One email changed my life
By Rohit Singh, Member of Technical Staff, Runable
The fastest ten months of my life
I'm from Vadodara, it's where I grew up and did my bachelor's. Before Runable, I was running my own tech and design agency, Infinity Linkage, and pouring whatever time I had left into open source projects.
My project OSStag hadn't even launched yet. It was still on a waitlist, 109 people signed up, around 90 stars on GitHub. Not massive numbers, but enough to tell me I was onto something, and enough to get it selected for the Vercel Open Source Program. Things were moving.
Around the same time, I was turning down job offers. Companies would reach out, and I'd say no because none of them felt right. But back in October, I was active on X, and I kept seeing this one company on my timeline. Runable. I remember thinking: that's a company I'd probably want to work at.
I never applied, though. I didn't have to because, unknown to me, fate had already decided that path for me.
The conversation I didn't know about
I was good friends with this guy called Dominik. We both maintained open source projects, and I'd contributed to his. He knew Saksham, our co-founder, and Runable was hiring, specifically from India. When Saksham asked around, Dominik put my name forward.
I had no idea any of this happened. All I got was an email. No job posting, no application, no recruiter screen. It just said:
"Someone recommended I talk to you, wanna book a call"
We got on a call. Saksham asked me basic stuff like who I was, what I'd built, how I worked. Then he gave me an assignment. I finished it in a day or two, went through a couple of iterations, and that was that.
Here's the part that still makes me smile: I actually asked Saksham for more time. His answer was simple - anyone we give an offer to comes within a week. So I wrapped up my entire life in Vadodara and was on a flight to Bangalore two days after that call.
As for Infinity Linkage, it's still alive and running. My cofounder Krutik Raut handles all the projects now and gets things done. I didn't have to kill one thing to start the other.
Day one in Bangalore
I still remember my first day. I landed in Bangalore around noon and dropped my bags at my cousin's place, where I'd be staying. By 4 PM I was at the office.
My first reaction after seeing the team was - wait, what?
Most of them were younger than me, and every single one had terrifying amounts of context on what they were working on. Saksham especially, the depth of knowledge he carried impressed me immediately.
I worked till 8 that evening. Then, because I was exhausted and it was day one in a new city, I met a friend, went to a bar, had some drinks, and slept. That was day one.
Two people, no designers, three website revamps
When I joined, Runable had no designers. So before we hired one, it was just me and Umesh, our other co-founder, sitting together and rebuilding the entire website, not once, but two or three times over.
That was the rhythm. We'd sit next to each other, come up with an idea, and implement it right there. No briefs, no approval chains, no "let's circle back next sprint." An idea at lunch could be live before dinner.
The nights
People ask about the hours, so I'll be honest: back then we were working something like sixteen hours a day, sometimes Sundays too. On paper, that reads like a burnout story.
It never felt like one. It was all nights, and those nights are some of my best memories here. The one I'll never forget is the night we found out we'd raised our Series A, backed by some big names. A small team, sitting together late, working like there was no tomorrow and then the news lands that the rest of the world just bet big on exactly that. When you're in a room like that, the work doesn't drain you the way it's supposed to. The energy compounds.
A mobile app in one week, and the honest part
I'd always wanted to work on mobile. So after a few months, I just started.
I built the iOS and Android app in a week, and we launched it on the spot. That still sounds crazy to say out loud because at most companies, "ship a mobile app" is a quarter-long project with a kickoff meeting and a roadmap deck.
But here's the honest part. When you build something that big, that fast, the bugs come with it. They were still there after release. So it was a week to launch, and a whole journey since. I've been on the mobile app ever since, and that journey of hardening it, fixing it, and making it better never stopped.
Ten months later
Looking back at these past ten months, I'll admit something strange: I don't remember about 80% of it. The whole journey was built this, test this, deploy this on a loop and yet I still can't get over the fact that I never felt burned out.
It comes down to two things: pace and ownership. The pace is the speed at which I get to try things and iterate. Ideas don't sit in backlogs here for ages, they get built, shipped, and either kept or killed. The ownership is that none of it came with guardrails. It was me and Umesh figuring out the website. It was me taking the mobile app end to end. The opportunity isn't just to contribute, it's to own entire aspects of the product and be trusted with them.
Ten months in, I can trace all of it back to a friend who put my name forward without telling me, and one short email. Someone recommended he talk to me.
I'm glad he did.
