Before Sandeep Kishore had a company to run, he had a staircase to contend with. In ninth grade in Patna, his study space occupied the patch beneath a shared stairwell. People walked overhead. Children jumped. Preparing for examinations required concentration; the building appeared to have other plans.
He complained to his mother, Asha Singh. Her answer was that a sufficiently clear purpose would let him stop hearing the footsteps. It is a wonderfully economical piece of parental advice: no renovation budget, considerable expectations. Years later, Kishore would remember it as a lesson that stayed.
Today he is founder and CEO of Agivant, an enterprise technology company working with AI agents, cloud infrastructure and data. Before that came a quarter-century at HCL, five years leading Zensar and a spell in private equity. Alongside those appointments sit two books of Hindi-English poetry. The boy under the stairs acquired several rather different ways of making himself heard.
A mother’s archive, a son’s handwriting
Kishore’s family moved from Ranchi to Patna in 1971, when he was five. He and his two younger brothers attended SGD Patliputra High School, a Hindi-medium school, followed by Patna Science College. Their father put particular weight on mathematics and science. When Kishore joined IIT Bombay in 1983, his father accompanied him to campus and credited that schooling with helping him get there.
The household also had a formidable relationship with words. His mother had studied economics at Ranchi University and competed in debates, winning trophies that remained on display at home. Her son left for Bombay and kept up a correspondence. During his college years, from 1983 to 1987, he wrote his parents more than a hundred letters.
Much later, his mother handed him a box containing them. She had saved every one. The future technology executive had, without intending to, created an unusually tender archive. Long before platforms made saving everything a default setting, somebody had decided his words deserved keeping.
He made an archive for his father, too. For his seventieth birthday, Kishore interviewed him over several sessions, transcribed his account and assembled a pictorial book about his life. The gift required listening before writing. It gave a family history the space and attention that a birthday card, however sincerely chosen, would struggle to provide.
Written home during his IIT Bombay years, 1983-1987. His mother kept every one.
Chaplin gets the first verse
Poetry had arrived earlier still. As a sixth-grade pupil, Kishore read about Charlie Chaplin and wrote a poem dedicated to him. He was drawn to the distance between the comic performance and the sadness behind it. A child had noticed that the person making everybody laugh might contain more than the audience could see.
That is a fitting beginning for a writer whose working life would eventually supply a quite different public identity. It would be easy to treat poetry as a charming executive accessory. The chronology makes that difficult. The poems came first. The chief executive’s title was a later addition.
At IIT, he edited a Hindi monthly magazine. Eventually, the private writing became books: Your Shadow Wants to Walk Alone in 2015, followed by Old Seeds of a New Tree in September 2017. Both put Hindi and English together. The second collection grew partly from notes made on his phone and developed during flights and weekends, the little intervals a demanding job leaves behind.
He translates his own Hindi poems into English, preserving their intention rather than following every word literally. The distinction matters. A mechanically accurate sentence can still lose what somebody meant. Here is a technology leader doing work for which the quality test is a feeling carried intact between languages.
For the second book, he described revision as an iterative process in which shorter verses could demand more work. Brevity had to be earned. The method is recognisable to anybody who has tried to make a few lines say exactly enough: record an observation, return to it, remove what weakens it, and try again. An international flight offered an extended interval for that patient business.
He credits his mother and grandmothers with the storytelling that shaped his conversational verse. The subjects stretch across hope, ambition, growing up and ordinary emotional life. His books invite readers to bring their own memories along. A balance sheet asks everybody to agree on a number. A poem can accommodate several perfectly respectable disagreements.
The CEO opens the questions
By the time Kishore joined Zensar in early 2016, he had spent more than twenty-five years at HCL Technologies. His responsibilities there included manufacturing and engineering and R&D services. He had already worked at the scale of billion-dollar businesses. Zensar gave him a different problem: how to change the habits and commercial direction of an established organisation.
One early answer was ZenVerse, a mobile platform that let employees put questions directly to him. Questions and answers were visible across the company. Colleagues could respond and register approval or disapproval. Kishore described answering most questions himself and bringing other leaders into the discussion when they could help.
The public replies mattered as much as the direct route to the CEO. One person’s uncertainty could become a shared answer. The hierarchy remained, of course, but a question no longer needed to travel privately through every level of it. For an organisation spread across locations, that was a concrete change in how information could move.
There is an appealing inconvenience built into that arrangement. Inviting questions is easy enough; allowing the entire company to watch the answers makes evasion a much less comfortable pastime. The chief executive’s accessibility became something employees could use, rather than a sentiment placed carefully in a presentation.
“Relevancy is the new currency.”
Sandeep Kishore
The platform could surface decidedly unglamorous problems. In 2016, employee comments helped identify dissatisfaction with an outsourced cab service. The company investigated and worked on changes with the provider. Corporate transformation has an appetite for grand nouns. Sometimes its first useful result is discovering why people are unhappy with the ride.
Kishore also pushed Zensar to practise the digital work it was selling. Internal processes moved onto mobile and cloud applications. That made employees participants in the experiment, with everyday opportunities to discover what worked and what caused friction. A sales promise had acquired an internal audience capable of answering back.
A transformation with unfinished business
The commercial choices required focus. Zensar narrowed its attention to three country markets and three industry segments, while increasing its commitment to digital services. Acquisitions added capabilities, including the British design agency Foolproof. Human experience had a place beside engineering and software, a recognition that technical delivery also has to make sense to the person using it.
The change attracted business-school scrutiny. A Harvard case published in March 2018 examined the tension between an aggressive digital strategy and preserving Zensar’s close-knit culture. A London case in 2020 treated the transformation as work still in progress, with a gap between strategic intent and company performance. Being studied in a classroom does not grant an executive immunity from awkward questions.
Digital takes a larger share
That unfinished quality makes the episode more useful than a tidy victory lap. Changing a company’s capabilities, customer mix and working habits takes longer than announcing a new direction. Zensar’s digital share increased, but translating new positioning into sustained growth remained a challenge. The distance between making a decision and making it work is where management earns its keep.
Kishore’s term as Zensar’s CEO ended in January 2021. That September he joined Siris as an executive partner, helping assess technology services investments and supporting portfolio companies. After years running operations, he was examining businesses through an investor’s questions about opportunity, execution and value. His next move would bring him back to building.
Agivant, and the geography of opportunity
Agivant followed in 2023. Its name joins agility with relevance, two concerns already familiar from Kishore’s earlier work. Today the company builds agentic systems for enterprises, with cloud, platform engineering, data and analytics underneath them. Its proposition puts AI inside the workflows businesses already use. The ambition has a practical address: the place where somebody’s daily work actually happens.
There is a second geography in the project. Agivant has described an ambition to positively affect 50,000 lives in small and mid-tier cities. That figure is a goal. The company’s earlier statements emphasised local opportunities and flexibility about where people build their careers. In a July 2024 post, Kishore celebrated colleagues from those locations and their determination.
The idea has a longer personal history. Kishore and his wife, Sushma, co-founded Har Asha Foundation, which supports opportunities for young people through skills development and vocational training. The foundation’s stated belief is that hope needs a chance to become real. There is a clear connection between preparing somebody for work and trying to create work within reach of them.
He continues to spend time with other founders. At TiE Silicon Valley’s January 2026 office hours, six founders met him to discuss positioning, traction and fundraising readiness. Three were invited to apply for investment consideration. An invitation to scrutiny is a modest, useful outcome. It also suits somebody whose career has moved between operating, investing and starting again.
For all the changes in scale and vocabulary, the letters and poems remain revealing. They record an inclination to notice, to explain and to preserve something before the next demand arrives. The staircase was noisy. The mother kept the letters. The schoolboy wrote about Chaplin. Kishore’s business life has become considerably more elaborate, but those earlier details still give the person room to breathe.