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Jai Jalan shared thisOne lesson that took me years to learn: The reported problem is almost never the actual problem. A customer says the app is slow. You find a slow query, fix it, and move on. But what if the real issue wasn't the query? What if the real issue was a missing test, a weak deployment process, or a gap in monitoring? The symptom gets reported. The root cause stays hidden. I've noticed humans and AI make the same mistake: we stop digging too early. The 5 Whys framework is a simple reminder to keep asking "why?" until you find the thing that actually needs fixing. The first answer fixes the issue. The fifth answer fixes the system.
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Jai Jalan posted thisI'm excited to accept the invitation to join TiE Rajasthan as a Charter Member. Six years ago, we moved to Jaipur and decided to make it our home. Since then, we've built our company here, raised our children here, and become deeply invested in the future of this city. Over time, I've come to believe that the most meaningful things we build are not measured in quarters or even years. They are measured in decades. My ambition is not just to build companies. It is to build institutions, create opportunities, and contribute to something that outlasts me. I'm joining TiE to build relationships with fellow entrepreneurs and leaders, learn from people creating meaningful impact, explore new ventures, and contribute wherever my experience and network can be useful. Jaipur has given my family a home. I look forward to building here, contributing here, and growing alongside this city for many years to come.
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Jai Jalan posted thisThree engineers. Same problem. Three different systems. All used AI. All got working code. None of it fit together. I sat in on a client working session a few months ago. Three engineers solving the same feature. All using AI assistants. All producing code that ran locally. When they tried to integrate it, nothing meshed. Different assumptions about data models. Different service boundaries. Different interpretations of what "done" meant. The AI did exactly what it was asked. Each engineer asked something slightly different. This is the part that gets missed in the AI productivity conversation. The tools are fast. The output looks right. But if three people don't share the same mental model of the system, AI just makes them confidently wrong, faster. What changed this for us: write the feature doc before writing any code. Routes, data models, services, UX, phases. Commit it. Let AI turn it into tasks. Run each in a parallel session. The bottleneck was never implementation. It was clarity. AI makes fast teams faster. It makes confused teams more confused, faster. What does your team do to align before building?
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Jai Jalan posted thisNine years running a services company is strange preparation for building a product. You can't hide from what customers actually need. I was wrong about the hardest part. At Better, we embedded with engineering teams. 40+ engineers. 500+ clients. We didn't just ship code, we saw how teams actually worked. And the same thing kept happening. An alert fires. Or a customer calls. Two engineers drop everything and go dark for a day. Sometimes two days. The fix takes twenty minutes. Finding the root cause takes most of the week. Multiply that across every team we worked with. Engineers losing 30-40% of their capacity. Not to features. Not to debt. Just investigation. That's not a team problem. That's a tooling gap. Nine years of services gave me something most product founders don't have: certainty. Not a hypothesis. A pattern I'd watched play out hundreds of times, across every stack, every size of team. The hard part wasn't finding the problem. The hard part was unlearning services thinking. In services, every client is special. You customize. You accommodate. You say yes. Building product means deciding what the answer is and holding that line for everyone. That shift took me longer than I expected.
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Jai Jalan posted thisRunning Better for 9 years taught me something I didn't expect. Services companies see every problem before products exist for it. That pattern became Operate. When you're a software partner for 40+ engineering teams, you stop guessing what problems are real. You see them. One client's engineers pulled offline for three days diagnosing a production issue. Fixed. Six weeks later, the next client. Same pattern. Different stack. Same three-day investigation. By the tenth time, I wasn't curious about the problem anymore. I knew exactly what it was. Engineering teams were losing 30-40% of their capacity to unplanned investigation. Not poor engineers. Not bad processes. Just work that couldn't be batched, planned, or predicted. Every time, I custom-solved it. Paired a Better engineer with their team. Worked through logs, database records, git history together. Then one day I realized: I'd been building the same product manually for three years. The mistake most services founders make: they solve it for the client in front of them and move on. The pattern disappears into the project history. The advantage they don't use: they've already validated the product with paying clients. Ten of them. Before writing a line of code. That's what a services background gives you. Not just domain expertise. A validated signal most product founders spend two years and $500K trying to find. What was the pattern you kept solving before you realized it was actually a product?
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Jai Jalan shared thisYesterday, I watched Sheep Detective with my 7-year-old son. What surprised me wasn’t just the humor, the murder mystery, or the beautiful animation - it was how emotionally layered the film was. Funny one moment, heartfelt the next, while still keeping both kids and adults completely engaged. It reminded me of the feeling I had watching movies like Up years ago. And it made me wonder: Why hasn’t the Indian animation industry reached this level of storytelling maturity yet? - India has incredible artistic talent. - We have strong technical capability. - We have rich mythology, culture, humor, and emotional depth. But very few animated films here feel truly universal - stories that work equally well for a child and a 40-year-old parent sitting beside them. Too often, animation in India is still treated as “kids content” rather than cinema. The best animated movies aren’t successful because they animate well. They succeed because they tell deeply human stories - with emotion, pacing, character depth, silence, music, and writing that respects the audience. Would love to hear - why hasn't Indian animation reached this yet?
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Jai Jalan liked thisThank you Arti Dogra It is deeply rewarding to see our alumnae reflect so fondly on their time at the school. Your achievements and continued connection to the institution are a source of pride and inspiration for our entire community.Jai Jalan liked thisThis weekend, I came across this video made by a young student of Welham Girls’ School, Aahana Gupta (Batch of 2026). It isn’t one of those polished, professionally produced videos and perhaps that is precisely why it stayed with me. There was something disarmingly sincere about it, something reminiscent of the voice many of us carried as schoolgirls standing at the threshold of life. Aahana speaks about life, resilience and optimism. She speaks of the kingfisher, the school bird that dives beneath the water only to emerge and soar again, after the deepest dive. She speaks of the familiar bajri-covered paths of Welham and how even something as ordinary as that teaches you to walk a little more steadily. Long after the video ended, I found myself thinking not so much about the words themselves as about the place from which they had emerged. And, inevitably, about Welham. It is curious how certain institutions remain a part of you long after you have left them behind. Decades pass. Life acquires layers and responsibilities your fourteen-year-old self could never have imagined. Yet one mention of school and something shifts. For me, Welham was never only about classrooms, dormitories, the tuck shop, assemblies or uniforms. Like most boarding school alumni, I think first of friendships, the kind that somehow survive distance, time and the various detours life takes. Friendships where years can pass and conversations resume as though they had merely been interrupted. But beyond the friendships, there is something harder to define. An ethos perhaps. And perhaps that is because boarding school teaches lessons that have very little to do with textbooks. You learnt to live with people different from yourself. To manage homesickness, disappointment and misunderstandings. To recover from bad exams, lost competitions and occasional heartbreaks. Nobody made a great fuss when you fell down and scraped your knees.You simply got up ,dusted yourself and carried on. Without quite realising it, you acquired resilience. Looking back, I think some of the most valuable lessons school taught us were really lessons about recovery rather than success. The expectation was never that you would never fall. The expectation was simply that you would rise. And rise again. That is why the kingfisher resonates so deeply. Life has a way of convincing us that falling and flying are opposites. They are not. Careers stumble. Plans collapse. Confidence falters. We all have seasons when we feel submerged rather than airborne. Yet perhaps falling and soaring are not separate chapters after all. Perhaps they are part of the same flight. Watching this video reminded me of something Welham taught many of us long before we knew we would need it: life will knock you over from time to time. You will survive it. And when the moment comes, you dust yourself off, adjust your stride on the bajri path, and keep moving.
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Jai Jalan liked thisJai Jalan liked thisAI is compressing the craft that turns junior engineers into senior ones. Most organizations have not noticed yet. And almost nobody is asking what happens to the pipeline when they do. #SoftwareEngineering #AIinTech #EngineeringLeadershipWhere Do Senior Engineers Come From When Junior Engineers Disappear?Where Do Senior Engineers Come From When Junior Engineers Disappear?
Experience & Education
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Better
View Jai’s full experience
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Licenses & Certifications
Volunteer Experience
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Project Coordinator
Iowa State University
- 2 years 5 months
Economic Empowerment
As part of Sankalp initiative, helped in various fund raising activities like football volunteering, Daawat - Dinner for Development, Coin and Can Collection and organized Younkers Community Day Event. Since Fall 2009, worked as a Project Coordinator.
Publications
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Steganalysis using Partially Ordered Markov Models
12th Information Hiding Workshop
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A Software Tool for Forensic Steganalysis of JPEG Images
ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law
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Feature Selection for Steganalysis using the Mahalanobis Distance
SPIE - International Society for Optics and Photonics, Media Forensics and Security XII
Projects
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SmartGlass client for Xbox One
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Bing Search for Windows Phone 8
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Partnered closely with the Windows Phone team to bring technical innovation and many feature capabilities to the Bing search app on the phone. This included adding support for Videos, Deals, and a new experience to explore Trending News, Videos, nearby deals, top movies, and upcoming events.
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Bing Mobile
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The project involved optimizing web and native experience for Bing users on smart phones.
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MSN Mobile
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The project involved optimizing web experience for MSN users on smart phones.
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Honors & Awards
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Thought Leadership Award
Microsoft
At Online Service Division Garage Fair for presenting MapDive, a geo-temporal search initiative.
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Teaching Excellence Award
Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University
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Customer Appreciation Certificate
TATA Consultancy Services
For making TCS proud by achieving Customer Delight for WebComm project.
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Certificate of Appreciation
McKinsey & Company
For outstanding contribution to problem solving in WebComms project.
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Gold Medal
Indian School Of Mines
For graduating top of the class 2006 in Department of Computer Science, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad.
Languages
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English
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Hindi
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Namrata Tiwary
🚀 New Podcast Episode with Adhith Citraju releasing on 23/6/2025 Monday, 8:15 pm. "Startups, Strategy & Staying Sane" featuring Adhith Citraju founder of NeuraaCall, MD at Solvionis. In today’s fast-moving world, we’re seeing a worrying trend: Many Gen Z professionals — despite their talent — are struggling with foundational skills like clear communication, accountability, and resilience. Companies are noticing. Stories of new hires being let go due to a lack of ownership, poor clarity, or passive behavior are becoming all too common. But then — you meet someone like Adhith Citraju 🎯 A young founder who defies every stereotype. He doesn’t just “show up.” He shows up with purpose, perspective, and precision. He communicates with clarity. He builds with intent. He reflects deeply, learns quickly, and speaks with authenticity — all while bootstrapping meaningful ventures in tech and AI. 🎧 In this episode, we dive into: * Building tech startups in India without funding or connections. * Navigating mental health as an ambitious young founder. * Making AI actually useful for small businesses. * Lessons from failure, resilience, and growing up in the startup world. * Why clarity and communication will always be your sharpest tools. 💡 Adhith Citraju — in a generation where many are still figuring out how to show up — you’re already leading. Your maturity, insight, and drive are rare, and deeply refreshing. I learnt a lot from this conversation. Thank you. #Podcast #GenZ #Startups #Leadership #AI #YouthLeadership #ClarityMatters #WorkplaceSkills #Entrepreneurship #IndiaInnovates
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Ashok Kumar E R
A must-read for anyone looking to leverage CSR as a force for systemic impact, not just goodwill. “CSR is shifting from checkbox compliance to strategic, equitable investment” but the real test will be whether funds start flowing into underserved regions and early-stage innovation. Sumit Tayal Give
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