I have a hidden strength. I’ve never been uncomfortable in social situations. So, when I walked up to Sandeep Todi in 1998 at Pragati Maidan, I was smiling to myself. It was a warm winter morning and I knew what was coming but I relished the idea.
“Hi Sandeep, remember me?”
Sandeep looked back at me blankly. He couldn’t place me but I looked familiar.
“Sorry, who are you?” he asked, squinting at me.
All right, about six months before this conversation, I met Sandeep at an interview. I was trying to get a job at a company, called Batchmate, which was trying to build an early version of Facebook. Sandeep was a product manager and I had been shortlisted as an early employee. Sandeep was one person on a four-person interview panel.
Let me set the stage for you.
We were seated in a banquet hall of an upmarket hotel in Delhi. The hall had been stripped of all furniture. All it had were five chairs and a table. Four chairs were placed together on one side of the table and another chair for the candidate on the other. The room echoed when you walked from the door to the table, there was no place to hide. It was as intimidating and sepia-tinted as it sounds. I don’t remember much from the interview. Except Sandeep. He asked me a simple question. “How would you encourage people to shop online?”
Again, this is 1997. A time when noisy modem handshakes symbolized excitement, email forwards were a novelty and Flipkart was not even an idea in Sachin or Binny Bansal’s mind. I stumbled through my answer but it impressed Sandeep into saying, yes, you’re in.
I didn’t take the job. The company headquarters were in Calcutta and I loved Delhi NCR.
“You interviewed me a few months ago,” I told Sandeep as he tried to set up his stall trying to get people interested in the internet.
“Right, why didn’t you join?” he asked.
I shrugged and tried to explain but Sandeep had lost interest.
A few years later, I was working at Nasscom and Sandeep emailed me. He didn’t recognize me this time either. But on reminding, he was warmer and treated me more like a peer than an indecisive young man.
Our relationship has blossomed since then. Sandeep is a very unique individual. Just like me, he excuses himself from the limelight and fights to stay in the background. An executor by nature, Sandeep’s biggest strength is his commitment to a task. When we’re trying to curate a large event, despite the time difference (Sandeep now lives in Canada), he’s first on the call and last to leave. It doesn’t matter whether it is 1 AM or 6 AM, if there’s a call and he’s needed, he’s on it.
I’ve seen Sandeep the product manager evolve into Sandeep the entrepreneur and while he has changed, there’s one thing that hasn’t: his single-minded focus on execution.
But while these are strengths that are more common, Sandeep’s superpower is the unrivalled ability to analyze a problem while being empathetic to people. Or as I like to call him the empathetic problem solver.
Many people claim to be empathetic but very few know how to use empathy in their lives to truly pay it forward.
Sandeep is an active listener, picking up clues not just from your problem statement but also your body language. He reads between the lines and starts to formulate answers based on the input. He will further drill into a problem by asking questions that will often make you question your own beliefs, but he does that in the hope that he can deduce a creative solution. All of this while being compassionate and open-minded so that he leaves room for you to adapt his solution in your unique way. This isn’t to say that Sandeep avoids difficult answers. He’s as prepared to take difficult, seemingly unpopular decisions in the face of a challenge if that’s the only way out.
But most importantly he’s patient. I’ve never seen Sandeep give up on something or someone.
I am glad he hasn’t given up on our friendship and his commitment to SaaSBoomi. I am happy I walked up to him on that summer morning.
From the Author:
SaaSBoomi began in 2015 as a small gathering of ~50 founders, and today, with over 500 events across three countries and countless lives touched, we’ve only just scratched the surface.
None of this would have been possible without the unrelenting passion of our 125+ volunteers — the lifeblood of SaaSBoomi.
Their contributions go beyond effort; they’ve built a community bound by camaraderie, empathy, and a shared vision for a Product Nation.
Pay it FWD is my tribute to every pay-it-forward champion I’ve encountered on this incredible journey.
Their contributions to SaaSBoomi and the broader ecosystem have been immeasurable, yet there remains a story left to be told — one that echoes with the impact they continue to create.
