A founder can sell a company and still find himself with homework. Thiru Thangarathinam built MST Solutions, watched it become part of Mastek, and then returned to the work of starting something. At KeenStack, his next venture, the reading habit has survived the change of business cards. There are books, discussions and expectations that people will keep learning. Starting again, apparently, did not excuse him from the reading list.
The appealing detail is how ordinary the machinery looks. Enterprise technology supplies the large nouns: Salesforce, ServiceNow, architecture, transformation. His account of building a business keeps returning to smaller things: a conversation with a prospective customer, a colleague willing to learn, a promise someone remembers. The scale changes. The people still have to speak to one another.
A beginning small enough to fit at home
MST Solutions began in October 2012, in his home office. Within a month, Thiru was working with a second person in a 150-square-foot office. His ambition was less compact. He wanted the freedom to decide where he worked and with whom, and to build an organization that would outlast his own daily involvement.
He came to that decision from a stable career. At Apollo Group, he had worked in platform architecture for an organization operating educational institutions. He had a family to support and the familiar reasons to keep a dependable salary. He also wanted to spend more time near his and his wife’s parents in India. Starting a business brought work and family geography into the same decision.
His early bet was on Salesforce integration. In his telling, the first year involved committing his savings while being responsible for a wife and two young children. There was no leisurely apprenticeship in being the person whose decisions paid everyone’s bills. He has been quite frank about how little he understood of entrepreneurship before trying it. Ignorance provided an introduction; experience presented the invoice.
There is an earlier detour worth keeping in view. His degree was in printing technology, and he briefly worked in newspapers. Moving into IT required a long spell of carrying résumés to offices without getting the opening he wanted. He later recalled that one company which never called him back eventually acquired MST. It is the sort of reversal a novelist would be asked to make less convenient.
The architect had to learn to sell
By the time he founded MST, Thiru had worked at Intel and Apollo Group. He also had a technical author’s record. His books include Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Databases and work on XML, .NET and debugging. Before writing about leadership, he was helping readers make software behave itself, a task with its own opportunities for humility.
Technical authorship gives this career a useful texture. His route to the chief executive’s chair passed through detailed explanations of systems and code. A book about databases offers little room to hide behind an attractive mission statement. Sooner or later, the reader tries the instructions. That background makes his later interest in repeatable ways of running a company especially understandable.
Finding customers required another education. His first three clients came through his network: LinkedIn prospecting, keeping track of connections who changed jobs, and persistent outreach. These were relationships he worked at, rather than a queue of buyers politely forming outside a new office. He also had to accept that a founder carries responsibility for selling, however comfortable the technical work may feel.
Michael Gerber’s E-Myth helped him think about moving beyond daily execution and building a business others could help operate. Along the way, he sought advice. Michael Denning, a longtime Arizona State University business professor and Vistage chair, became a mentor he trusted for an outside view when a problem looked immovable. Even an architect benefits from someone checking the plans.
“The founder is the best salesperson for the organization.”
Thiru Thangarathinam
Three Cs, and a reading assignment
The organizing idea at MST was the Three Cs: customers, colleagues and community. Thiru describes them as priorities the team helped formulate, intended to shape decisions rather than decorate a presentation. The order matters less than their coexistence. A consulting firm needs paying clients, people capable of delivering the work, and a place in the communities where those people live.
One expression of that idea was a quarterly book discussion. The team read authors including Patrick Lencioni and Jim Collins, then came back with ideas and two or three changes they would make. Employees received Audible subscriptions, making participation easier during a commute. The interesting part was the demand that reading produce something beyond an impressive list of titles.
He put structure around those conversations. The Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS, helped establish goals and a regular rhythm of meetings and communication. In his description of MST’s approach, cultural expectations and job performance could both be discussed explicitly. A pleasant conversation about values becomes considerably more demanding when somebody has to decide what will change next quarter.
Community participation had its own practical expression. In 2017, an employee launched the KIND Project, working with local nonprofits to help underserved women find and retain sustainable employment. That detail matters because the initiative began with a colleague. A company’s stated priorities become more convincing when somebody besides the founder feels able to act on them.
Recognition followed the business’s expansion. MST appeared on the Inc. 5000 and earned Arizona workplace awards. Thiru was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year finalist in 2019. His professional circles included YPO, Vistage and Conscious Capital Arizona. These connections place him within a wider community of operators, people facing versions of the same questions about growth and responsibility.
The sale, then the second beginning
On July 18, 2022, Mastek announced an agreement to acquire MST Solutions. The business was a Chandler-based Salesforce consulting partner serving enterprise customers. For Mastek, the deal added capabilities in a platform it wanted to grow. For Thiru, the public explanation emphasized cultural alignment, colleagues’ development and access to a wider market.
A transaction puts a price and a date on years of work, but the practical handover continues afterward. Thiru stayed involved following the sale, describing his responsibility as making sure employees and customers were taken care of. By 2023 he was leading Mastek’s Salesforce Business Unit. The founder’s next task was helping the company he had built belong within a larger one.
KeenStack officially launched on January 14, 2025. This time the platform was ServiceNow. The continuity was the specialist consulting model: understand a major enterprise platform, then help organizations put their investment to work. On a radio appearance shortly after launch, he described six employees in Chandler and about 70 in India. Those figures belong to that opening moment, before the subsequent work of growth.
He had a straightforward explanation for returning. He missed building a company from the ground up. A completed deal had given him experience, but it had apparently done little to diminish his appetite for the work itself. The second venture offered a chance to apply lessons while decisions were still being made, rather than admire them after the fact.
A different platform, a revised bargain
One revision concerned employees’ financial participation. In March 2026, he explained that KeenStack’s C-corporation structure was chosen with restricted stock units in mind. He wanted employees to benefit from a possible future exit, according to their contributions. This was an intention about how a later outcome might be shared, with the lesson drawn from his previous company already influencing the new one.
The geography also asks for deliberate choices. He describes an India team largely working in the office, a hybrid arrangement for local US employees, and remote colleagues traveling for important gatherings. Leaders spend time in India too. Across this arrangement, he wants relationships strong enough that customers experience a consistent standard of work wherever delivery happens.
His more recent writing adds another layer: storytelling within the company. Teams gather to discuss goals, recognize colleagues and recount examples of people helping customers or each other. He treats these accounts as a way to communicate expectations across distance. A policy can specify a rule; the story of a colleague’s decision gives people something they can picture doing themselves.
There is a personal ambition inside that operating approach. He wants people who eventually leave his company to take more than improved technical skills with them: better communication, greater humility and an increased capacity to learn. Office libraries, listening credits and leadership discussions are small investments toward that ambition. The claim invites a practical test in the lives of the people who work there.
The next chapter still has a home address
Thiru’s July 2026 writing turns the lens toward his own behavior. He argues for carrying consistent values between work and home, and describes reliability as a quality he wants others to associate with him. One revealing detail is his habit of pausing in the car before going inside, giving himself a transition between the day’s business and his family.
At work, he describes coaching technically capable employees when their behavior conflicts with company values, then making a harder decision if nothing changes. He also asks whether he would feel comfortable explaining a decision to his family. It is a useful question precisely because an audience at home is unlikely to be dazzled by a well-formatted strategy deck.
The next chapter remains anchored in Chandler. At launch, he spoke of creating about 150 technology jobs there over the following years. That is an ambition, with execution still required. In September 2026, KeenStack announced its selection among Arizona’s Most Admired Companies. It has also earned Great Place To Work Certification in the United States and India, giving the newer company its own workplace milestones.
Thiru has changed platforms and started another company, carrying forward some practices and revising others. The interesting work now lies in the repetition: another hiring decision, another customer conversation, another occasion to make a stated value visible. There will presumably be another book discussion, too. A founder may finish a transaction. The homework has a talent for renewing itself.