I spent fifteen months in risk consulting at PwC India and was promoted from Specialist to Specialist 2 inside a year. In January 2026 I joined ZenCabs, an electric cab service in my hometown of Jammu, as Head of Strategy & Growth. This is how I think about that move.

What PwC gave me

The biggest thing was a standard of rigour. At a Big 4 firm your analysis has to survive people actively looking for holes in it, and after a while you start looking for the holes yourself before anyone else does. The work taught me to size every finding, because a finding without a number does not get funded, and to walk a process as people actually run it before judging the policy that describes it.

It also gave me results I am proud of: ₹6+ Cr in annual client cost savings, engagements worth ₹12 Cr+ for clients including Cars24, Stryker India and PIF, and an internal audit AI tool that saved 10,000+ consulting hours. I wrote about the cost work in where margin leaks in Indian companies and the tool in AI in internal audit.

Why I left

Consulting showed me in detail how large organisations make decisions: slowly, through layers of approval, with the adviser some distance from the outcome. I had already run Cairros, my agency, through college, so I knew what it was like to own a result end to end, and I wanted that ownership again. ZenCabs sat at the far end of the spectrum from a Big 4 firm: a new venture, a small team and a number that moved every week.

Jammu mattered too. I come from a fourth-generation business family there, and the city was a market the national aggregators had never prioritised, which made it a real gap to build into.

What carried over

  • Sizing. The expansion case behind adding 10+ cars a month started from a market sizing, the same habit as sizing an audit finding.
  • Structure. A vague problem such as growth being slow still breaks down the same way into questions with owners.
  • Decision rights. Knowing who can approve what, and making it fast, matters as much in a startup as in a client.
  • Leadership reporting. The weekly KPI review with the founder is a lighter version of the structured reviews I ran for CXOs.

What I had to unlearn

The finish line moved. In consulting a well-supported recommendation is a finished piece of work; in a startup it is the start. I also had to stop waiting for complete data. At ZenCabs a decision that could be undone cheaply was usually worth taking this week and correcting next week, which is the logic of the commit step in my Push and Absorb framework: think hard about the changes that are expensive to reverse, and move quickly on the rest.

The feedback loop changed most. At PwC an engagement took months to show a result. At ZenCabs the weekly review showed within days whether a change was working, and over the first six months the service went from launch to 30,000+ users and a ₹4 Cr annualised run-rate.

What it cost

A startup has less structure, less certainty and a smaller brand behind it, and there is nobody to escalate to when a problem is yours. I chose that knowingly, and I am now adding the technology layer on top at Masters' Union, so the next thing I build I can also build the product for.