Aditya Kothadiya and the Work Worth Keeping

Aditya Kothadiya has spent years building software to take tedious work off other people’s hands. In January 2018, he explained why he still ironed his own shirts. He had priced the chore, considered the alternatives, even searched Yelp. The calculation kept running into a memory: an ironing business in his hometown in India, whose owner had grown from collecting clothes at people’s homes to running a shop with a helper. Kothadiya remembered the work, the progress and the owner’s unchanged humility. A pile of shirts could be an unexpectedly effective reminder.

The co-founder and CEO of Avoma is an advocate for automating meeting notes, CRM entries and the small obligations that accumulate around a conversation. His household exception makes his argument more interesting. Time has uses beyond whatever an hourly rate can justify. Some activities deserve to survive an efficiency audit. The trick is deciding which ones.

A birthday with a resignation attached

On March 15, 2017, Kothadiya published a birthday announcement with rather more consequence than a dinner reservation. He was starting another company. He had resigned from [24]7 two days earlier, after spending four years there following its acquisition of his startup, Shopalize, in 2013.

He was candid about the interval. The acquisition included payouts over four years, and he had also enjoyed the work: enterprise products, relationships, mistakes and a chance to influence strategy. Eventually, the learning began to flatten. Starting again offered a way to accelerate it. He had spent months considering problems before choosing one that troubled him daily.

His ambition was specific enough to sound almost unambitious. Meetings produced useful knowledge, and then much of that knowledge disappeared. He liked a productive meeting. He disliked watching its value leak away afterward. A birthday usually asks what you want for yourself. His answer involved fixing a recurring piece of everybody else’s working day.

The first customers wanted a game of pool

His appetite for enterprise predates enterprise software. After finishing 12th grade, Kothadiya and friends saw that playing pool required a trip beyond their small town. They pooled money from their mothers, bought a table and opened Yaraj Pool Club. They charged by the hour and organized competitions. The name combined the friends’ initials; years later, Avoma would stand for A Very Organized Meeting Assistant. Even his acronyms have a social life.

He left for engineering school, while friends continued running the club. The practical education had already begun: handling money, paying people and giving local customers something they otherwise had to travel to find. He grew up in a joint family supported by agriculture, with financial uncertainty and limited emphasis on education. Reading helped widen his view beyond the town. The pool club was an early opportunity to put an outside idea to work nearby.

“I don’t hate meetings. In fact, I love them”

Aditya Kothadiya, announcing his next company in 2017

A good conversation, followed by a bad handoff

The more precise origin of Avoma was a product leader’s frustration. At [24]7, Kothadiya helped take new products to market, working through early sales, onboarding and customer success before passing responsibility to specialist teams. Customers moved between people. Context failed to travel with them. Opportunities slowed or disappeared.

He dated his initial idea to October 2016. Before committing, he conducted more than 30 customer development interviews with executives, sales leaders and customer success professionals. The response persuaded him that the problem extended beyond his own calendar. His eventual co-founders came through existing relationships: he had known Devendra Laulkar through a mutual friend since their earlier startup days; Laulkar had worked with Albert Lai at Pulse.

That sequence matters. An irritation became interviews, then a team, then a product. The first paying customer arrived in July 2018. There was a long stretch between noticing something broken and receiving money for fixing it. A founding story can compress that interval into a paragraph. A founder has to live through every Tuesday.

The notes were only the beginning

Avoma’s early proposition covered the work surrounding a call as well as the call itself. In his seed funding announcement, Kothadiya described the possibility of giving customer-facing employees something resembling an executive assistant: help preparing, recording what mattered, sharing it, updating systems and following through.

There was a second audience in the same conversation. A representative wanted less administrative work. A manager wanted to understand objections, requests and successful approaches across the team. Kothadiya treated those needs as connected. The person producing the information needed a reason to use the system, while colleagues needed a way to learn from it.

Investor Manu Kumar noticed a particularly tangible feature: notes synchronized with the recording and transcript, allowing a user to share the relevant passage. The customer’s own voice could reach people who had missed the meeting. That is a modest-sounding capability with a useful consequence. A disputed recollection can become a passage everyone can hear, rather than an argument about whose notes deserve the most respect.

A founder who published the missed targets

His account of 2017 contains a less polished kind of progress report. He had intended to relearn programming and build a meaningful application. He learned Python, Django, JavaScript, React and Redux, but did not finish the application. He concluded that his relative inexperience was slowing the startup’s development and let his technically stronger co-founders take over that work.

He also reported reading ten books against a goal of twelve, and writing fourteen articles against a goal of one a week. Thoughtful writing, he explained, could take five to eight hours per piece. The numbers are small enough to be recognizable. Most people have a version of that unfinished reading list. Fewer put it beside their new company announcement.

The report shows a willingness to distinguish effort from usefulness. Learning a framework could be valuable personally while still being the wrong use of the CEO’s time during product development. Getting out of the way was itself a contribution. It simply offered fewer opportunities for a triumphant photograph.

An earlier experiment with social media had produced a similarly mixed verdict. In a 2011 essay, he described the advantages of spending less time consuming online material, alongside the cost of staying quiet while building an online business. He missed sharing what he learned. Writing also helped him clarify his thoughts. The conclusion was a search for a workable balance between building and communicating. His later habit of publishing imperfect progress makes sense in that light: the writing becomes part of the learning, with readers allowed to see the rough edges.

Then somebody edited his calendar

Kothadiya has also described sending a senior executive a 45-minute invitation for an Avoma demonstration. The executive declined, then sent a replacement for 25 minutes. It was a brisk lesson in ownership of a calendar, delivered without a seminar.

Kothadiya felt embarrassed, including about his casual treatment of his own time. He began scheduling shorter meetings, then looked for a way to make the change stick without editing every invitation manually. His resulting article explained shorter default durations and Google Calendar’s Speedy meetings setting. A 30-minute slot reduced to 25 minutes releases five minutes, or one-sixth of the original allocation.

Of course, a shorter invitation cannot guarantee a better conversation. The revealing detail is his readiness to make himself the example. The founder selling meeting efficiency had needed someone else to point out a wasteful assumption. He published the correction. Software can remember what people said; people still have to reconsider what they meant to do.

Let the buyer choose the door

His willingness to question defaults extended to selling software. While fundraising in 2018, he encountered investors who wanted Avoma to choose between product-led and sales-led growth. He preferred to let buyers try the product themselves or speak with a salesperson.

The customer behavior was untidy in instructive ways. Some larger buyers wanted to purchase through self-service. Some smaller companies wanted a conversation. His account resists the convenient assumption that company size dictates buying preference. The question became how the customer wanted to proceed.

There is a family resemblance between that position and the calendar story. A process becomes irritating when the person operating it forgets the person on the receiving end. Making somebody attend a demonstration they do not need consumes precisely the resource a meeting assistant promises to return. Consistency, in this business, can be tested before the customer has even paid.

Keeping the ball in play

In March 2019, a tennis lesson supplied Kothadiya with another business analogy. His group kept hitting into the net. Their coach urged them to get the ball across it first. Kothadiya connected the lesson to avoiding unnecessary business risks: insufficient customer research, products nobody wanted and spending too quickly. Remaining in the game created the chance to improve.

Avoma later raised a $12 million Series A led by Headline, announced in December 2021. His announcement emphasized further work on AI, the product experience and integrations. The money marked a stage in a continuing project. He wanted the assistant to handle more of the work before and after meetings.

His subsequent writing about a growth acceleration platform carries the idea outward to scheduling, lead routing, conversation insights and revenue intelligence. The ambition remains connected to an ordinary frustration: information should help the next person act, rather than leave them assembling the conversation from fragments. That leaves room for a rather sensible division of labor. Let the software keep the notes. Let people decide what deserves their attention. The shirts, apparently, can wait for him.