Tushky: From a Mumbai Apartment to 500 Startups
Tushky started the way most things in my life have started — with an instinct, not a spreadsheet.
It was September 2011. I was an IIT Bombay aerospace engineering grad who had no business building a consumer marketplace, and yet that is exactly what I set out to do. Tushky was going to be India’s destination for real-world leisure experiences — skydiving, pottery workshops, archery lessons, local tours, cooking classes. The stuff people say they want to do on weekends but never actually book. We wanted to change that.
We had no CTO. No dedicated tech team. We ran operations out of a Mumbai apartment and figured things out as we went. The early months were pure hustle: onboarding activity providers one phone call at a time, photographing experiences ourselves, writing every listing by hand.
GSF and the First Real Push
In October 2012, we were accepted into the inaugural cohort of GSF Accelerator — founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma, who would go on to build Paytm into one of India’s largest fintech companies. GSF gave us structure, mentorship, and the first sense that what we were building might be more than a side project. It gave us permission to think bigger.
500 Startups, Batch 6
By spring 2013, Tushky was part of 500 Startups Batch 6 in Mountain View. We were one of roughly five Indian startups in the cohort. Suddenly we were in the Bay Area, surrounded by founders from thirty-plus countries, learning the language of growth metrics and conversion funnels.
I remember standing in the Google campus — Building 1900 — staring up at the ceiling and thinking, this is actually happening. Riding the Google shuttle felt surreal. A few days later, Livemint ran a piece on Tushky. Demo Day came in July 2013, covered by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and The Next Web.
When we got our own office, I wrote a note to the team — a playful riff on Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” speech:
“Long months ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge… At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, Tushky will awake to life and freedom.”
It was tongue-in-cheek, but it was also real. That office meant we had survived long enough to need one.
The Numbers
At our peak, Tushky listed over 2,000 experiences from more than 1,000 providers across 100+ cities. Over 100,000 travelers used the platform. For a bootstrapped-then-accelerated startup in a category that barely existed in India at the time, those numbers meant something.
The End, and What It Meant
In August 2015, we shut down. Despite the love and support, we could not hit the scale we had hoped for. I wrote at the time: “We have decided to go in hibernation for some time to reboot.”
We never came back from that hibernation. And that is okay.
Tushky taught me how to build — not just a product, but a company, a team, a pitch, a culture. It taught me that the leap of faith is worth taking even when the landing is rough. It taught me that the best startups are not the ones that succeed on the first try, but the ones whose founders carry the lessons forward.
Everything I have built since — Pragmatic Leaders, Zopdev, this very site — traces a line back to a Mumbai apartment in 2011, where a guy with no tech team decided to make something people would love.
What Came After
Tushky shut down in August 2015. Within a year, I was building again.
Pragmatic Leaders started as a platform for engineering leadership — helping senior engineers and managers become more effective. It got into Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch. That run sharpened my thinking on how technical organizations actually scale, and where the real leverage points are.
That thinking led to Zopdev. The core problem was one I had lived through at Tushky and seen repeated everywhere since: cloud infrastructure is too hard, too opaque, and too slow. Zopdev is building agentic cloud infrastructure — systems that can reason about, provision, and manage infrastructure with the kind of autonomy that used to require a dedicated platform team. It is the most technical thing I have ever built, and it is directly downstream of every lesson Tushky taught me about what founders lose when infrastructure becomes a bottleneck.
Three companies. Twelve years. The thread running through all of them is the same: reduce friction between what a builder imagines and what they can ship.