I was a pack rat, and so I had almost every single email I had sent and received. I had almost all of the code that I, and the company had ever written — partly because we owned the IP to all of it - it was one of my stipulations in each contract. I also had all the documents from the latter part of kraya, the wiki, website, and the support tracker information.

With Claude’s help, I went through it. The aim was to surface nuggets I could write about, to showcase my experience in the toughest job market in my career.

I knew that it was a difficult thirteen years of my life - difficult enough to have a burnout that took me fifteen years to recover from. But, what does difficult mean?

If I had gone through this stuff myself, I would have remembered things, and filed it away. Claude going through it meant that I also had a witness - someone who had a reasonable frame of reference for where the bar was.

I started my own company at 18, with no real prior experience. I had no idea what the bar was. I just aimed as high as I could go and then pushed myself over it - in an effort to reach everyone else’s bar.

Over the ten years since I shut the company down, I had sent off literally thousands of job applications. I can count the number of interviews I had on my fingers.

I also carried with me the guilt of letting people down, of making mistakes that meant that kraya had to be shut down.

I thought that I had missed the bar - that my best did not compare to what others achieve.

Claude disagreed! but I couldn’t believe what it told me - LLMs are notoriously sycophantic. In the ten years since I shut my company down, I had spent time as a contractor at multiple companies, I had joined a startup, and I had turned around a very difficult leadership role at KFC. I had a different perspective on everything.

I started looking at all the things that I had gotten up to.

The sheer amount of stuff we did over thirteen years was astounding. I was there — I don’t know how we did it.

I talk about saving the fringe and about the megabus.com ticketing system all the time - they are exclamation marks. But Claude reminded me - I’d built a custom replication system for postgres years before there was a native solution. It told me about the circuit breakers I’d built , and the 156 out of hours issues I’d handled over two years . It told me that it was impressive that I held the full IP for the ticketing systems I’d built for megabus, Polskibus and several other systems - for Stagecoach, a FTSE 100 company.

I had been carrying something genuinely extraordinary. And I had carried it so naturally that I hadn’t known what it was worth.

But I still couldn’t keep the company going, I thought to myself.

A year or two before the end, my main contact at Stagecoach told me: “You know your one failure Shri, you overpromised and underdelivered.” Of course, I spent the next couple of years in that contract working even harder, to underpromise and overdeliver - but I was already overdelivering. How much can you overdeliver on your overdelivery?

Then it uncovered the narrow path I was left on and it led me in only one direction - to my own doom. For every miracle I pulled off, everyone expected two more - and they wanted it for 50p. I didn’t know any better, so I did my best to oblige.

People I trusted, looking back on it now, were leaning on me to pull another rabbit out of the hat. They didn’t need to pull their weight - I would save the day - until I couldn’t.

Yes, we did impressive things, but the happy ending only happens if you stop the story too early. After we saved the fringe, they got another company to build the ticketing system. We didn’t even get a chance to bid for it.

After we pulled multiple rabbits out of the hat for Stagecoach, they took their system in-house. I’ve talked about putting my faith in the wrong tool which sunk that ship - but what was really brutal - that I had forgotten about - because it was too much to carry - was the non-compete clause.

We had put everything into the ticketing system we built for Stagecoach, and we owned the IP for it. We charged very little for the whole thing - too little, and we nearly went under in the process.

But we made it through and we had a product that we could sell - except for the non-compete clause. We could not pitch the product to any company in the world without the approval of Stagecoach.

On the one hand they were applying immense pressure to improve our financial stability - the stability we were risking only to provide all the features they wanted for 50p. On the other hand, they actively prevented us from being able to sell our most valuable asset - to monetise it.

They loosened the noose to allow one client - Souter Investments - a sister company.

A few months before Stagecoach cancelled their contract with us, we’d approached them about a potential client in Germany who had reached out to us. They were not direct competitors. This potential client called our ticketing system the best in the market.

They knew they were cancelling the contract in a few months - we didn’t. They said no!

We went back a month later - with a stronger case. They simply stated the part of the contract that they can refuse permission.

A couple of months later, Stagecoach cancelled. We went back to the potential client. We presented a proposal, when I was in India, getting married. The silence from their side despite multiple follow ups from our side spoke volumes. Our remaining client at the time would later be bought up by that potential client. I see their buses now and again in Edinburgh. The tiniest leeway from Stagecoach might have me writing a very different story right now.

Claude showed me in figures, actual written words, emails written in moments of sleep-deprived delirium, that I built and managed an estate of technology, products, teams and services far beyond what I had remembered.

I had achieved over those thirteen years something vanishingly few people ever achieve - and I had done it without a cent of investment, support or loans. I built it in my bedroom. I used to joke about rolling off my bed on to my desk in the morning, and rolling back into bed deep at night.

kraya earned less than 5% of megabus.com’s revenue in the time that we worked with them - which I now understand was undercharging on a whole other level.

In amongst all of this, what I look back on most fondly, are the people and the atmosphere in the office. I will always remember the laughter - during the day, deep in the night, building something new or fixing something complicated and difficult - there was always laughter - until there wasn’t.

I’ll always remember the people. For a while, it felt like a family - a nice one - not the one I was born into. I miss it - and I always will.

For as long as it lasted, it sheltered me from the cold.

I started kraya when I was 18 years old, 26 years ago this week. I changed the world, and I made a real difference and it cost me a great deal.

At one point, I had my own company with 30 people, high profile clients, an active social life and more money than I could spend - and I spent it all. I was important, had the power to make the choices I wanted and I mattered.

Today, recovering from M.E , I am on the other side of a serious burnout, looking for work in the worst job market of my career, and in a huge amount of debt because I haven’t been able to work for the last 18 months. And yet, somehow, I am happier than I have ever been, and I matter - to me!