I like big businesses, & I can't lie.

98 began on 1st January 2020 — midnight, sober, talking my way into a friend's father's car while everyone else partied at the nightclub he ran. The club was called Esquire. They became the first social-media-and-branding client. The name “98” came later, off a grey wall in some city I was shooting in with a YouTuber friend; somebody had spray-painted “98” in white¹². The first proper client was Pratima Singh⁶ — Indian basketball captain, Arjuna awardee, the sports officer at Bennett, the one who set up the introduction to her husband, Ishant Sharma⁷. First pitch I ever made her was on 26 February 2020.

A 300-sq-ft office in Delhi came next. Most early calls were cold ones.

By 2023 we were running social, talent management and brand campaigns for 55+ clients across Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore — a team of 18, a roster of 12 athletes and 500+ influencers. I architected Ishant's RuPay × IPL '22⁸ partnership (300M+ impressions), ran award-winning campaigns for Happy Dent and Borges, and built a hyperlocal influencer engine that brands like TrulyMadly and Slay Coffee rode for growth.

Got the ISB admit in February 2022 — same month I signed Ishant exclusive. Deferred twice. The first time because COVID; the second because the agency was at peak and I knew I couldn't run a 55-client roster and a one-year PGP at the same time. I had already rejected an NYU admit straight out of college. By mid-2023, with the deal flow finally running, I wrapped 98 deliberately, took a three-month trip across 11 cities, and walked into ISB Hyderabad in April 2024.

The year there put structure under the practice. The year after, I operated across enterprise GTM and founder's-office work.

Now I'm restarting Ninety-Eight as 2.0 — a creative-and-strategy practice for founders who need a thinking partner across consulting, marketing, advertising, financial modelling and market research. Not operational consulting. Business partners for hire who've built and scaled the thing themselves.

On the side: GenZ Economics, a blog written with Professor Prasanna Tantri at ISB on what India's transition decade looks like through a Gen-Z lens. A documentary on influencer culture in development. A founder playbook in progress, for people my age making sense of less-privileged starts.

Off the clock you'll find me on a golf course (12 handicap, swing still inconsistent), in a notebook designing something, or two books deep — one history, one operator memoir. I keep a watchlist of films from places most people skip past on the festival map. Born in Ratlam (population ~270K, on the Mumbai–Delhi line, on no one's map) and still mildly surprised when people don't know it.