Not any role.
The right one.

In June 2025, Enavia wound down due to bankruptcy. The closure had nothing to do with the work — it was a funding circumstance. I had spent two and a half years building commercial infrastructure for a product I believed in, and I left with the work done and the relationships intact.

What followed was not panic. After eleven years of building without stopping, I chose to take some time before committing to the next chapter. That time is coming to a close.

What I bring

I am experienced in taking commercial functions from unclear to structured — building the forecasting logic, pipeline architecture, CRM governance, territory design, and go-to-market activation that allow a sales organisation to actually see what it is doing and make decisions from that. I have done this as a founder raising capital and managing a multi-city retail business, and as a Director running international new business for a B2B SaaS company with 9–18 month deal cycles.

I am comfortable in regulated industries — I have worked in food (FSSAI, ISO 22000, HACCP) and pharma, and I understand that compliance is a constraint to design around, not a reason to slow down.

I work best when the situation is genuinely ambiguous — when the question has not been asked clearly enough yet, when the answer is not obvious, and when someone needs to hold steady while the structure is still forming.

What I am looking for

A role in transformation, GTM leadership, commercial strategy, or new business development — in a company where the problems are real and the team takes them seriously. Europe is preferred. I am open to remote. I hold EU Blue Card authorisation.

Looking, thinking,
and building a little.

The job search is primary. In the background, I am working on a side project called KnightGrid — a vendor risk management platform. I am not raising money for it. I am building it because the problem is obvious enough that leaving it unaddressed felt irresponsible.

KnightGrid

Personal writing

I write on Substack under the name Mahidasa. It is separate from the professional work — more reflective, less structured. For those in the fire, those who came through it, and those who sense something essential is missing.

substack.com/@mahidasa

One person.
Everything.

There is a version of "brand building" that means briefing agencies, reviewing decks, and signing off on work other people made. That is not what happened here.

BRIN and Sacred Leaf were built from the ground — by one person, with no agency, no creative team, and no budget to speak of. Everything that went to shelf, to retailer, to investor, to press: I made it. The copy that reads like it was written by a poet was written at a desk at 2am. The packaging that competed on shelf against Tropicana and Red Bull was designed, prototyped, and approved by the same person who formulated what was inside the bottle. The photography that looked studio-shot was lit and composed on a kitchen table.

What made it work was not ambition. It was an unusually precise eye and the refusal to ship anything that felt wrong — even when the easier path was obvious and the money was running low.

BRIN — "Tea that tastes like tea."

The name came from Welsh — bryn, meaning mountain summit. Clean, international, and quietly meaningful. The brief I wrote to myself: a premium RTD tea that tastes like actual tea, not like sugar water with a leaf drawn on it. The extraction process used supercritical fluid technology to preserve EGCG concentration. The label carried that science without explaining it — the copy was spare, confident, and accurate: "Refresh. Guilt free. 15 calories."

Every variant had its own personality. Honey Lemon. Plain. The typography was chosen to signal quality without shouting about it. Retailers noticed. Barista Coffee Company — 150+ stores nationally — came on board as the launch partner. Nilgiri's, Namdhari's, and BigBasket followed.

Sacred Leaf — "Ancient Plant Alchemy. Cold Brewed. Bottled."

The brief evolved. After four years of retail, I understood the game better. Sacred Leaf was designed for glass — premium, giftable, D2C — and the branding had to match. Each variant carried a mythology: a dragon for Clarity (L-Theanine + Black Tea), a lotus for Calm (Green Tea + L-Theanine), a great wave for Rise (natural caffeine). The line on the inner box read: "Wisdom of the earth. Memory of water. Best of plant queendom." I wrote that. I also designed the stamp seal, the outer packaging, the insert cards, and briefed the label printing. The whole thing looked like it came from a London studio. It came from an apartment in Bengaluru.

The part nobody talks about: manufacturing

Getting a manufacturer to run a small batch is one of the hardest things in FMCG. Most won't. The economics don't work for them, and a new brand with no track record and a modest order is not an attractive customer. The conversation requires a specific combination of technical credibility (knowing what you're asking them to make), commercial maturity (showing you understand their constraints), and the willingness to accept a higher per-unit cost in exchange for flexibility.

I negotiated those terms repeatedly. I knew the formulation cold. I knew the supply chain constraints. I knew what questions to ask and which battles not to pick. That is what kept the business running when most early-stage FMCG brands break on this exact problem.

No ending.
Only the next chapter.

The trajectory across eleven years is not linear. I left a funded portfolio company to start on my own. I rebuilt entirely during a pandemic, having watched a retail distribution network collapse overnight. I left a business I had spent six years building to relocate to a different continent and join a company in a sector I had never worked in. The company eventually wound down.

None of those moments ended anything. They each clarified what mattered and what could be set down.

What this looks like in practice

• I am comfortable holding uncertainty without filling it prematurely with a plan
• I can identify when a model has stopped working and make the call to change it, rather than defend it
• I have managed investor relationships, supplier negotiations, and team decisions in the same week — sometimes the same day
• I have worked without a playbook across every role, in regulated environments where improvisation has real consequences
• I tend to preserve what is worth keeping under pressure and release what isn't — in business and personally
• The decision to leave Invenmi and relocate to Hamburg was the most consequential one I have made. I made it clearly and without hesitation

I do not think resilience is a personality trait. It is a set of decisions, made repeatedly, to continue with honesty about what is actually happening. That is the only pattern I can identify looking back at the past eleven years.

The hands-on
keeping the eye honest.

I practise pottery, photography, and painting. Not as a hobby in the casual sense — more as a discipline that keeps a different part of thinking active. Making something with your hands, where the material pushes back, is a useful counterbalance to work that is mostly conceptual.

Pottery

I work with clay on the wheel and by hand. The medium is unforgiving in a specific way — it tells you immediately when you are forcing something. There is a patience required that transfers well to everything else.

Photography

I photograph mostly in natural light — people, objects, food. I have shot all product photography for my own brands. The eye I have developed through photography is the same one I use in brand and packaging work.

Painting

Mostly acrylic and ink. Not finished works — working through things visually, in whatever medium is available. It is practice more than production.

These three things keep the observation skills sharp. A good brand sense, a good design eye, and the willingness to throw away what isn't working — these come from somewhere. For me, they come from here.