Working notes

The most useful question a founder can ask isn't "how do I fix this?" It's "have I fixed this before?"

Because if the same issue keeps coming back — late collections, hiring challenges, cash-flow surprises, numbers that never tie out, last-minute compliance panic — you probably don't have a people problem. You probably don't even have a business problem. You have a process problem.

In my experience, recurring issues are rarely solved by more effort. They're solved by ownership, rhythm, documentation, and systems.

A founder once told me: "we keep having collection issues." After reviewing the numbers, it became clear that collections weren't the problem. Nobody owned collections. Customers were followed up only when cash became tight. The company wasn't facing a collections problem — it was facing the absence of a collections process.

That's the theme of Part 2 of our startup governance series: Why Most Startup Problems Are Process Problems.

Companies rarely scale by becoming better firefighters. They scale because they stop needing fires to remind them what should have been a process.

Most people looked at the recent SEBI interim order involving Rajesh Exports and saw a number. ₹15.15 lakh crore.

I looked at it and saw something else. An aged receivable.

According to the order, the matter traces back to concerns raised regarding receivables that had remained outstanding for an extended period. A simple question followed: where is the cash?

From a forensic perspective, that's often where the interesting work begins. Not because an aged receivable proves anything — it doesn't. But because genuine transactions ultimately leave evidence trails: cash movements, counterparties, contracts, approvals and supporting records.

When I review a file, I don't start by asking "is the revenue real?" I start by asking: can I verify it independently? Can I trace it to source documents? Can I identify the counterparty? Can I reconcile the cash? Can I reproduce management's explanation from evidence?

The company has publicly disputed the findings in SEBI's interim order, and the matter will follow its legal and regulatory process. Regardless of the eventual outcome, the order provides an interesting case study in the types of issues that investigators, auditors, lenders, investors and boards often examine: aged receivables, revenue concentration, counterparty verification, related-party transactions, asset substantiation, documentation and audit trails.

Compliance proves that filings were made. Governance proves that transactions can be demonstrated.

And when difficult questions arrive, the most valuable asset in the room is not a presentation or an explanation. It's evidence.

Full forensic breakdown: Anatomy of a ₹15-Lakh-Crore Allegation.

I spent 10 years learning to read what isn't in the financial statements. The revenue line that looks clean but hides customer concentration risk. The expense category that's technically accurate but economically misleading. The cash flow that makes a company look solvent when it's actually months from a crisis.

Trained that way, I find it hard to look at AI adoption narratives without asking — what's not in this picture?

Still early in how this will evolve, but here's what I'm not seeing in most conversations about AI transforming finance and strategy:

Leadership teams using AI to produce better-looking outputs faster — without fixing the underlying assumptions those outputs are built on. Companies calling themselves "AI-first" who have fundamentally the same decision-making quality they had two years ago, just faster and with better decks. Founders who are excited about AI summarising their MIS instead of asking why their MIS needed summarising in the first place.

AI is a powerful amplifier. But it amplifies what's already there — good thinking gets sharper, bad thinking just gets presented more convincingly.

The most important question for any business adopting AI isn't "what can it do?" It's "what blind spots are we now running faster with?"

Would love to hear from folks in finance, advisory, or strategy roles — are you seeing this play out too?