Rakesh Kamath
I scale companies. Not decks.
Twenty years of walking into companies where the traction is real but the systems are fragile — and installing the engineering, operational, and financial infrastructure that makes growth durable.
Co-founded and exited a SaaS platform that reached 5.8M users across 119 countries. Led a 60-person engineering organization toward $24M ARR. Turned a founder-led EdTech startup into an enterprise growth engine with 91% activation rates in a market where 65% is considered good.
The pattern is always the same: diagnose the structural weakness, align engineering to revenue, install operating cadence, and build systems that don't break when the company doubles.
This is where I write about what I've learned doing that.
What I'm thinking about
Why Your Engineering Team Isn't a Revenue Engine (Yet)
Most engineering orgs are optimized for shipping features, not driving revenue. Here are the five structural fixes that change that.
12 min readOperating CadenceThe Fragile → Stable → Productive Arc
Every engineering team falls on a three-stage arc. The problem is almost never the people — it's the operating system they're running on.
8 min readAI (Pragmatic)What AI Operationalization Actually Looks Like
The AI features in your pitch deck are almost never the AI investments that move your business. Here's what actually works.
8 min readFinancial DisciplineThe Financial Blind Spot That Kills Scaling Companies
A real example of how quarterly cash flow summaries hide a five-month gap between what leadership believes and what's actually happening.
3 min readGTM EngineeringYour Activation Rate Is Your Real Product-Market Fit Metric
Most founders measure product-market fit wrong. Look at activation rate instead — the percentage of new accounts hitting meaningful value within 30 days.
3 min readIf your company has real traction but the systems underneath it are starting to crack — that's the problem I spend my time on.
Let's talk