Rahil

In 2006, the five co-founders of Fractal Analytics flew into London from three different cities. @srikanth Velamakanni and Pranay Agrawal from New York. Nirmal Palaparthi and Pradeep Suryanarayan from Singapore. Ramakrishna Reddy from India. The agenda: elect their first CEO. For context, Fractal Analytics was a young startup back then. Fractal wanted banks to hand over sensitive customer data so it could build AI-driven financial decision tools The election was cordial. The choice was unanimous. Srikanth got the role. They celebrated and went to watch Chicago. "For so long, all of us had been equals, but today I was the boss," he recalled. It felt weird. For six months, everything ran smoothly. Then the disorder began. Two co-founders openly voiced dissent against Srikanth's working style. The row turned acrimonious. The company faced a clean binary: go back to the old way of functioning, or split. Srikanth and Pranay delivered a stark message to the investors: "If the company splits, there won't be two companies. You will get only one dead company." The split was averted, but the crisis kept simmering. June 2007. Srikanth was sitting in the Bengaluru office of serial entrepreneur K. Ganesh, seeking wisdom on how to build a company. A few minutes in, he glanced at his BlackBerry. Three emails, same subject line: Resignation. Then two more. He apologized to Ganesh, cut the meeting short, and rushed back to Mumbai. By the time he reached the head office, there were over a dozen resignations. Every one of them had sided with the warring co-founders and was headed to a rival firm. A rumour spread through the company like wildfire: "Fractal bandh ho raha hai." Someone had pulled the rug. The next year was consumed by legal battles. "It was the worst year of my life," Srikanth said. Then the 2008 financial crisis arrived on top of it. What happened next is the part most people skip over. Srikanth went on a three-day retreat. He sat with the conflict and tried to look at it honestly. Until then, the dissenting co-founders were the villains in his story and he was the good guy. On that retreat, the framing shifted. The co-founders had unanimously elected him CEO, which meant they trusted him. "Maybe my ego or behaviour was responsible," he thought. He had started behaving like a boss, not like one of five equals. He came back and called his co-founders. He apologized." There was stunned silence from the other side." In 2009, two years after the blowup, the warring co-founders amicably sold their stake and exited. One more followed in 2011. Of the five founders who flew into London in 2006, only Srikanth and Pranay remained. "We were almost starting again from scratch. That was the intermission of the Fractal story," he said. The post-intermission chapter was built on a completely different foundation: values, humility, and culture. Fractal entered high-growth. The 10-20-30 client strategy took shape. Only serve clients with at least $10B in revenue, $20B in market cap, or 30 million consumers. The logic was simple. You spend the same energy selling to a small company or to Google. Might as well aim at Google. In 2022, Fractal entered the unicorn club with a $360M raise from TPG. In 2026, it IPO-ed. Gulu Mirchandani's early ₹2.75 Cr investment turned into over ₹2,400 Cr. The biggest threat to a founding team is co-founder disputes - How that is handled, and how honestly the leader examines their own role in the fallout, determines everything that follows.