The Real Thing

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A few years ago, Shubhi sat in a conversation with someone from the Small Business Administration, the federal agency that exists to help companies like hers. By then she had spent years building Raft, a software company that would go on to put its products in the hands of American soldiers.

The person across from her wanted to know something more basic. Was there somebody in the background actually running the show?

She told me her reply with almost no drama. "No, this is the real deal. Ask me questions that you have. I have all the answers." Then she moved on, the way people do when they have been asked a version of that question their whole lives.

Much of her life reads as an answer to that same question. Her parents asked the question in their own way when they laid out a path to medicine. An employer asked it when it declined to promote her because she was, in her words, "moving too fast." The government contracting market asked it when she walked into it with no network. Each time, Shubhi answered the same way. She picked the version of the work that would prove it, even when an easier version was sitting right there.

She grew up in Ghaziabad, just outside Delhi, in what she calls an educators' home. Her father served in the Indian Forest Service. Her mother is an obstetrician who ran her own nursing home. Shubhi watched both of them work all the time, and education sat at the center of the house. So did a script.

It would be easy to tell this as a story of defiance, and I think that would miss what she did. She did not walk away from her family's respect for a profession. She kept it, changed the profession, and aimed it at an airport. "Difference of opinion" is her phrase, and it is exact. She negotiated rather than broke away. Her younger brother, also an engineer, became a lawyer. Her father, she says, still wants her to pursue law.

For most first-generation readers, that is the more useful version of courage. Few of us get to burn the script. Most of us get to edit it, one line at a time, until it points somewhere our parents could not have pictured but can still recognize.

When I asked where her habit of running toward fear came from, she did not reach for a book or a mentor. She named her mother's mother. Her grandmother lived in Rewa, in central India, then little more than a village. She had an eighth-grade education when she started having children, and finished college later in life. She raised seven children, and all seven became professionals, five doctors and two engineers. The family home was called Nalanda House, after the ancient university.

Shubhi saw that same courage again in her mother and in her aunts. "That's the genetics that I'm blessed with," she said. Her grandmother explains the contradiction in Shubhi's childhood. The same household that handed her the doctor-or-engineer script had also shown her, one generation up, a woman who did what she believed was right and let the village catch up. When Shubhi chose engineering and America, she was not rejecting that house. She was following its deeper instruction.

Her first month in America reads like a field test. She landed in Boston without knowing anyone. A student she had never met picked her up. She spent a night with a distant relative she had never spoken to, took the train, and found herself an apartment. She asked people for "coins" instead of "change" and got blank stares. "I was lost," she said. "But I was free."

At the end of our conversation I asked what she would never let go of from India. She paused and answered with one word, jugaad.

Her example is a small one. When the power went out the night before an exam, you found candles, and when the candles ran out, you found another lamp. My read is that this same skill did much of the heavy lifting in a male-dominated industry where she had no invitation. Around the start of 2019, Raft won its first real contract, a three-year deal with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Within six months a new director arrived and canceled the program. Raft had about twenty-five people and nothing else in the pipeline. "We were not from the ecosystem," she said, and "nobody wanted to give us work." So Raft talked its way into six more months, then went straight to the government instead of waiting for a larger firm to bring it in as a subcontractor. That is jugaad at company scale.

Here I would push a little. Jugaad has a shadow, and every Indian professional knows it. Improvisation can harden into a habit of skipping process, and in defense, where software feeds decisions about life and death, that habit is dangerous. What makes Shubhi interesting is that she seems to know this. She sorts decisions into reversible and irreversible, and waits on the irreversible ones until she must act. On AI in war, she is blunt. "Irreversible decisions, life and death decisions, require a human being." That is jugaad grown up, hustle where you can undo a mistake and patience where you cannot.

The decision I keep coming back to is the one almost nobody makes. Raft held woman-owned business status and minority certifications, and they were helping it win work. Everyone around her advised keeping them. Shubhi wanted to know whether Raft could win full and open competition against "these big boys and big girls," and she decided there was only one way to find out.

What followed was eight months, maybe a year, of losing. Raft lost bid after bid to larger companies, and learned from every no until it started winning, and then winning the large contracts that put its software with soldiers in the field. It is the clearest example of what I admired most in her, the willingness to do what is right for you whatever is expected.

I would handle one part of it with care. She called those certifications crutches, and that word will sting some readers. For many women and minority founders, those programs are the only door into rooms that incumbents built. The SBA question she was asked is a pretty good argument for why the programs exist. Her choice was right for Raft, at a moment when, as she put it, the product spoke for itself. The lesson I take is to notice when an advantage has started protecting you from learning.

Raft kept choosing bigger rooms. It survived the canceled contract, moved into defense through a small Air Force research award, and grew for eight years into the kind of company a public defense contractor wants to own. In July 2026, Leonardo DRS agreed to acquire Raft for $450 million. The deal is expected to close later this year.

I asked her what she did in the first hour after it was signed. She sat by herself and had a cup of coffee. Then she said the most honest thing I have heard a founder say about a big outcome.

She compared it to a roller coaster. The thrill is in the climb, and at the end you are already asking where the next one is. When I asked about her next chapter, she did not have a plan. She is thinking about a three or four decade horizon for whatever she builds next, and about harder problems, and she admitted that patience is not her forte. I believed her on all three counts.

The thing she has made completely American is almost comically small, and it is my favorite story in the episode. For years she started every morning with chai, at least fifteen minutes of cardamom and ginger, and she was strict about the steps. Her husband challenged her that if she wanted to change in this country, the chai had to go. She quit cold turkey and switched to coffee. Ten years later, coffee is hers.

She audits her inheritance rather than preserving it. She kept jugaad. She kept the strict discipline she was raised with, and she says she now wants to thank her parents for being "so mean to me." She traded away the gentle morning. Whether that strict parenting carries over to her own children, whom she calls very privileged, she leaves open. "Time will tell," she said. I respect that she didn't pretend to know. Living between two worlds comes down to which trades you are willing to make, and whether you notice yourself making them.

The admirable quality I find is her consistency. Medicine gave way to engineering. The certification advantage gave way to open competition. Subcontracting gave way to going straight to the government. Chai gave way to coffee. Each time, she chose the harder door, and each time the choice fit the version of herself she was trying to become.

The honest counterweight is that doing what is right for you has costs, and some of them land on other people. She talked about the first time she had to fire someone at Raft, about a person she kept on too long, and about founder loneliness. "You're always gonna be the bad guy no matter what you do," she said. And the dopamine line suggests the reward was never going to be the arrival.

So when the government asked whether she was the real thing, the truest answer was a pattern that started in a house in Rewa and has held for a long time.

Clear lessons readers can carry into their own works

She kept her family's respect for a profession and changed the profession, choosing engineering because it was her way to America.

Raft gave up the certifications that made winning easier, lost for months, and learned from every no until it could win in open competition.

Candles on exam night and six months of runway after a canceled contract are the same skill. Build the result with what you have, and save your patience for the decisions you cannot undo.

When a government agency asked if she was a figurehead, she said, "Ask me questions that you have. I have all the answers.”

After a $450 million deal, she found the feeling she expected was not there. Enjoy the climb.

This essay follows one thread, the courage handed down from a house in Rewa. The full conversation shows what that courage costs in practice, from the hire she kept too long to why she believes life-and-death calls must stay with humans.

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