How Avengers Endgame Taught Me to Stop Fighting Myself
Status: Declassified — File Archive 16 | Failure, Transformation, Identity
In my last dispatch, I talked about mentors who confuse you on purpose — and how you only understand them after they're gone.
This one is different. This one is about a movie that understood me better than I understood myself. 🎬
Let me confuse you. 🎯
📌 The Dot: Becoming Someone Completely New
Tony Fadell, the guy who built the iPod and the iPhone, wrote this in his book Build:
"My life has swung wildly between success and failure, incredible career highs immediately followed by bitter disappointment. And with each failure I chose to start from scratch, take all that I'd learned and do something completely new, become someone completely new."
When I read this, I didn't just nod along.
I felt it deep in my gut — that churning recognition when someone puts words to your own experience. 🎯
Because I've lived it. The wild swings. The highs crashing into lows. The bitter disappointment that sits in your chest like a stone.
But here's where my story takes a different turn.
Fadell says he became someone completely new. Like he deleted the old version and installed a fresh one.
I didn't do that.
I did something weirder. Something I learned from a big green superhero. 💚
Stay with me.
📌 The High: When Everything Was Working
Let me take you back to 2015. 📅
We were building a SaaS product — a point-and-click CI/CD solution. Think of it as a tool that helps software teams ship code faster, without all the complicated setup.
And man, things were clicking into place like puzzle pieces. 🧩
⚡ We had a solid team who believed in the vision
⚡ We got mentored by founders who had just sold their startup to a big company
⚡ We had beta customers ready to test our product
⚡ We learned Product Management from scratch — how to build an MVP, how to think like a product person
This was my second shot at entrepreneurship. And this time, I told myself: "I've finally cracked it. I'm never going back to a regular job. This is it."
My co-founder bootstrapped everything — poured in his own money to keep us alive. I supported by not taking a salary for months and letting go of my appraisals without ever pursuing them. We built the MVP with our bare hands.
And when the product was ready, we prepared like warriors going into battle. 🛡️
Demo? Polished. Slide deck? Beautiful. Elevator pitch? Practiced a hundred times. Mock pitches to our network? Everyone was impressed.
We lined up meetings with investors.
This was our moment.
📌 The Crash: Two Sentences Into the Pitch
Here's what nobody tells you about investor meetings. 🚪
Sometimes they don't even let you finish your elevator pitch.
Our elevator pitch was two lines. Two lines. And most investors would cut us off before we finished the second sentence.
They didn't want to see the demo. They didn't want to flip through the deck. They didn't even want to hear the idea fully.
Just... no. Next. Goodbye.
The first rejection stung. The second one hurt. By the third and fourth, we knew something was deeply wrong — but we couldn't figure out what. 😶
Then came the meeting that cracked the code. 🔓
One investor did the usual thing — cut us off mid-elevator-pitch. But then he did something different. He grabbed our laptop and ran through the slide deck himself. Fast. Impatient. Scanning.
Then he stopped and asked: "How do you handle Marketing? Sales? Finance? What's your runway? Cashflow projections? CAC? Churn rate?"
I remember looking at my co-founder. We were both Techno Functional guys. We knew code. We knew architecture. We knew how to build products.
But runway? CAC? Churn rate? We fumbled. Badly. 🥴
Our answers weren't seamless like they were for the technical questions. We were clearly out of our depth.
The investor wasn't even interested in our Techno Functional brilliance. He dropped solid advice: "Either one of you needs to learn Business Function, or you bring in a co-founder who owns it. Business Function is more critical than Techno Function for a startup to survive."
That was the first time I heard terms like runway, cashflow, CAC, churn rate spoken as non-negotiables.
The dot: Fadell talks about "bitter disappointment." Not just disappointment. Bitter. I finally understood what that word meant. Bitter is when you did everything right in your domain — and it still didn't work because you didn't even know the other domain existed.
📌 The Aftermath: Everything Falls Apart
What happens when the investor door slams shut?
Everything behind it starts crumbling. 🧱
I had to walk away. From the venture. From the team. From the co-founder who wanted to keep going. From the beta customers who believed in us. From the mentors who invested their time in us.
And worst of all — I had put my family through hell. 👨👩👧👧👴👴👵
My wife. My two daughters. My father. My father-in-law. My mother-in-law. All of them carrying stress and worry they didn't sign up for.
Months without salary. Loan EMIs unpaid. All because I was chasing a dream that crashed into a wall.
The guilt was everywhere. 💔
Guilty toward my team. Guilty toward my co-founder. Guilty toward the mentors. Guilty toward my family.
And the heaviest guilt of all?
I knew, when I walked away, that I was walking away from entrepreneurship forever.
This wasn't a pause. This was a funeral. ⚰️
By Q3 2018, I finally buried the entrepreneur version of myself. And what followed was darkness.
📌 The Realization: Why I Failed Twice
Somewhere in early 2019, the pieces finally connected. 🧩
I failed my first entrepreneurship attempt. Then I failed my second. Both times, I blamed external factors — market timing, investor mood, bad luck.
But the truth was simpler and more painful.
Both times, me and my co-founders were Techno Functional. Nobody focused on Business Function.
We could build products. But we couldn't market them. We couldn't sell them. We couldn't price them. We couldn't project revenue or manage cashflow. We didn't even know what questions investors would ask.
We brought a knife to a gunfight. A really well-engineered knife — but still a knife. 🔪
The dot connects: It took me years to learn what that one investor taught us in five minutes. Business Function isn't optional. It's the oxygen. Techno Function is important — but without Business Function, even the best product suffocates.
Costly lesson. Learned late. Connected even later.
📌 The Darkness: Fighting Myself
I got a job in Bangalore in Q4 2018. Business Product Owner at a company run by a kind founder named JJ. 🙏
They gave me freedom. They gave me empowerment. And I was genuinely grateful.
But here's the thing about tasting entrepreneurship — no job feels quite the same after. Even with all the freedom and power they offered, something inside me knew it wasn't the same as building your own thing from scratch.
I don't say this to pinpoint anyone or diminish what they gave me. They were generous. It's just... the entrepreneurship bug doesn't die easy.
And Bangalore meant being away from my family in Madurai. During my stint there — across two companies — I developed a ritual. Almost every Friday night, I would travel to Madurai. Wait for hours to catch the bus. Endure the exhausting overnight journey. Spend the weekend with my family. Then return to Bangalore early Monday morning. 🚌
Taxing? Absolutely. But those couple of days with my wife and daughters made up for everything.
Still, inside me, a war was raging. 🥊
From Q4 2018 until April 2019, I felt like two people fighting in one body:
⚡ The Entrepreneur — who wanted to build, create, own
⚡ The Employee — who needed stability, safety, a paycheck
They were at war. Every single day.
I couldn't fully be the entrepreneur anymore — that door was closed. But I couldn't fully be the employee either — it felt like giving up.
I was stuck. Angry. Lost.
📌 The Trigger: A Movie Changes Everything
April 2019. Avengers: Endgame releases. 🎬
My family had come to visit me in Bangalore — they had a bunch of holidays that lined up with the weekend. We decided to watch the movie together.
I walked into the theater expecting entertainment. I walked out with a framework for my life.
There's a scene early in the movie. The Avengers go looking for Bruce Banner. And when they find him... he's different. 💚
He's not the anxious scientist anymore. He's not the rage monster either.
He's both. Merged. At peace.
Smart Hulk. Professor Hulk.
Banner explains it simply: "For years, I treated the Hulk like a disease. Something to cure. But then I realized — he's not a disease. He's the cure."
He spent 18 months in a gamma lab merging his mind with Hulk's body. And what came out was something new. Not Banner. Not Hulk. Something better than both. 🧬
I sat in that dark theater, with my family beside me, and something clicked.
The dot connects: I had been treating the Entrepreneur like a disease. Something I lost. Something to mourn. Something that made being an Employee feel like failure.
"Banner stopped fighting. So did I."
But what if the Entrepreneur wasn't something I lost?
What if he was something I could merge with?
📌 The Merge: Intrapreneur Is Born
That night, I made a decision. 🎯
I would stop fighting myself. I would stop mourning the Entrepreneur. I would stop resenting the Employee.
I would merge them.
The Intrapreneur was born. 🦸
What's an Intrapreneur? Simple:
⚡ I work inside a company — but I operate like I own it ⚡ My bosses become my investors — I pitch them, deliver value, earn their trust ⚡ My engineering teams become my customers — I empower them, solve their problems ⚡ My team becomes my startup — I bootstrap it, build culture, scale it
I'm not a founder on paper. But in my head? I'm the Virtual CEO of my team — first DevOps, then SRE, and more recently, QA joined the team — and yes, team, not family. That's a whole other dot.
Banner + Hulk = Smart Hulk. Entrepreneur + Employee = Intrapreneur. 💚
Same formula. Same peace.
📌 The Proof: Nick Fury of Kissflow
Fast forward to 2021. I joined Kissflow as Senior Director of DevOps & SRE.
Recently, I got promoted to Associate Vice President. And here's what our CPO Dinesh wrote in the announcement:
"Congrats, Swami, the Nick Fury of Kissflow, on a truly well-deserved promotion! I asked him to make DevOps invisible — a silent engine that powers everything without disrupting the flow of engineering. Within the first couple of years, he turned that vision into reality. The shift from chaos to a seamless flow was not accidental; it was built brick by brick by someone deeply determined and committed. A true leader is someone who absorbs challenges but still presents a calm, confident front to peers and colleagues. That's Swami — our Nick Fury — always in control, always prepared, always leading from the front."
I never told Dinesh about the Intrapreneur identity. I never explained the Smart Hulk framework. I never shared the 2015 failure or the months of inner war.
But he saw it. Through my actions. Through the culture I built. Through the results. 🔥
The dot connects: Fadell says "become someone completely new." But maybe that's not the only path. Maybe you don't have to kill the old you. Maybe you can merge the old you with the new you — and become something neither could be alone.
🎯 The Debrief
⚡ Failure isn't always a funeral — sometimes it's a fusion reactor
⚡ Techno Functional alone isn't enough — Business Function is the oxygen
⚡ The identities fighting inside you might be partners, not enemies
⚡ You don't have to delete the old version — you can merge it
⚡ Intrapreneur = Entrepreneur agility & brain + Employee stability
⚡ The proof isn't in what you say — it's in what people see
Banner fought the Hulk for years. Tried to cure him. Suppress him. Eliminate him.
Then he stopped fighting. And became whole. 💚
I fought the Entrepreneur for years. Mourned him. Resented the Employee who replaced him.
Then I watched Endgame — with my family beside me in a Bangalore theater.
And became whole.
Sometimes the movie that saves you isn't the one you expect.
Class dismissed. ✊
