About
I’m Selva Ganapathy — engineer, former founder, and author. I’ve built products through four technology waves: network security, software-defined networking, cloud-native SaaS, and production GenAI. This is how that turned into Startup Engineering.
The story
I started in networking and infrastructure — building network security modules at HCL for Juniper's mobile backhaul routers, then an M.S. in Computer Engineering at NC State working on web traffic analysis for a Cisco R&D project. Deep foundations: packets, protocols, systems that cannot afford to fail.
At Brocade in San Jose I built production systems through the software-defined networking wave — including a software load balancer that took throughput from 1 Gbps to 160 Gbps. Nearly a decade of learning what it takes to ship engineering that enterprises bet on.
In 2016 I came home to India and founded Naanal Technologies, a B2B logistics SaaS company. Over five years we grew from zero to roughly ₹6 crore in annual revenue and a 45-person company, with a 30-engineer team and a platform handling a million shipments a month at 99.9% uptime. Every technical decision was made with my own runway on the line.
Since 2021 I've been Principal Technical Architect at Mintmesh, an AI startup, leading a 14-engineer team building GenAI SaaS. Production numbers, not demos: accuracy improved from 60% to 85%, OpenAI processing cost reduced 5×, an LLM orchestrator running at 50 million tokens per minute, and an AI observability stack that took recovery time from 4 hours to 10 minutes.
Those experiences kept pointing at one question: how can non-technical founders make strong technical decisions before they have their own technical leadership? Answering it became Startup Engineering — the discipline, the Startup Engineering Lab, and the book for the founders who need it most.
For the record
M.S. Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University. Indian patent holder (Life Saving Cell Phone System). LinkedIn Top AI Voice badge. Founder of the Startup Engineering Lab — applied research at startupengineering.io, where the motto is evidence, not vibes. Based in Bengaluru, India.
I’ve sat on both sides of the table — as the engineer being evaluated and as the founder doing the evaluating. Happy to sit on yours.