Daily Inspiration: Meet Rahul Sharma

Today we’d like to introduce you to Rahul Sharma.

Rahul, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up in India and got into hardware early. After my engineering degree at NSIT Delhi, I started my first company, HatchnHack Solutions, in consumer electronics. We designed and sourced PCB and PCBA hardware for B2B clients, everything from a smart parking system startup to a firewall and network security company. We grew the team to 70 people and scaled revenue 10x year over year, eventually crossing INR 20M a month. A big part of that growth came from negotiating directly with suppliers in China and Taiwan, which cut our costs by about 27%.

From there I started a second company, SEMLX, building robotics and industrial automation kits for B2B clients. We hit meaningful revenue within four months.

After a decade of building on the hardware side, I wanted to broaden into strategy and operations at scale, so I came to the US for a STEM MBA at Purdue’s Daniels School of Business. I graduated in August 2025, and during the program I worked on an Engineering Leadership Institute project building sensor data infrastructure and an AI strategy roadmap for an industrial paper mill.

Today I’m with DeltaOps AI, a healthcare AI startup building scheduling and operational tools for non-medical home care agencies. I lead business operations and strategy, which means running executive surveys and industry reports across companies from $1M to $1B in revenue, building out a market database of over 2,000 accounts, and leading our angel fundraising round.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not smooth, no. I don’t think anyone’s is. My view on it now is that life is a constant series of trade offs, and every choice carries some regret with it. So the goal isn’t a regret free path, that doesn’t exist. The goal is to keep the expected value of your regrets as low as possible over time.

One of the hardest moments was firing my first hire at HatchnHack. When you’re building something from scratch, you know your early people in and out, you’re close to them, and then work issues force you to make a call that’s good for the company but hard on the relationship. Holding both of those at once, the emotional connection and the responsibility to keep growing, was a real test.

There’s also the cost of staying away from family for years while building. And a broader thing I’ve noticed: when you’re deep inside your own company, your own bubble, it’s easy to stop looking up and seeing how the world outside is actually moving. Staying aware of that, without losing focus on what you’re building, has been its own ongoing struggle.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Back during my undergrad and my first venture, I used to visit schools and colleges to teach students about product building and circuit design. Two things I told them stuck with me too. First, the world moves too fast now for anyone to just master one thing, you need to be a jack of all trades and a master of many. Second, everyone remembers the tortoise and the hare as a story about slow and steady, but that’s not the real lesson. The hare lost because he second guessed himself and took breaks. The lesson is focus on what you have to do and do it. Early birds get the worm. Life is both a sprint and a marathon, and knowing which one you’re in at any given moment matters more than raw speed.

I have a deep, rooted passion for hardware design. I love building circuits. But loving how something is designed doesn’t mean the customer wants it, and that’s where I learned market discovery. My experience now lets me bridge the gap between how an engineer’s brain works to solve a problem and how an end user actually wants that problem solved. Today that shows up as business operations and strategy work at DeltaOps AI, a healthcare AI startup, where I sit across finance, operations, production, and fundraising rather than owning just one lane.

What I’m proud of isn’t one deliverable, it’s that I’ve been able to hold all of that together, and I credit that to understanding emotionally what motivates me and what motivates the people I work with. Numbers tell you what happened, but people tell you why. That’s probably what people who’ve worked with me would say I’m known for, someone who can sit in the engineering room and the boardroom on the same day and translate between them.

My approach to most problems comes down to two components at the macro level, qualitative and quantitative, and that engineer to end user gap I mentioned is really just that split playing out in practice. The engineer’s side is the qualitative pull, what the design wants to be. The end user’s side is the quantitative pull, what the numbers and the market actually say. Understanding both, not just picking one, is usually how you find the best path forward.

What was your favorite childhood memory?
Most people probably expect me to say something like winning a gold medal at the Math Olympiad, or getting a certificate of merit for being in the top 1% of computer science students in the country. Those happened, and I’m proud of them, but they’re not it.

My favorite memory is learning to ride a bicycle without holding the handles. No hands, just balance. There’s a moment right before it clicks where every instinct tells you to grab the handlebars, and the second you give in to that instinct, you fall. The only way it works is if you stop second guessing and just trust the balance you already have. That’s stuck with me more than any trophy did.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://alienavi.com
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/rahul-sharma-mba