like I had missed some crucial memo that went out to every ambitious person in their thirties, the one that said: write down the things that will make your life meaningful, frame them beautifully, and get to work.
I looked at my colleagues who had these lists, some literal, some just lived out loudly, and felt a low-grade anxiety I could not quite name. They had destinations. I had a cup of tea and a conversation. I would nod along at dinners while someone described their upcoming trip to Patagonia, and somewhere underneath the nodding was this small, persistent voice asking whether I was doing life wrong. Whether contentment at forty-something was actually just a nicer word for having stopped trying.
I tried, once, to make a list. Seriously. I sat down with a notebook and asked myself: what do I actually want to do before I die?
The notebook stared back at me. I wrote “visit Japan” because I had heard good things. Then I scratched it out, because I realized I didn’t actually want to visit Japan, I just wanted to want to visit Japan, which is a very different thing. Then I wrote “write a book,” already done, so that felt like cheating. Then I stopped, made myself another cup of tea, and called a friend instead. We talked for an hour about nothing important and everything interesting, and when I hung up, I felt more alive than I had in days.
That should have told me something. It took me longer than it should have to actually listen to it.
Here is what I have noticed, slowly, over years of watching friends collect experiences like stamps in a passport: the people with the longest bucket lists are not always the most content. Sometimes they are the most restless. They finish one thing and immediately feel the weight of the next unchecked box. The marathon becomes a triathlon. The twenty countries become thirty. The adventure is always just ahead, never quite here. I have watched this up close, in people I genuinely admire, and there is something almost tragic about it. Not the doing. The never arriving.
I don’t say this to judge them. I say it because I recognize the machinery. I have run that machinery myself, just pointed at different targets. Revenue instead of summits. Client wins instead of countries. For years I mistook the next milestone for the finish line, and the finish line kept moving, the way it always does, because that is what finish lines are built to do.
Somewhere in my forties I quietly stopped playing that particular game. Not because I lost the appetite for ambition. Because I noticed that the ambition itself had started pointing inward instead of outward. I no longer wanted to collect things to show people. I wanted to build things that would still matter to me if nobody was watching at all.
Meanwhile, I have been building a company. Reading books that rewire how I think. Having adda sessions that stretch from evening into midnight, the kind where somebody’s opinion on Test cricket turns into a two-hour argument about discipline and patience and what it actually means to build something that lasts. Watching my family in the ordinary, unglamorous rhythms that don’t photograph well but feel, on most days, quietly full.
None of this would make a compelling Instagram reel. There is no summit photo. No finish-line medal. No before-and-after arc. Nobody claps when you close a difficult quarter with your integrity intact, or when you finally have the conversation with your business partner that you had been avoiding for weeks, or when your son tells you something about his own struggle building his own thing and you realize the best thing you can do is listen, not fix.
Just a life, lived mostly in the middle of things.
The extraordinary things I’m doing don’t look extraordinary from the outside. That used to bother me. It doesn’t much anymore. I have made a kind of peace with the fact that the things I actually value don’t compress well into a caption. Thirteen years of building Brainium doesn’t fit in a reel. Neither does the slow, unglamorous work of staying married to the same discipline of thought for decades, showing up at the same desk, asking the same hard questions of myself that I ask of every company I evaluate.
I am not arguing against bucket lists. If running a marathon makes you feel genuinely alive, run one. If standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon is something you have wanted since childhood, go. I am not the ambassador of staying home. I know people for whom the mountain genuinely calls, and chasing it is not performance, it is truth. That is not what I am pushing back against.
What I am saying is this: somewhere between Instagram and the school reunion WhatsApp group, we quietly outsourced the definition of a meaningful life to a crowd. And the crowd, as crowds tend to do, converged on the loudest, most photogenic answer. Meaning became something you had to prove, in pixels, to people who were mostly scrolling past anyway.
The anti-bucket list, the things you consciously decide you do not need, is not laziness dressed up in philosophy. It is something closer to honesty. It is looking at the carousel and asking: which of this is mine, and which of it did I just absorb from everyone around me? Because if I am honest, a good number of my old ambitions were never really mine. They were borrowed. Picked up at some dinner table or LinkedIn feed and mistaken, over time, for something I actually wanted.
I do not need to run a marathon. I do not need to skydive. I do not need to visit fifty countries. I do not need to convert my Saturday afternoon into content.
I need a good book, a long conversation, a problem worth solving, and a life that feels like mine when I am living it rather than only when I am posting it. That distinction, between living something and performing it, is the whole argument, really. Everything else is footnotes.
The WhatsApp group is still going. Someone just posted a photo from Ladakh. The reactions are pouring in, fire emojis, clapping hands, the whole vocabulary of digital appreciation.
I hit the heart button and go back to my tea.
No summit. No reel. No regrets.
What does your invisible list actually look like? I’d love to know, drop it in the comments.
Priya had two quotes on her desk and a decision to make by Friday.
Priya isn’t one person. Like Daniel from last week, she’s a composite of CTOs and product leads I’ve sat across from over the years, built from real conversations so the story holds together. But every beat of what happens to her has happened, in one form or another, to someone real.
She ran product at a fast-growing logistics company, the kind that had outgrown its original booking system two years ago and had been patching it ever since. The business had finally agreed to fund a proper rebuild. Not a huge project by industry standards, but not small either. Six to nine months of real work, the kind of number that gets a line item in the board deck.
She’d sent the same brief to two firms. Same requirements document, same conversations, same three weeks of back and forth answering their questions. And now she had two quotes, and they could not have looked more different.
Firm A wanted 340 hours. Firm B wanted 210 hours.
Same project. Same brief. A gap of 130 hours, which at their blended rates worked out to a difference of just over eleven thousand pounds. Firm B was not just cheaper. Firm B was dramatically, suspiciously cheaper, and Priya’s finance director had already circled that number twice and written “why not this one?” in the margin.
Here is what most people do at this exact moment, and I want to be honest that Priya nearly did it too.
They assume the numbers are telling them something simple. Either Firm A is padding their quote to make more money, or Firm B is hungrier and sharper and has found a cleverer way to build the same thing for less. Both of those stories are comforting, because both of them let you pick the cheaper number with a clear conscience.
Almost nobody stops to ask a third, much less comfortable question: what if the two numbers aren’t actually estimating the same thing at all?
Priya’s first instinct, if I’m honest about how these situations usually go, was to lean toward Firm B. It was tempting. Same brief, but for eleven thousand pounds less, and a board that would nod approvingly at the number. She was two days from picking it when a colleague, someone who’d been burned on a project exactly like this one, said something that changed her Friday.
“Ask them both the same question. Not about the price. About the number itself.”
Here is the question, and it is the entire method, so I want to give it to you plainly rather than making you wait for it.
Ask each firm to break their total into blocks. Not a paragraph justifying the number. Actual blocks. This screen, this many hours. This integration, this many hours. This piece of testing, this many hours. Ask them to show you the arithmetic that adds up to their total.
This sounds like a small, almost bureaucratic request. It is not. It is the single most revealing question you can ask a vendor, because of what it does to the two different kinds of number sitting on your desk.
A real estimate can always be taken apart, because it was built by putting pieces together in the first place. Someone sat down, thought about the actual features, sized each one based on real experience of how long that kind of work takes, and added them up. The total is downstream of the pieces. Ask for the pieces, and they exist, because that is literally how the number was made.
A guess cannot be taken apart the same way, because it was never built from pieces. Someone looked at the brief, felt a number in their gut based on similar projects they’d half-remembered, adjusted it for a bit of safety margin, and wrote it down. The total came first. There were no pieces. Ask for them, and the vendor has to invent a breakdown after the fact, which is a very different and much more uncomfortable exercise than reading one off that already existed.
Priya sent the question to both firms on a Wednesday afternoon.
Firm A’s answer arrived Thursday morning. A spreadsheet, eleven line items, each one named after an actual feature in her brief. The core booking flow, forty-two hours. The driver notification system, twenty-eight hours. Integration with their existing payments provider, thirty-one hours, with a note flagging that this was the riskiest item because the provider’s documentation was known to be incomplete, and the number included time for that discovery. Testing and QA, sixty hours, broken further into unit, integration, and a manual pass on the mobile app.
It wasn’t a beautiful document. It was a working one. And when Priya emailed back asking why the payments integration was quoted higher than she’d expected, she got a two-paragraph answer within the hour, from the actual engineer who’d sized it, explaining exactly which part of that provider’s API had burned them on a previous project.
Firm B’s answer arrived Friday morning, later than promised, and it was one paragraph. It said, in essence, that their 210 hours reflected their team’s efficiency and their experience with similar booking platforms, and that they were confident in the number based on comparable projects they’d delivered. There were no line items. When Priya wrote back asking for a rough split between the booking flow, the notifications, and the payments integration specifically, the reply took two days and offered three very round numbers that added up, suspiciously neatly, to exactly 210.
Priya told me later that the moment she read Firm B’s second reply, she felt something click into place that she hadn’t been able to name on the Wednesday. It wasn’t that Firm B was lying, exactly. It was that Firm B had never actually built the number the way Firm A had. Someone there had looked at the brief, felt that 210 hours sounded competitive, and let the salesperson run with it. The three round numbers in the second reply weren’t a breakdown. They were the breakdown being invented, live, under a bit of polite pressure.
Here is the part that made Priya genuinely angry for about a day, and I think she was right to be.
The 130-hour gap between the two quotes was never really there. It was going to reappear, guaranteed, the moment the project actually started and the payments integration turned out to be exactly as troublesome as Firm A had flagged and priced for. Firm B hadn’t found a cheaper way to do the same work. Firm B simply hadn’t done the thinking yet, and that thinking was going to happen anyway, on the clock, disguised as a change order three months into the build, at a point where Priya’s negotiating position would be far weaker than it was on that Friday with two quotes on her desk.
The cheap quote wasn’t a better deal. It was the same project with the hard part hidden until it was too late to say no to it cheaply.
This is the thing nobody tells buyers, and it’s worth saying plainly. A vendor who guesses low isn’t giving you a discount. They’re deferring the discovery of the real number to a point in the relationship where you have the least power to question it. The padding Priya’s finance director was worried about wasn’t in Firm A’s quote. It was going to arrive later, in Firm B’s invoice, wearing the disguise of an unexpected complexity.
Priya went with Firm A.
Not because it was cheaper. It wasn’t. She went with them because when she asked them to show their working, they had working to show, and when she pushed on the one number that looked high, she got a specific, technical, credible answer from a person who clearly understood the problem, inside an hour.
The project ran eight months. It came in fourteen hours over the original 340, on a single item, the payments integration, exactly the one Firm A had flagged as risky on day one and priced with room to be wrong. Fourteen hours over on a 340-hour quote is not a failure of estimation. It’s what a real estimate looks like when it survives contact with reality, close, explainable, and exactly where the risk was always flagged to be.
She never found out what would have happened with Firm B, because she didn’t run that experiment. But she’d seen enough of that pattern before, on a different project, years earlier, to know roughly how it goes. The number holds for a few weeks. Then something nobody priced turns out to be hard. Then a change order arrives, apologetic and specific in a way the original quote never was, and by the time it’s totalled up, the gap has closed and often reversed, except now you’re three months in and the vendor knows you can’t easily walk away.
If you remember nothing else from this, remember the question, because it’s the whole method and it costs you nothing but an email.
Ask every vendor to break their number into blocks. Not a paragraph. Blocks, tied to real pieces of the work, that add up to the total they’ve given you.
If they can do it quickly and defend any piece you push on, you are looking at an estimate, and the number, whatever it is, deserves to be taken seriously. If they stall, or the breakdown arrives late and suspiciously round, you are looking at a guess wearing an estimate’s clothes, and the real number is still ahead of you, waiting to arrive at the worst possible time.
The cheapest quote on your desk is not the one with the lowest number. It’s the one that’s actually telling you the truth about what the work will take. Sometimes those are the same quote. When they’re not, the gap between them is exactly where you’ll pay later, with interest.
If you’re staring at two quotes right now and the gap between them doesn’t quite make sense, send me both breakdowns. I’ll tell you which one was actually built, and which one is still being invented.
Let me tell you about Daniel.
Daniel isn’t one person. He’s a version of a manager I have sat across from dozens of times over the years, in Kolkata and London and on video calls at odd hours, and I’ve put all of them into one man so the story holds together. But everything that happens to him has happened, more than once, to someone real.
Daniel runs engineering at a mid-sized retail company. Good business, real revenue, the kind of company that isn’t a startup gambling on a dream but isn’t a giant with infinite bench either. About ninety engineers. He’s competent, he’s tired, and it’s the second week of July.
His problem is a date. The company has committed to a major platform launch for the first week of October, tied to peak season, promised to the board, promised to partners, the sort of date that does not move because too many other things have been chained to it. And Daniel is short. He has a senior backend role that has been open since March. Four months. He’s interviewed maybe fifteen people. Two were good and both took offers elsewhere while his own hiring process ground through its third round of approvals. The rest were, to be honest, the one-year-of-experience-repeated-ten-times kind, confident on paper and hollow the moment you pushed.
So here he is in July, ninety days from a launch he cannot miss, carrying a gap he has not been able to close in four months of trying. His team is already doing overtime. Two of his best people have started giving him that look, the one that says they’re updating their own CVs. The board has begun asking, in that gentle way that isn’t gentle at all, whether the date is safe.
Daniel is about to make a decision. And in my experience, at exactly this moment, most managers make one of two mistakes.
The first door is the one marked panic hire.
Daniel goes back into his candidate pool and this time he lowers the bar. That confident backend developer from three weeks ago, the one whose answers sounded fine until you looked closely, the one Daniel passed on because something felt thin. Maybe Daniel was being too fussy. The date is coming. A body in the seat is better than an empty seat. He makes the offer.
I understand this decision completely, and it is almost always a disaster. Because Daniel isn’t actually solving his October problem. Hiring a permanent employee takes weeks to close, weeks of notice period, and then months of ramp before that person is contributing at full weight to a codebase they’ve never seen. Daniel needs velocity in ninety days. A new permanent hire, even a good one, is barely productive in ninety days. And he’s just handed a permanent seat, permanent salary, and permanent presence on his team to someone he settled for under pressure. He has taken a short-term deadline problem and solved it by creating a long-term quality problem that will outlive the launch by years.
The second door is marked just throw bodies at it.
Daniel calls a staffing agency, the cheapest one that answers fast, and says he needs backend developers, now. Within two days a shortlist of twelve CVs lands in his inbox with a covering note: strong senior candidates, available immediately. Daniel is relieved. This is speed. This is the thing he needs.
I understand this decision too, and it fails him for a different reason. We’ll come back to those twelve CVs, because that covering note is hiding something, and it’s the most important part of this whole story.
Both doors feel like decisions. Neither one is. They’re both just ways of making the discomfort stop for an afternoon.
Now here is where the story turns, because someone asks Daniel a question that reframes his entire problem. In the real versions of this story that someone has sometimes been me, sometimes a good peer, sometimes just a quiet hour when the manager finally thought clearly. The question is this.
Daniel, is this a gap you’ll still have in two years?
Sit with that, because it’s the whole thing.
Daniel’s instinct has been to ask “hire or augment,” as if those were the two options and he simply had to pick the cheaper or faster one. But that’s the wrong question, and asking it wrong is why both doors are traps. The right question isn’t which solution to buy. It’s what kind of gap he actually has. Because there are two completely different kinds, and they need opposite answers.
Some gaps are permanent. They are capabilities your business will need every day, for years, woven into what makes you you. The person who owns your core product architecture. The engineer who holds the deep knowledge of the system your whole company runs on. The lead who sets the standard everyone else codes to. These are not seats you rent. These are people you hire, invest in, promote, and build your future around. If you try to solve a permanent gap with temporary people, you spend years renting something you should have owned, and you never build the institutional memory that compounds into a real engineering organisation.
Some gaps are temporary. They are bursts, spikes, specialist needs with a shape and an end. A launch ninety days out. A migration that needs three people for six months and one person forever after. A specialist skill you need deeply for this one project and rarely again. A hole to cover while you take the proper time to hire the permanent person well. These gaps do not want a permanent hire, because when the burst is over you’re left carrying a full-time cost for a need that has passed. These gaps want augmentation. You bring in senior capability fast, exactly sized to the need, and when the need ends, so does the cost.
Look at what this does to Daniel’s problem.
Daniel has been treating his October launch as if it revealed a permanent hole in his team. But it doesn’t. The launch is a spike. It’s ninety days of intense need that will subside once the platform ships and stabilises. Trying to fill a ninety-day spike with a permanent hire is why door one is a trap. He’d be hiring for a shape of work that won’t exist in six months.
And Daniel does also have a genuine permanent gap, the senior backend role he’s been failing to fill since March. That one is real, and it deserves a proper, unhurried, high-standard permanent hire. But he has been letting the panic of the launch contaminate that hire, tempting himself to lower the bar and fill a decade-long seat to solve a ninety-day problem.
Two different gaps. Two different answers. The moment Daniel separates them, his impossible situation becomes almost simple.
He augments for the launch. Senior contract engineers, brought in fast, sized to the spike, gone when it’s over. And he keeps hiring, properly and without panic, for the permanent role, now that the launch is no longer holding a gun to that decision. The augmentation buys him the one thing he was missing: the time and the breathing room to make the permanent hire well instead of desperately.
That’s the framework. It isn’t “augmentation is better” or “hiring is better.” Anyone who tells you one of those in the abstract is selling you something. It’s this: hire for the permanent, augment for the temporary, and the expensive mistakes all come from confusing the two.
I run a company that does staff augmentation. So you should be suspicious when I tell you that you need it. Let me earn back some of that suspicion by telling you plainly when you don’t.
If the gap is permanent, augmentation is the wrong tool, and a good partner will tell you that even though it costs them the easier sale. If your core product knowledge would walk out the door every time a contract ends, you don’t have a staffing need, you have a hiring need, and you should hire. If what you actually need is not more hands but a different structure, or a decision nobody’s willing to make, or a product problem dressed up as a capacity problem, then more people of any kind, permanent or contract, will just help you build the wrong thing faster.
I have talked companies out of augmentation more than once. Not out of virtue. Out of self-interest of the longer kind. Because the client I stop from making an expensive mistake becomes the client who trusts me for a decade, and that relationship is worth more than the contract I declined. A partner who will only ever tell you to buy more of what they sell is not a partner. They’re a vendor with a quota.
So before you augment anything, be honest about which gap you have. If it’s permanent, close this tab and go write a proper job description. I mean that.
Let’s say Daniel has done the honest work and he genuinely has a temporary gap. The launch. He’s right to augment. So he calls the agency, and two days later the twelve CVs arrive with that covering note. Strong senior candidates, available immediately.
Here is the thing that note is hiding, and it’s the trap of door two.
That sentence is a claim. Strong senior candidates. And a claim is worth exactly as much as the work that went into it, which you cannot see from the CVs.
You would never accept a prescription from a doctor who named the drug before examining you. But a shortlist is a prescription, and most of them are written without an examination. What usually happens behind that covering note is not assessment. It’s a search. The agency took Daniel’s brief, ran it against a database of available people, filtered on keywords, checked who was free to start, and forwarded whoever matched. No judgement about Daniel’s team. No test of depth. No thought about who would actually survive in his specific environment. The shortlist looks like the output of expertise. It’s often the output of a database query with a covering sentence that claims otherwise.
And if Daniel doesn’t catch that, door two swallows him. He interviews twelve people to discover that maybe two can actually do the work, burns his senior engineers’ scarce time doing it, places someone who looked right on paper, and three weeks into the launch crunch discovers the person is the one-year-repeated-ten-times kind, except now they’re embedded in the most important project of his year.
So how does Daniel tell a real shortlist from a forwarded database? He runs a test that costs him almost nothing.
He gives the exact same brief to two different providers. Same words, same requirements, same day. Then he compares what comes back. If both did real work, the two shortlists will differ in interesting ways. Different people, yes, but more importantly different readings of his brief. One weights the domain experience, another the communication skills, another comes back with a question about a contradiction in his requirements he hadn’t noticed. That variation is the sound of people actually thinking about his problem. If both providers are just forwarding, he gets the same generic senior developers from the same shared talent pools, two lists that look suspiciously alike, because neither was shaped by his brief. Both were shaped by who was available.
The test works because thinking produces difference and forwarding produces sameness. Daniel doesn’t need to be able to judge the candidates himself. He just needs two lists on one desk.
This is the difference between a body shop and a partner. A body shop sends you people who match your keywords. A partner sends you people they have actually assessed against your reality, and can tell you exactly why each one is on the list and who they rejected and why. When you ask a body shop those questions, they stall. When you ask a partner, they were waiting for you to ask.
Daniel separated his two gaps. He augmented for the launch, and he ran the two-brief test, and he noticed that one provider’s shortlist was thoughtful and specific while the other’s was a database dump, which told him everything about which one to work with. He brought in two senior contract engineers who were productive inside a fortnight, because that’s what senior augmentation is for, and because they’d been assessed for exactly his stack and his situation rather than forwarded off a keyword match.
The launch shipped in the first week of October. On time. It was not a miracle. It was the ordinary result of a problem correctly diagnosed.
But here’s the part of the ending I like best, because it’s the part nobody plans for.
One of those contract engineers, in the course of the launch, documented a piece of the system that Daniel’s own team had been quietly terrified of for two years. Wrote it down. Explained it. And when the contract ended and that engineer moved on, the knowledge stayed, because a good augmentation engagement transfers knowledge instead of hoarding it. Daniel’s permanent team came out of the launch stronger than they went in.
And the permanent role? Daniel filled it in November. Properly. No panic, high standard, the right person, because augmentation had bought him the one thing the July version of him was missing. Time to make the decision that mattered without a gun to his head.
That is what winning looks like. Not a heroic scramble. A clear head, an honest diagnosis, and the discipline to treat two different problems as two different problems.
If you are somewhere near where Daniel was in July, ninety days from something that can’t slip and short of the people to do it, I want you to do one thing before you reach for either door.
Ask whether the gap in front of you is permanent or temporary. Whether you’ll still have it in two years. Because a permanent gap wants a hire, patiently and to a high standard, and a temporary gap wants augmentation, fast and exactly sized, and almost every expensive mistake in this whole area comes from solving one with the tool meant for the other.
And when you do augment, remember that the shortlist is a claim, and make them prove it was earned.
That’s the honest guide. It doesn’t tell you to always augment, because I’d be lying, and you’d eventually work out that I was lying, and then I’d have a sale and no relationship, which is the worst trade in business.
If you’re staring at a version of Daniel’s July right now and you’re genuinely not sure which kind of gap you have, that’s exactly the conversation I’m happy to have, including the version where I tell you to hire and not to call me back until you have a different problem. Sometimes that’s the most useful hour we’ll spend together.
A few years ago a man came to us wanting to build a betting portal. He had a clear vision, real capital behind him, and every intention of spending it with us. He was, on paper, the perfect client. The kind you don’t want to slow down.
I asked him one question before we discussed anything else.
Do you have a licence to run a betting business?
He told me he had a business licence. I explained, as gently as I could, that a business licence and a betting licence are two entirely different things, and that in a great many jurisdictions the second one is extraordinarily hard to get, and sometimes simply unavailable. He went quiet. He said he’d come back to us once he had it sorted.
That was nine years ago. I’m still waiting.
I could have taken his money. He was ready to pay. We could have built him a beautiful, well-architected betting platform that he would never have been legally allowed to switch on, and by the time he discovered that, the invoice would have been settled and the problem would have been entirely his. Nothing I did would have been illegal or even, by the loose standards of the industry, unusual. Plenty of firms would have built it.
I’ve never once regretted asking the question instead. And I want to explain why, because the reason is not that I’m a good person. The reason is a business argument, and it’s one I think most technology buyers have completely upside down.
Here is what actually happened when I turned that project away.
That man tells people about me. Not “Brainium built my thing,” because we never built anything. He tells them something far more valuable than that. He says “I went to these people ready to spend a fortune, and instead of taking it, they stopped me making an expensive mistake.”
Do you understand how rare that story is, and how far it travels? In an industry where the default assumption is that every vendor will tell you whatever it takes to win the contract, a firm that talked itself out of one becomes the firm people recommend without being asked. That reputation compounds, quietly, for years. It is worth more than the project would ever have been, and it costs nothing but the discipline to ask an uncomfortable question at the wrong moment.
This is the part buyers get upside down. You are trained to see a vendor’s eagerness as a good sign. It is usually the opposite. A vendor who says yes to everything is not being helpful. They are being a vendor who says yes to everything, and one day the thing they say yes to will be your bad idea, and they will build it perfectly, and you will pay for it.
The most valuable thing a technology partner can do for you is sometimes to tell you not to build.
I’ve watched a lot of software projects fail expensively over twenty-seven years. Almost none of them failed for reasons nobody could have seen. They failed for reasons that were sitting in plain sight on day one, and that everybody in the room agreed, tacitly, not to look at.
A licence nobody checked. An integration everyone assumed would exist and nobody confirmed. A data source that turned out to be locked behind a contract, or a regulator, or a department that had no intention of cooperating. A key third party who was never actually consulted. A regulation that made the whole model illegal in the one market that mattered.
None of these are technical failures. Every one of them is a question that should have been asked before a line of code was written, and wasn’t, because asking it might have slowed down the fun part.
The betting-portal question is not really about betting. It is about the single assumption your entire project rests on, the one thing that has to be true for any of this to work, that nobody has actually confirmed is true. Every project has one. Usually the team can feel it. It’s the thing everyone talks around in the planning meeting. The assumption stated a little too confidently and a little too quickly, that nobody wants to be the person to poke, because poking it might mean the project doesn’t happen.
A good partner pokes it. On day one. Before you’ve spent anything. That is the single most useful thing they will ever do for you, and it will feel, in the moment, like an obstacle.
This is the practical part, and it’s the reason I wrote this down.
When you are choosing who to build with, you are not really evaluating whether they can build. Most competent firms can build. You are evaluating whether they will tell you the truth when the truth is inconvenient to them. And you can test for that before you sign a thing.
Ask them, directly: tell me about a time you talked a client out of a project, or out of a feature they wanted. A firm that has the instinct will have a story ready, because they’re a little proud of it. A firm that doesn’t will stall, or give you a vague non-answer, or quietly reveal that they’ve never once left money on the table for a client’s benefit.
Ask them what they think is riskiest about your idea. Not what’s exciting. What’s riskiest. Watch whether they’ve actually thought about it or whether they reach for reassurance. Reassurance this early is a warning, not a comfort.
Ask them what would have to be true for this to fail. A partner worth having will answer that question with something specific and slightly uncomfortable. A vendor who just wants the contract will tell you it won’t fail.
The answers will tell you almost everything the proposal won’t. A firm that can say no to you before you’re a client is a firm that will tell you the truth when you are one. A firm that agrees with everything in the sales process will agree with everything right up until the project is on fire, at which point they’ll agree that it’s on fire and hand you the invoice.
I’ll be honest about my own position here, because it would be dishonest not to. I run a firm that makes its money by building software. Every project I talk a client out of is revenue I don’t earn. When I ask the betting-portal question, I am, in the short term, arguing against my own P&L.
I do it anyway, and not because I’m a saint. I do it because the alternative, a portfolio full of projects that should never have been built, clients who quietly resent the money they wasted, and a reputation as a firm that will build anything you pay for, is a far worse business than the one I actually want. The short-term revenue is real. The long-term cost of chasing it is much larger and much harder to see, which is exactly why so many firms chase it anyway.
So before you commission your next build, ask yourself one question, and then ask it of whoever wants to build it for you.
What is the one thing that has to be true for this to work, that nobody has actually checked?
If you can’t answer it, that’s not a green light. And if the firm you’re about to hire can’t answer it either, or won’t, you’ve learned the most important thing about them before signing a single page.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on a build you’re weighing up, that’s a conversation I’m always happy to have, including the version where I tell you not to do it. Sometimes that’s the most useful hour we’ll spend.
I keep coming back to a number. 35,000. That’s roughly how many SAP ECC customers exist globally, and by Gartner’s count, less than 40% of them had actually migrated to S/4HANA by the end of 2024. December 31, 2027 is when mainstream maintenance for ECC 6.0 ends. Extended maintenance buys another three years, until 2030, at a premium. After that, you’re running an unsupported ERP that touches finance, procurement, supply chain and manufacturing at some of the largest companies on the planet.
People have started comparing this to Y2K. I understand the instinct, but I’d frame it differently. Y2K was a fixed technical bug with a fixed technical fix. This is a forced re-platforming of enterprise data at a scale most CIOs have never had to think about, on a timeline they don’t fully control, into an architecture that punishes them economically for bringing along everything they’ve accumulated over twenty or thirty years.
That last part is where I think there’s a real, underappreciated business sitting for a company like Solix Technologies. Let me walk through why, and then let me tell you honestly where I think Solix will fumble it if nothing changes.
Do the arithmetic on that 35,000 number. Roughly 14,000 organisations had migrated by end of 2024. Basis Technologies’ own adoption model, built from SAP and Gartner data, projects only about 57% of ECC customers will have completed the move by the time mainstream maintenance ends in 2027. That leaves somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 enterprises worldwide who still have to move a live, mission-critical ERP system in the next few years, on a services market that is already tight on SAP-certified talent.
Now here’s the thing that most of the coverage misses. Nobody migrating from ECC to S/4HANA is doing a simple lift and shift of their entire database. And that’s not a technical inconvenience, it’s an economic constraint baked into the architecture itself.
SAP HANA runs on in-memory computing. Data that used to sit comfortably on disk now competes for space in RAM, and RAM at enterprise scale is expensive in a way spinning disk never was. So the moment a company decides to move to S/4HANA, someone in finance is going to ask a very reasonable question: why are we paying premium infrastructure cost to keep twenty years of closed purchase orders, settled invoices and completed projects sitting in active memory?
A 30 TB legacy SAP database is not 30 TB of live, operational data. A meaningful chunk of it, often the majority, is dead weight retained mostly because someone, somewhere, is worried about a tax authority or a regulator asking for it seven years from now. Moving all of that into HANA makes no economic sense, and increasingly, CFOs are the ones saying so, not just the IT architects.
This is precisely the gap that application retirement and data archiving exist to close. Identify what’s actually needed for the go-forward system, archive the rest into a compliant, queryable, low-cost repository, and shrink the database that actually needs to move. Smaller database, faster migration, lower infrastructure bill, lower risk. That’s not a nice-to-have step in an S/4HANA project. For any enterprise with a genuinely old SAP footprint, it’s close to a prerequisite.
This is Solix’s home turf, and to be fair to them, they’ve built real product depth here. SOLIXCloud Enterprise Archiving covers database archiving, application retirement, file archiving and email archiving under one roof. Their retirement play doesn’t stop at ECC either, they’ve built out multi-system retirement across SAP satellites like BW, CRM, SRM and GTS, retiring them into a single governed archive with native understanding of SAP’s own archive object semantics through the Archive Development Kit and Information Lifecycle Management framework. That’s not a trivial thing to replicate. Understanding how SAP structures archive objects, and being able to retrieve that data years later in a form that satisfies an auditor, is domain expertise, not generic storage.
Their pitch is straightforward and it’s the right pitch: identify static and rarely used data before migration, archive it to the cloud, shrink the migration footprint, and cut cost, complexity and timeline all at once. If I were running Solix’s SAP go-to-market, I would not change this pitch. I would change how loudly and how often it gets made, and to whom. More on that later.
I’d expect a smart CIO to push back here and ask why they wouldn’t just dump the historical data into Snowflake or Databricks and call it done. It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is that those platforms solve a different problem.
Snowflake and Databricks are built for analytical consumption, structured for querying at scale, optimized for feeding dashboards and machine learning pipelines. What they are not built for, natively, is SAP’s own retention semantics. An SAP archive object carries legal hold logic, country-specific retention rules, ILM-governed deletion schedules, and the ability to reconstruct a business document exactly as it looked inside the SAP transaction it came from, years after the source system is gone. A generic lakehouse can store the bytes. It cannot, out of the box, guarantee an auditor that a purged record was deleted in line with a retention policy tied to a specific SAP archiving object and a specific regulatory clock.
That distinction sounds like a technicality until you’re the general counsel of a company facing a compliance audit or an eDiscovery request, and someone asks you to prove chain of custody on a decommissioned system. At that point, “we moved it to a data lake” is not an answer. “We moved it into a governed archive purpose-built to preserve SAP’s own retention and access semantics” is. That’s the wedge Solix should be driving, hard, in every conversation, because it’s the one place where the hyperscale data platforms genuinely cannot compete on their own terms.
Here’s where I think Solix should be far more ambitious than its current messaging suggests. An application retirement engagement is, by nature, a low-drama, back-office project. Nobody gets promoted for archiving old purchase orders. But it is also the single best Trojan horse into a much bigger enterprise data relationship.
Once Solix is inside an account, holding the retired, governed, compliant historical record of the enterprise, the natural next conversation is: now that this data is unified and accessible, what else can we do with it? Data governance. Sensitive data discovery and masking for privacy compliance. Feeding a genuinely AI-ready data fabric instead of a swamp of undocumented legacy tables. Solix already has products in this direction, Enterprise Content Services, Enterprise Data Governance, and their own Enterprise AI layer sitting on top of the Common Data Platform. The archiving engagement is the low-risk entry point. The governance and AI-readiness layer is where the account actually grows.
The mistake would be treating the S/4HANA cycle as a one-time services windfall. The right way to think about it is as thousands of enterprises opening their door for exactly one reason, cost reduction on a forced migration, and Solix having a limited window to prove enough value inside that door to earn a much larger, much stickier data relationship over the following years.
Enterprises don’t buy archiving because it’s elegant. They buy it because the numbers work, and here the numbers genuinely do work in Solix’s favour. A smaller migration footprint means a shorter, cheaper migration project. Fewer TB in HANA means lower ongoing infrastructure and licensing cost, every single month, for as long as the system runs. Retiring legacy applications outright removes maintenance, support and licensing spend on systems that exist purely to give someone occasional read access to old records, replacing an ongoing cost with a low, fixed archiving fee. And a properly governed archive removes compliance risk that, left unmanaged, shows up eventually as an audit finding or a legal exposure nobody budgeted for.
Stack those four together and you have a genuinely defensible ROI story that doesn’t need embellishment. That’s rare in enterprise software pitches. Use it.
I looked at several market sizing reports for structured data archiving and application retirement software, and I’ll be direct with you, they disagree with each other by an order of magnitude, some pegging the category at under a hundred million dollars globally, others at close to nine billion. That spread itself tells you something useful: this is still an immature, loosely defined category, which is actually good news for a specialist willing to define it clearly for buyers rather than bad news.
Let me build my own back of envelope instead of borrowing someone else’s number. Take the pool of roughly 17,000 to 20,000 SAP ECC customers who still need to migrate before the 2027 to 2030 window closes. Assume a meaningful minority, say 25 to 30%, have legacy databases large and old enough that a pre-migration archiving and retirement engagement is genuinely worth doing, rather than a nice-to-have. That’s somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 realistic target accounts globally over the next four to five years. Price a typical engagement, software plus services plus the ongoing archive subscription, anywhere from $150,000 to over a million dollars depending on enterprise size. That puts a realistic, serviceable addressable opportunity for SAP-linked archiving and retirement work somewhere in the low single-digit billions of dollars, cumulative, over this cycle. Not the total category TAM you’ll find quoted in a vendor report, but the actual pool of accounts with a genuine, time-boxed reason to buy.
Solix’s own reported revenue is in the range of $7 million, on a base of around 585 to 594 employees. Set that against a multi-billion dollar addressable pool and the gap is not subtle. This is not a company that is short of opportunity. It is a company that has captured a rounding error of the opportunity in front of it.
Let’s put a number on the upside, because I think this is where the opportunity really comes alive.
Take the low single-digit billions cumulative SAM I built above, call it $3 billion over the next four to five years as a round working number, sitting between my own conservative build and the more optimistic estimates floating around. Now ask a much less ambitious question than “can Solix dominate this market.” Ask: what happens if Solix simply captures 3 to 5% of it, nothing heroic, just a credible, well-executed share for a focused specialist going up against much larger incumbents.
Three percent of $3 billion is $90 million, cumulative, over four to five years. Spread that out, and you’re looking at an incremental $15 to 20 million a year layered on top of their existing $7 million base. That alone doubles or triples current revenue. At 5% capture, you’re at $150 million cumulative, roughly $30 million a year in new SAP-linked revenue, which puts Solix at four to five times its current size purely from this one cycle, before counting a single dollar of expansion revenue from governance, masking or Enterprise AI once they’re inside the account.
This is the part I want to underline. Solix does not need to win this market to be transformed by it. It needs to win a small, defensible slice of it, with discipline, and the company changes shape entirely. That is a far more achievable goal than the market-share fantasies most vendors chase, and it should be the number the leadership team is actually managing towards, quarter by quarter, account by account.
OpenText is the incumbent here, and it earns that position honestly, deep, certified integration with SAP ArchiveLink and ILM, decades of enterprise content management pedigree, and the comfort of being SAP’s own recommended archiving and document access partner. If a CIO wants the safest, most conventional choice, OpenText is it, and Solix should never pretend otherwise.
But “safest and most conventional” is also OpenText’s weakness. It’s a large, broad ECM platform where SAP archiving is one product line among many, built for the customer who wants everything from one vendor and is willing to pay for that convenience and that complexity. Solix’s honest USP is focus and speed: a company whose entire founding purpose, since 2002, has been enterprise data lifecycle management, purpose-built for this exact use case, without the weight of a sprawling content management suite around it. That should translate into faster deployment, a simpler commercial model, and pricing that doesn’t carry OpenText’s platform overhead.
Whether it actually does translate into that, in practice, on a real deal, is a different question, and it’s one Solix needs to be able to prove with hard numbers, not adjectives, in front of every CIO who defaults to “let’s just ask our SAP account rep who they recommend.”
Before any of this legacy SAP data becomes fuel for AI, it has to move through a sequence: classify it, clean it, archive it, govern it, secure it, integrate it, analyse it, and only then apply AI to it. Solix’s strongest, most defensible position is squarely in the middle of that chain, archive, govern and secure. Their retirement and archiving products do that work today, at genuine depth, for SAP-specific data structures that generic platforms don’t understand out of the box.
Where I’d push them to be honest with themselves is the two ends of that chain. Classification and cleaning, the unglamorous front-end work of figuring out what data actually matters before you archive it, and analysis plus AI application, the glamorous back-end work everyone wants to talk about, are both areas where Solix has product ambition (their Enterprise AI and Common Data Platform pushes are clearly aimed there) but not yet the market credibility that IBM, Databricks or Snowflake carry in AI conversations. The right strategic posture is not to pretend Solix is an end-to-end AI platform. It’s to own the archive-govern-secure middle with total authority, and partner or integrate outward at both ends rather than trying to out-market companies with ten times the AI mindshare.
A few things need saying plainly, because a company this size, chasing a cycle this large, cannot afford polite silence about its own gaps.
Solix is unfunded and has stayed that way since 2002. That’s either admirable discipline or a structural constraint on how fast they can scale sales and marketing to meet a decade-scale opportunity, and honestly it’s probably both. A ~$7 million revenue base against 585-plus employees, most of the headcount concentrated in India through what looks like a services and delivery-heavy model, tells me this is a company organised more for cost-efficient execution than for aggressive market capture. Their competitive set, per their own positioning, includes IBM, OpenText, Veritas, Commvault, Informatica and Precisely, tier-one vendors with sales and marketing budgets that dwarf Solix’s entire revenue. Product depth alone does not close that gap.
I think that’s exactly Solix’s risk right now. The technology is genuinely differentiated for this specific moment in SAP’s history. The economics of the pitch are sound. The timing could not be more favourable, a hard deadline, a forced budget conversation, a CFO already primed to ask why the migration bill is so large. The upside math above is real, not aspirational marketing copy.
None of that matters if the sales motion stays where it currently appears to be, largely inbound, largely content-marketing-led, competing for attention against vendors ten times its size. The best product in the world, sitting quietly on a website waiting to be discovered, loses every single time to a mediocre product with a sales team already in the room. Winning this cycle needs an aggressive, account-based push directly at the 4,000 to 6,000 realistic target enterprises I estimated above, a serious channel and system integrator strategy so Solix rides alongside Accenture, Deloitte, TCS and the other large SI’s who are already inside these accounts running the migration, rather than trying to get discovered independently, and marketing that states the ROI and upside case in numbers a CFO and a board can defend, not adjectives a marketer likes.
The window here is not permanent. By 2030, most of this cycle will have played out, one way or another, for most of these 17,000 to 20,000 accounts. The company that wins isn’t necessarily the one with the best archive engine. It’s the one whose sales team is already in the room, with the CFO, before the CIO has finished writing the migration business case. Solix has the product to earn that seat, and it has a genuinely transformative revenue outcome waiting on the other side of even modest execution. Whether it earns that seat is now entirely a go-to-market question, not a technology question.
If you’re sitting inside Solix, inside a CIO’s office staring down this exact 2027 clock, or you think I’ve got a number wrong somewhere in this piece, I want to hear it. Argue with the math in the comments, or write to me directly. This is exactly the kind of conversation that’s more useful out in the open, before the decisions get made behind closed doors.
Disclosure: I hold shares in TechNVision Ventures, Solix’s parent company.