i know you studied engineering in college and then you had a little turning point in your life uh you want to share a little bit about what happened and how you've grown from there sure yeah yeah so i did study engineering and then i worked at nec electronics and after that at sun microsystems and then vmware my career was going great you know my kids were doing really well husband was doing really well and uh there appeared to be the strange break that was applied to my life um where i felt sick with some sort of a mysterious illness and i went through a good two-year process where they were trying to figure out what was the issue there were definitely issues um and what that caused is uh it made me pause and really examine what's important in life and so the turning point for me was where you know i was following the silicon valley path of being hard charging ambitious aggressive i was sort of succumbing to the kind of borderline exploitative culture of silicon valley which was not natural to me it went against the grain for me because i'm a very fair and compassionate person so that two-year break that i had it forced me to just take a complete stop and uh i really understood what was important in those two years yeah so share a little bit more about your illness like was it like life-threatening was it like painful just a little bit more yeah so ultimately what it was was some sort of a viral infection that affected the brain it did cause seizures which were unexpected for me i was in my late 30s at that point and the doctors thought it was life-threatening for about a three week period which was a scary three weeks yeah but beyond that it felt like it was more something that was chronic um and that was a little painful because the medication i was taking was a little numbing and so it wasn't a very pleasant experience for me to be taking that medication i really struggled with the fact that i might have to take this medication for the whole of my life yeah that caused me to really fight against it and i went off and explored holistic forms of medicine yeah so that's how i got into ayurveda yeah and uh a lot of other spiritual practices um and ultimately what happened was i did heal from it so in two years i healed from it i it wasn't a chronic condition it was something that uh the body just needed to fix on its own time scale yeah um but those two years were incredible for me because they caused me to just completely do almost like 180 degrees turn to find out who i was really yeah and what i came back into tech with a new stance you know but i figured out a way that i could be successful without being hard charging and aggressive and exploitative and i'm applying that to my company currently where i make it a point to be extremely generous with my employees i make it a point to be extremely fair considerate and honest with my customers yeah and that is working for me rupali that is fantastic share a little bit about your new startup sure sure so my startup is called akasha akasha cloud aka sia it isn't that new anymore you know it's been around for five years we do cloud planning yeah so enterprises such as ibm periton uh your alma mater cisco um chevron and so many others yeah they use our software to do pre-migration planning yeah yeah yeah so our software does the uh discovery of the on-prem environment and then automatically presents to you what the equivalent cloud options are yeah and shows you all the optimizations available in the cloud the savings opportunities available in the cloud yeah so it's becoming more and more and more popular we've been profitable for the last three years uh and 2020 and now 2021 have been blockbuster years for us uh you know like other companies through the pandemic you guys did fantastically well huh yes yes luckily for us yeah yeah we recently issued a press release with ibm yeah that's on our website uh so you know this journey has been incredible but what i love about this journey is i'm being true to myself yeah and i find that if you're true to yourself you actually just naturally do well in whatever you pick up yeah you know so that that's kind of what i would encourage uh sometime you just need the hard knocks of life to realize that right absolutely absolutely yeah and i just wanted to share on this platform that you know you've been such a supportive friend of mine for the longest time and i really value our friendship too thank you karima so much and vice versa rupali you've been you know one of the pillars in in our life too i'm so glad we mean these similar things to each other thanks karima okay bye bye
