Rutesh Shah and the art of becoming less necessary

A garage is a useful place to begin a Silicon Valley story. It is a less useful place to end one. When Rutesh Shah announced Infostretch’s agreement to merge with Apexon in February 2022, he recalled the business as a dream project that had started in his garage. Then he welcomed the people who would lead its next chapter. After years as chief executive, he was moving to the board.

“Great businesses outlive their #founders,” he wrote. The hashtag belongs to LinkedIn; the thought deserves more room. Founders are encouraged to make themselves indispensable. Shah was describing a company ready to keep growing under somebody else’s leadership. For someone whose earlier career involved making software reliable, there is a pleasing consistency in wanting the business to work when its original operator steps aside.

His route to that moment runs through software testing, a long partnership, the less glamorous problems of enterprise technology, and an unusually persistent interest in how people feel about their work. The garage supplies the opening scene. The handover supplies the question worth following.

The customer spoiled the product pitch

Before Infostretch, Shah was vice president of reliability services at Arsin Corporation. He worked on quality solutions for distributed applications used by companies including Oracle, Informix and Charles Schwab. This is the part of computing where a clever idea has to survive contact with a working business. An application may look splendid in a demonstration. Its users will still expect it to function on an inconvenient Tuesday.

His academic background was in computer science: a bachelor’s degree from Gujarat University and a master’s from MS University. Quality and test automation became subjects he discussed at conferences and user groups. The work gave him a vantage point on the distance between technology’s promise and its behaviour.

When preparing another venture, Shah asked former customers what they wanted. Their answer changed the plan. They were interested in business outcomes, rather than technology for its own sake. In his account, that conversation helped shape Infostretch as a services company. He and Manish Mathuria founded it in 2004. The useful question became what a customer could accomplish with the technology being built.

Two founders, a very long conversation

Mathuria was more than a fellow name on the incorporation story. Shah has said they started three companies together. During Infostretch’s first two years, they worked side by side, seven days a week, without salaries. Their weekends included conversations about the week just finished and what its events might mean for the business.

By 2020, Shah said they still made time for that discussion once a month. He valued an honest partner who could offer support and also reflect back where he needed to improve. It is an appealingly practical account of partnership: encouragement with the flattery removed. After enough years together, a co-founder can presumably recognise the difference between a breakthrough and an idea that needs lunch.

The company’s geographical story also stretched beyond California. Ahmedabad became Infostretch’s first Indian office. In 2011, the founders were discussing an innovation centre there and plans for mobile technology work in Gujarat. In 2023, Apexon opened another Ahmedabad facility and explicitly noted the city’s place in Infostretch’s beginnings. A change of name had left that connection intact.

The unromantic pleasure of making things work

Infostretch’s growth can be followed through rather ordinary numbers. In 2014, Silicon Valley Business Journal listed its revenue at $14.54 million for 2011, $16.73 million for 2012 and $19.74 million for 2013. Those figures describe an operating business accumulating work, customers and responsibilities. They also provide a useful pause before the much larger numbers associated with its later merger.

Some of its work involved a distinctly unshowy kind of relief. In 2018, Infostretch announced a Jenkins plugin to help convert existing automation jobs into coded pipelines. Shah described the way Jenkins jobs could accumulate and the manual effort required to move them. The intervention addressed an existing tangle inside the customer’s operation. Nobody needed another inspirational slide about speed while engineers were still untangling yesterday’s configuration.

The company also offered CloudBees Enterprise Jenkins training. In 2017, it reported having more than 30 certified engineers and trainers. Teaching customers to use the tools themselves belonged alongside delivering services. By a 2018 conference interview, Shah was discussing the “continuous economy” and continuous testing. Under the changing terminology, the concern remained recognisable: help businesses release software and keep it working.

A chief executive who wanted a different job description

Shah’s views on management are unusually concerned with the everyday experience of belonging to a company. In a 2019 discussion of work culture, he described leadership through engagement and example. Hiring people who shared the company’s direction came first; giving them room to do their jobs followed. The executive was expected to stay in contact with employees, customers and partners.

He called the role “Chief Engagement Officer”. The phrase is easy to put on a mug. Its implications are less decorative. A leader who says the team should exercise judgment has to accept that judgment arriving at an inconvenient answer. Shah also argued that appreciation involves the work people receive and their opportunity to contribute, as well as compensation.

“Chief Engagement Officer”

Rutesh Shah’s alternative reading of CEO

That concern appears in his writing too. In October 2018 he published a LinkedIn article about “HeartCount”, crediting a Simon Sinek talk with introducing him to the term. Even the choice of subject is revealing. A company can count employees precisely and still know remarkably little about their attachment to its work. Shah kept returning to the relationship between that attachment and the service a customer eventually receives.

The children had already checked three apps

There is another version of Shah in his writing: the experienced technology executive watching younger people and revising his assumptions. In a 2020 essay about Generation Z, he drew lessons from employees and his own children. One detail brings the subject down to earth. Before choosing a restaurant, his children checked ratings and reviews across three apps.

For a parent, that could be an obstacle between the family and dinner. For Shah, it illustrated a generation’s expectations about information and value. He wrote about younger users seeking things out themselves, comparing alternatives and expecting a direct route to what they wanted. Their habits were useful evidence for anyone designing a digital service.

He also admired their ability to notice when an organisation’s claims failed to match its behaviour. An employer could polish its public language, but employees and customers would be having their own conversations. The entrepreneur who had listened to customers before founding Infostretch was still listening, with a new set of people supplying the awkward questions.

Even a competitor might be useful

Shah’s interest in relationships extended to companies a services firm might otherwise regard as rivals. In 2019 he wrote about cooperation among competitors, examining how different capabilities could fit together on a customer engagement. His argument asked providers to be candid about their strengths and gaps before deciding whether to collaborate.

It is a revealing extension of the founding idea. If the desired outcome belongs to the customer, the supplier has a reason to work with someone whose abilities complement its own. A perfectly defended corporate boundary offers little comfort when an unfinished project is sitting on the other side. Partnership becomes a delivery decision, with practical questions about capability, readiness and location.

The company gets a life beyond its founders

The 2022 merger agreement brought that willingness to combine capabilities onto a different scale. Infostretch and Apexon planned to bring together product engineering, data, cloud and customer experience work. Sriniketh Chakravarthi would become chief executive, with Sumithra Gomatam as executive chair. Shah and Mathuria were to join the board as vice chairmen.

The announcement described a prospective organisation with more than 8,000 employees. That was a figure for the combined businesses, rather than a count of people Shah and Mathuria had hired organically at Infostretch. The distinction matters to the story: this next stage involved bringing organisations together, as well as growing the original one. The merger completed in April 2022; the combined business subsequently adopted the Apexon name.

Today, Apexon lists Shah as a director. In its sustainability reporting, he has also linked technology investment to responsible operations, transparency and developing employees. Those concerns sit alongside his earlier involvement in the 1% Pledge and mentoring entrepreneurs. His interests have continued beyond the immediate business of the chief executive’s office.

Still asking why

In October 2025, Shah shared his conversation with Padmini Murthy for her Unwire to Rewire series. The discussion concerned entrepreneurship, innovation and AI. Reflecting on it, he emphasised a founder’s habit of asking why, alongside the questions of how and what. A new technology had arrived; the need to examine its purpose was familiar.

There is a through line from that reflection to the customers who helped redirect his plans in 2004. Shah has repeatedly described progress as something requiring other people’s judgment: a customer’s, a partner’s, an employee’s, even his children’s. Each puts a useful limit on the founder’s certainty.

The garage story survives because beginnings are easy to picture. The later achievement is harder to photograph: a founder welcoming new leadership, a partner still willing to be honest, a company operating under a different name. Shah’s account leaves room for all three. The business can carry on. So can the conversation.