Raj Sanghvi started with code on paper

Raj Sanghvi learned to program without a computer. Growing up in a small town in India, he wrote code by hand, working through the logic before he could watch a machine obey it. For a boy interested in mathematics, paper offered a place to begin. The hardware would have to catch up. Technology has since supplied him with rather more equipment, but that opening remains the detail that makes his career worth a second look.

There is an agreeable reversal here. A teenager once supplied the labour that a computer could have spared him. Today, as founder and CEO of the San Diego software company Bitcot, Sanghvi sells businesses ways to spare people unnecessary labour. Between those two points sit a computer science education, years of enterprise work, a company founded in 2014, and an appetite for making software answer practical questions.

He has recalled that early experience with amusement, remembering handwritten programs before access to a computer. It would be tempting to turn the pencil into a prophecy. A pencil is entitled to a quieter existence. What the story establishes is simpler: his interest in programming arrived before the convenient means of doing it. He was already curious about the instructions underneath the machine.

“I was coding on paper.”

Raj Sanghvi

An enterprise education, then a smaller stage

Sanghvi went on to earn a master's degree in computer science. His education includes the University of North Texas, which he attended from 2001 to 2003. His professional background spans software work for businesses including Sony, IBM, Nissan, Micron, HD Supply and Dick's Sporting Goods. These are names associated with complicated operations, where a purchase or an apparently simple customer interaction may depend on numerous systems behaving themselves.

Enterprise work gave him experience of that complexity. It also introduced a frustration. After years inside large corporate environments, he wanted to move more quickly and work closer to the people making decisions. In 2014, he founded Bitcot. Startups and smaller businesses offered a setting in which software could change the working day without first requiring permission from an entire organisational family tree.

The move changed his proximity to the problem. A founder commissioning a product needs help deciding what to build, how to make it work, and what can sensibly wait. Sanghvi's advisory work covers those decisions as well as development. His published professional profile describes work with more than 100 funded startups. That is a record of involvement in other people's beginnings, alongside his own.

His public biography places established brands beside entrepreneurs, which is a revealing combination for a service business. The established company brings existing systems and expectations. The entrepreneur may bring a product that has yet to find its shape. Serving both makes the initial conversation consequential. Before a development team can begin writing instructions for a machine, somebody has to establish what the business is asking the machine to accomplish. That is where technical advising earns its place in his work.

A headset, an app, and a $50,000 prize

Bitcot was still a young business when PlanetCar brought it an early public milestone. In 2015, the app won the $50,000 grand prize in a Plantronics innovation competition. The contest attracted 88 teams from 33 countries and ran for nine months. Entrants were asked to develop companion applications for the company's Concept One Bluetooth headset.

The headset carried sensors, giving developers material to work with beyond an ordinary audio connection. Sanghvi's team built a prototype that worked across Apple and Android platforms. The competition involved elimination rounds and a final presentation, with entries assessed for compatibility, feasibility and creativity. Those are useful companions: an inventive idea still has to work on the equipment in front of it.

Sanghvi said the winnings would go back into developing applications. At the time, Bitcot had 30 people working remotely. The episode offers an early picture of the business: client development paying the bills, a distributed team doing the work, and experiments making room for ideas of its own. A prize can be framed on a wall. Reinvesting it gives it a somewhat more demanding job.

The customer has a plot of their own

Sanghvi's published writing reveals interests that extend beyond the mechanics of software. In 2020, he wrote about the relationship between stories and software, asking developers to think about where a product belongs in a client's story. It is an appealing request in a trade that can become very attached to its own vocabulary. The customer, after all, has usually arrived with something to accomplish.

Another piece that year considered making better mistakes. A third explored whether applications could themselves be built through applications, examining low-code and no-code development. Together, these subjects show an engineer paying attention to how people reach a useful result: understanding context, learning through attempts, and making creation accessible to people without conventional coding skills.

His 2025 guide to hiring a chief technology officer returns to the relationship between technical decisions and business direction. It discusses fractional and virtual leadership, evaluating candidates through real work, and finding technical judgment suited to a company's stage. The recurring concern is the fit between a tool, a team and a purpose. A grand title is an expensive substitute for that fit.

The low-code subject has a particular resonance in his own story. Someone who began with handwritten programs was considering how people might build applications with less conventional programming. There is no need to romanticise either method. Paper offered an entry point when a computer was unavailable. Low-code offers a different kind of entry point for people with a business problem to solve. In both cases, access to making things is part of the question, alongside the quality of whatever eventually gets made.

A shared inbox acquires some manners

By October 2026, Sanghvi's writing was following the untidy details of everyday operations. One example concerns a lending team's WordPress forms. A customer submitted a request, received a reassuring message, and went on with the day. Behind the form, however, the submission became an email in a shared mailbox. Somebody still had to read it, identify the request, copy the details and work out who should respond.

The solution described in his account connected that mailbox to Power Automate, used AI to extract information from inconsistent messages, and checked the results before creating records in a database. Missing information went to exception handling. Departments could see requests as work with a status, rather than as messages whose unread count had acquired managerial responsibilities.

It is a useful example of his current focus because the achievement is easy to picture. A form can work perfectly while the process behind it limps along. Fixing that process means understanding what happens after the visitor has stopped looking. The interesting engineering sits in classification, validation and responsibility. Few people will applaud a properly routed request. The person who previously had to rescue it may feel differently.

Forty jerseys are forty separate problems

A second October 2026 account follows FLITE Sports, which sells customized apparel to clubs, schools, coaches, players and families. Teamwear makes an excellent test of an ecommerce system's manners. One jersey design can arrive in numerous sizes, each linked to a particular name and number. A team order is a collection of individual promises disguised as one purchase.

Bitcot retained Shopify as the storefront and built a separate application for the work specific to sports commerce. That included partner stores, personalized orders, bundles, commissions, supplier information and reporting. Coaches received a portal for placing roster orders without needing access to the Shopify administration system. The design kept an established storefront while extending the parts that did not fit.

The details matter because errors travel. A player's name or size has to remain attached to the right item as the order moves toward production. The system also separates what different participants can see: a supplier needs production information, while internal margins belong elsewhere. Here, software development looks less like inventing a new shop and more like teaching the existing shop to remember everybody's measurements.

There is also restraint in the decision to retain the storefront. Custom development can mean adding the missing part around a system that already works. For this project, the specialised application carried the teamwear rules while Shopify continued handling familiar commerce functions. It is a practical answer to a familiar temptation: rebuilding the whole house because one room needs attention. The more interesting design work lies in understanding exactly where the existing arrangement stops being useful.

Time has a place outside the spreadsheet

When Sanghvi talks about automation, he also talks about family. He has described being a father to two daughters with different interests: one drawn to cybersecurity, the other to creative art. The pleasure he takes in their pursuits gives his argument about efficiency a personal destination. Time recovered from repetitive work can be spent with people who are under no obligation to admire a dashboard.

His business remains rooted in San Diego, with a team presence in the United States and India and clients across markets. Bitcot's work now spans custom applications, cloud systems, AI and workflow automation. That breadth creates plenty of room for technical discussion. Sanghvi's stated ambition keeps returning to a more ordinary question: can an organisation run better because of what his team has built?

There is a pleasing continuity between that ambition and the boy writing programs on paper. Both begin with working out what ought to happen, step by step. The tools have changed almost beyond recognition. The task still requires attention to the instructions, the circumstances and the person waiting at the other end. For Sanghvi, the pencil has acquired a company. The work remains making an idea behave.