The Story I Actually Want to Tell
For a long time, I thought success had a shape. Good marks. Better marks. The right degree. The right company name on your CV. I chased that shape diligently — and I was good at it.
What I didn’t know was that I was optimised for a very narrow kind of performance. And that the world outside the exam hall was going to humble me in ways no syllabus had prepared me for.
Academics taught me how to score. Life taught me how to think.
I was a 90-percenter who had never once read a newspaper. Never needed to — the syllabus didn’t ask for it, and the exams didn’t test for it.
Then I walked into a management classroom and noticed something in a few students that couldn’t be crammed for. A business context, a current affair, a shift in the room — they’d just get it. Instinctively. The kind of awareness that comes from paying attention to the world, not just a textbook.
Intelligence is not the same as awareness. A high score is not the same as a wide view. Being a frog in a well — however deep and well-decorated — is still being in a well.
I pulled up my socks. Literally and figuratively 😉
One message changed everything.
In my final year, during a summer project, I came across a LinkedIn profile that stopped me mid-scroll. A biomedical engineer who had become a founder. The combination of both worlds felt like a door I hadn’t known existed.
I sent a message. She said yes to a meeting. That one conversation led to an informal project, which led to an offer, which led to fourteen years — and counting.
I joined a young company, not an MNC with a fancy glass building. (Although as I write this, the Sorgen office is in a glass building — so perhaps we got there after all 😄*)* They were in healthcare, and I came in through their compression therapy segment — compression socks, specialised medical equipment, the kind of products most people walk past without a second thought.
I was proud to be in the room. I wanted to understand everything.
And what I found there, over the years that followed, was an education that no institution had offered me.
What working under great entrepreneurs actually teaches you.
They gave me room. Room to try things, room to learn slowly, room to fail without it becoming a defining moment. That kind of trust — when you’re young and green and enthusiastic but still figuring it out — is rarer than people realise. I did not take it for granted then. I do not take it for granted now.
I learned by doing, by staying, by watching how founders think. Not just about product or sales or marketing — but about decisions, about people, about the longer arc of building something. I was in meetings I had no business being in. I was handed problems that weren’t technically mine to solve. I was trusted before I had fully earned it, and that trust made me rise to it.
Anchal Gupta and Manish Gupta gave me that. I was, am, and will always be thankful to them for it.
We built this the hard way. And I mean that with pride.
When we first decided to sell online, nobody handed us a playbook. We started with Instamojo. Graduated to Magento — a constant headache where the website would go down, the developer wouldn’t respond, and every small edit took forever. Then WooCommerce. Then KartRocket, which was trying to be India’s answer to Shopify before they pivoted and became ShipRocket. That chapter didn’t work out for them quite the way ShipRocket did.
Then Shopify arrived and became the buzzword. We jumped on it. What you see today is probably the eighth iteration of that site. That’s how long this road has been.
We listed on Amazon so early in India that there was no online listing process yet. I sat across from an Amazon representative at Viviana Mall, over coffee, described our products, and signed paper tick-box forms to get us registered. Three or four products to start. And embarrassingly few orders to show for it, at first.
But we kept going. Because they say when you walk every day, nothing feels like it’s changing. And then one day you turn around — and everything has.
Over fourteen years, I have touched every corner of this business. Sales. Marketing. Customer support. Branding. Operations. Dealer networks. Human resources. I watched us go from being dealers of other people’s products, to building our own brand, to launching a private label, to setting up an entire manufacturing arm. I have seen it all — not from a distance, but from inside every single one of those rooms.
I am an employee who gets paid to run my own company.
That is the most honest way I know to describe what I do.
I have built large parts of what Sorgen is today. I have cared about it the way founders care — obsessively, personally, with my whole self. The wins felt like mine. The hard seasons felt like mine too.
There were safer options. MNC jobs that looked impressive on paper. And for a while, I wondered. But after some years inside this work — real work, work that mattered — I understood that the pleasure of doing what you love is simply above all of that. No title, no logo on a glass tower, was ever going to give me what this did.
Every time a “safer” path presented itself, something kept me here. Some people won’t understand that choice. They’ll ask why I didn’t move on. Why I didn’t build something “of my own.”
My answer, every time, is this: I did.
What I carry forward.
I am not writing this to offer a template. I’m writing it because I spent a long time believing that achievement was the point — that if I performed well enough, the rest would sort itself out.
What actually shaped me was different. It was the humility of that classroom. The courage of a cold message sent without overthinking. The generosity of founders who let me grow inside their company as though it were my own. The slow, patient work of staying long enough to truly understand something.
I am grateful — without reservation, without performance — for the path that brought me here. Not because it was easy. But because every part of it was real.
This is where I begin.
— Renuka