I’m Kathan Shah. I live in Bangalore, travel the world, and win against the odds.

I’ve always been drawn to things most people don’t notice yet. I grew up in a small town, in a time before the internet was really a thing around me, but my curiosity about gadgets and computers was already out of control. In school I was hand-writing HTML before I even knew it was called “coding” — just following the urge to make things work on a screen.

After that, my path wasn’t a straight line. I stepped away from software for a while to help with our family business abroad, and got a close look at how real-world operations, people, and money actually move. But the pull of tech was too strong. When I came back, I went all in: from frontend experiments to deep backend systems, teaching myself as much as I could and learning by building real things for real people.

One of the wildest chapters was being the “tech army” guy from India for Tully, a product for Joyner Lucas. I took it from the first line of code to a product strong enough to help secure a $6M investment from Sony. The founders in the US were on stage pitching and demoing, but they were showing what I had built. I was just out of college, happy with a few thousand dollars, doing it purely out of passion — obsessed with how music is stored and processed in computers, what signals and waveforms really are, and how to manipulate them to create effects and change sound.

Along the way, I spotted a huge gap in how businesses handled IT hardware. What started as a small hustle buying and reselling laptops turned into SPURGE RENTALS, a full-fledged IT hardware rental company that helps businesses avoid heavy upfront investments. Instead of running everything with phone calls and spreadsheets, we built software to orchestrate logistics, deployment, tracking, and support end-to-end. By 2023, we had thousands of rental laptops and MacBooks running across India, and today the business largely runs on autopilot with a strong team behind it.

Once that machine was stable, it stopped feeling like a real challenge — and I’m wired to chase difficult problems. That’s when I returned to my first love: product. I started Stocky Pro, a connected suite of business applications designed to help companies capture, organize, and act on information without chaos. Under the hood it’s a lot of hard thinking, deep architecture work, intense debates, and endless nights. There are basically no Sundays for me right now; I own a watch but rarely look at the time. I’ve removed every excuse that once kept me from building my own product, put together a small but incredibly strong engineering team, and I’m fully committed to seeing it serve real businesses in a meaningful way.

Everything I do — from SPURGE RENTALS to Stocky Pro to supporting the SPURGE Foundation orphanage for my wife — comes from the same core: do whatever it takes, take on problems that look too big, and keep going until the impossible starts to feel normal. I’m from a small town, building for a much bigger world, with my eyes still quietly set on space.