This is an inspiring story. More power to you Gaurav. And, to this wonderful way of thinking.

Never say never. - I gave 3 attempts at JEE (95-97), did not make it to the IITs - I missed the cutoff at BITS Pilani by less than 0.5% - Ended up in a Tier-3 college - Studied hard, topped a lateral entrance exam to migrate to to a Tier-2 college More than IITs, the fact that I missed BITS Pilani by a whisker hurt me all those years. An institution I admired so much - I was so dejected that I would shut my ears when anyone mentioned the name. As fate would have it, I then returned to BITS Pilani to do my Masters in 2002-2003. And few days back, life came full circle when BITS Pilani awarded me with a Startup Excellence Award for my & my team's work at @vanshivtech at our Alumni event in Jaipur. Sometimes life doesn't give you what you want at 18, so it can give you the grit to earn its respect at 48. Keep walking. One day, you won't just walk those halls- you’ll hold their trophy.

🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳

13 years. 34 sessions. One relentless obsession for learning, skill and knowledge. That conference is @Dreamforce & the craft is @salesforce. In 2012 - I walked onto the biggest stage in enterprise tech and it felt impossible for a small-time founder from a Tier-2 Indian city. Since then, I've presented every single year as a speaker (except the pandemic years) No playbook, no shortcuts - just relentless hard work, code, and an obsession with engineering excellence. This week, I’m taking the stage for the 13th consecutive year to deliver my 31st through 34th Dreamforce sessions. You can sign up for my sessions here - lnkd.in/dJNw8pWX For everyone in a Tier-2 city grinding through @trailhead past midnight: your pin code doesn’t define your stage. The ecosystem makes room for excellence. From a quiet room in Jaipur to the keynote stages of San Francisco: the Salesforce ecosystem doesn’t check your pedigree, it respects your craft! See you in San Fran!

The 80s look is trending so our HR team created a visual of how I and my co-founders would look like if we started @vanshivtech in 1980s. Thanks @ChatGPT - you're making things possible which we could only imagine in the past!

Since last 24 hours - my feed has been flooded with 'I resigned from' posts trolling Jacob. For all the people who've been trolling and joking around with similar posts, I truly believe Jacob is right and in a few years from now, everyone will realise that he was spot on with his predictions. It takes courage to speak up, more so - when half the world is out there to troll you. Well done Jacob!

The year was 2004 - I was promoted to be a Technical Lead and given a team of 3 developers. Among those 3 team members was a developer- who's undoubtedly the best developer I've ever worked in my life. I mentored him for two years, we worked very closely on several projects and solved a number of problems together which others gave up on. I would fight internally for his promotions, onsite trips & recognition at every opportunity. He made it big, moved to the US, worked for MAANG companies for over 10 years, then founded & sold his startup for more than $200M. He now works for Anthropic & makes well over $500K/ year. Multiple houses in US & India, lavish lifestyle, has invested in several companies & his net worth is probably 100X of mine. It's been 23 years, a lot changed in our lives - yet, every year on Teachers Day, he calls me & talks for hours about those days when we worked together nearly two decades back & he credits me for shaping his career. I always tel him - 'I am too small in front of you' and he always replies - 'Once my teacher, always my teacher.' I'm grateful for such respect that he shows me even though we've not even met in over 20 years. While I've always shown respect to my own teachers, I don't think I'll ever be able to match how he treats me. Happy Teachers Day!

Just to clarify, I truly believe solutions like ClaudeForce are the future of Salesforce & enterprise SaaS in general. It's just that - "you will never need to login to Salesforce again" seems like stretching it too far, time & again.

Thanks @salesforce 👇 2010 -> Chatter, you will never need to login to Salesforce again 2013 -> Salesforce1 Mobile, you will never need to login to Salesforce again 2016 -> Einstein, you will never need to login to Salesforce again 2021 -> Slack, you will never need to login to Salesforce again 2024 -> Agentforce, you will never need to login to Salesforce again 2026 -> Headless, you will never need to login to Salesforce again 2026 -> ClaudeForce, you will never need to login to Salesforce again 2026 -> Still occasionally clicking "Switch to Salesforce Classic" P.S - But please don't change the name of the company to ClaudeForce.

Step 1: Memorize certification exam dumps. Step 2: Call it "preparation material." Step 3: Clear the exam with zero hands-on skills. Step 4: Cry that "AI is taking our jobs." AI isn't taking your job - your refusal to actually learn is giving it away. Hard work still has no shortcut. The sad reality - every other Tech industry WhatsApp/ Telegram group is full of such non-sense. I've left 10 such groups in the last three months - created originally for knowledge sharing and now left to be a playground for exchanging/ selling/ buying dumps. There was so much backlash over NEET paper leak. If the world gets to know how a lot of people in our tech industry leak cert exams, God bless India and Indian IT industry! #Fail

I'm a big supporter of @Salesforce and I'm very bullish that its Agentforce-led vision will redefine how enterprises combine data, applications, and AI agents in the years to come. But as someone who has spent ~20 years in the Salesforce ecosystem, I'm not a big fan of the constant name changes - whether it's for products or rumours about the company itself being rebranded. Salesforce will forever be Salesforce for me - no matter if the CEO decides to rename it as Agentforce or SalesforceSlack or AgnetforceSalesforceSlack. And I'll always call it 'Sales Cloud', no matter if it becomes Agentforce for Sales or SalesforceSlack for Sales or whatever. The opportunity is real: Salesforce has evolved far beyond CRM into a leading platform for the agentic enterprise. But adoption is not just about capability - it is also about clarity. Great products deserve great storytelling. And great storytelling should not require a flowchart. It requires innovation and I truly hope that Salesforce continues to focus on that as it has done for several years! cc @Benioff #Salesforce #Agentforce #Slack

How do developers (and other tech roles) prepare themselves for the AI-first era? That's the question I asked @rseroter in my podcast with him. If you are a developer, architect, or tech leader navigating the shift to agentic systems, spend 20 minutes of your life watching this episode - it will be worth it. Watch the video on YouTube here - youtube.com/watch?v=H4fGSmSH…

If this happened in India - AI firing a human, just imagine how much unrest & uproar it would cause in the Indian tech industry. The cliche statement - “AI will take your job” definitely came true in this case. The time to learn & embrace AI is now or never!

I got my team 100% certified on an AI platform that we actively use everyday. Not just engineers. HR. Finance. Ops. Everyone. Because AI is no longer a tool reserved for the technical team. It is becoming a basic workplace skill - like spreadsheets, email, or the internet once were. And sometimes, adoption does not happen organically. It needs a push from the top. I did it myself and set a target for everyone to it within the set deadline - as a founder, sometimes you need to take the bull by the horns. Leaders have to create the time, set the expectation, and make learning non-negotiable before the urgency becomes obvious. Troll me for it if you want, but the people who learn AI early will not just work faster; they will shape how work gets done.

I’m approaching 50. I looked at what happened to my college batch after nearly 27-28 years in the tech industry. The numbers are uncomfortable: 15% - got laid off and never found their way back into tech. 15% - left IT and moved into business. 25% - stuck in middle management, fearing the next layoff. 10% - retired early. 10% - moved into consulting/training. 5% - senior leadership. 20% - still hands-on, learning and reinventing themselves. The interesting part? The people who stayed relevant weren't necessarily the smartest or most experienced. They kept learning. They stayed hands-on. They reinvented themselves. And whoever I talk to - those numbers are mostly true for most of the middle and senior management for tech industry in India. The problem isn't age. The problem is that we stop learning.

Imagine selling your soul for 25K! That too when you are on 15 LPA. > You wait for a candidate to serve full notice period of 3 months > 3 Days before joining, candidate asks you to increase their package by 50K - you somehow agree as you don't want another last minute back out > Candidate shows up, does onboarding, collects laptop & asks for 'work from home' due to personal problems. You agree. > Next day, candidate stops responding on calls, email or IM > Finally, we manage to get in touch somehow. Candidate says "I can't continue due to personal reasons" > The audacity is unbelievable - candidate says - 'Get your laptop collected'. > As the founder & CEO, I have to intervene and send an email stating we'll initiate legal proceedings. > Candidate realises this shit is real and returns laptop > We get to know that she joined another company which offered her 25K more than what we did. I really wish 'AI DOES take away such candidate's jobs'. After 3 months, we're back to square one while the candidate fulfilled her greed for 25K!

Just in case, you didn't know @JeffDean is the Rajnikant of @Google A list of achievements that seems hardly believable. > co-created MapReduce > helped build Bigtable and Spanner > built core Google Search and early ads infrastructure > co-founded Google Brain > helped create TensorFlow > pushed Google's TPU program > co-designed Pathways, which powered PaLM > contributed to neural Google Translate > shaped Google’s AI strategy And that's not all, he even has punch lines written him just like Rajni Sir, the best ones below (IYKYK) > Google: it's basically a Jeff Dean's side project. > Errors treat Jeff Dean as a warning. > Jeff Dean doesn't write bugs, just features you are unable to understand. > Jeff Dean can instantiate abstract classes. > Jeff Dean invented MapReduce so he could sort his fan mail. > Jeff Dean mines bitcoins. In his head. > Jeff Dean traps the KILL signal. > Jeff Dean doesn't exist, he's actually an advanced AI created by Jeff Dean. Best wishes Jeff for @DiscoLoopAI - it will be amazing and all your fans - including yours truly will be cheering and watching. Godspeed!

Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind.

India’s critics keep asking, “What has really changed?” Look around. The answer is not hidden in speeches or hashtags. It is visible in the rails carrying freight, the highways connecting cities, the metros moving millions, the homes getting tap water, and the power infrastructure enabling growth. You can debate politics. You cannot debate progress that people use every single day. India did not wait for permission to build its future. 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳

As simple and boring as this diagram looks, it is now redefining how Consulting Industry has worked for decades. It's no longer about bodies or hours, it's about outcomes. If you complete it, you get paid. If you don't, you don't get paid. As simple as it gets - THIS IS THE FUTURE of all tech services!