Less ‘E’, More ‘We’: Meet Deep Chanda, the CEO Who Rewrote the Role

Deep Chanda dropped a letter. Just one.

Outside, it passed unnoticed. Inside, it hit instantly. No ‘sir.’ No ‘ma’am.’ No titles doing the heavy lifting. Just ‘chief officer,’ and not CEO. On paper, it might look like a quirk—a small tweak to stand out or maybe something designed to spark curiosity in meetings.

It worked. People leaned in.

Chanda doesn’t look like someone trying to blur hierarchy.

Look at him for a moment. Formal suit. Tied knot. Certificates lined up neatly behind him. It’s a kind of setting that usually demands a ‘sir.’ And then there’s the hair—long, pulled back and almost rockstar. And yet, he introduces himself as “Chief Officer.”

Chanda explains. “Chief Officer is nothing but a way to intrigue people,” the 42-year-old cybersecurity honcho confesses. “Honestly, it’s just the CEO. I just wanted to make it a little quirky,” he adds.

But the explanation doesn’t end there.

For 17 years, Chanda worked inside companies where titles carried weight far beyond the job. They shaped how people spoke, how they held back and how distance crept into rooms without anyone naming it. ‘Executive’ wasn’t just a word. It came with posture, hierarchy, and a quiet expectation of deference.

Chanda didn’t want that kind of company. “Employees come first for me,” he underlines. “I didn’t want a ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ culture,” he contends.

So, when Chanda started building Ampcus Cyber, he made a call early. Remove the word. Flatten the signal. Take away one small, invisible barrier between people.

Inside the cybersecurity consulting firm, nobody calls him ‘sir.’ Most call him ‘Deep Bhai.’ It sounds informal, almost loose. But it isn’t. It’s designed that way.

This wasn’t about a letter. It was about killing the pause—the split second when a junior stays quiet, when bad news slows down and when leadership turns into performance.

Strip that out, and things change. Decisions move faster. Conversations get sharper. People stop second-guessing tone and hierarchy. They just say what needs to be said.

It shows up in small ways first.

Birthdays aren’t just cosmetic HR emails. They’re days off. Not just yours, but your parents’, your spouse’s. Mental health support isn’t buried in policy. It’s expected to be used. And there’s room for life’s messier moments without turning them into negotiations.

Individually, these are small calls. Together, they build a certain kind of place.

The outcome sits quietly in a number. Attrition: around 3%.

In an industry where churn is the norm, where talent moves fast and burns out faster, that number doesn’t happen by accident. It is built carefully, and consistently.

But culture is easy to talk about when things are stable. It’s easier still when nothing is at risk. The real test comes when it is.

At one point, nearly a quarter of Ampcus Cyber’s revenue came from the Middle East—a steady, predictable stream. Then the region turned volatile over the last few months. Projects stalled, clients hesitated, and the ground reality changed.

Inside Ampcus Cyber, the options were clear: push harder, protect revenue and keep billing. The alternative was harder: Step back.

Chanda chose the latter. “I’ve been firefighting, telling customers we can’t deliver right now and they don’t need to pay us,” he says.

But when you take a hard call, there’s always a price. Work paused. Revenue dipped. Teams were pulled back as dozens of people moved out of the region and back to India. There was no symbolism here. It hit immediately, straight into operations, and it cost money.

And that’s the thing. There was no announcement or story built around it. Just a call. If ‘people-first’ holds only when it’s convenient, it doesn’t hold at all. That choice didn’t slow the company down for long. If anything, it clarified what it was building.

And you see it in the numbers.

Ampcus Cyber is still early in its journey, but the curve is already visible. In FY25, the company clocked ₹19 crore in operating revenue. A year later, it’s looking at ₹52 crore. This, after operating for just three months in FY24.

The ramp is steep. Behind it sits a larger ambition. The parent, Ampcus Group, isn’t playing for incremental growth.

“We are incredibly proud of what Deep Chanda has built at Ampcus Cyber,” says Salil Shankaran, president of Ampcus Group of Companies. “Our vision is to become the largest privately-owned cybersecurity firm by 2030,” he says.

For that ambition, India can’t be a side market. It’s the test. India processes the largest volume of digital transactions of any nation annually. “The digital ecosystem here is uniquely complex,” reckons Shankaran. If you can solve the cybersecurity problem in India, you can solve it anywhere in the world.

That belief shows up in how the business is split. About 25% of Ampcus Cyber’s revenue comes from India, with the US accounting for nearly 50%.

“That is exactly why Chanda is deeply invested in India, and why India sits at the heart of our global strategy,” he adds.

Courier Boy to Carrying Shoe Boxes

Chanda’s story, though, didn’t begin with a title. It started with a constraint.

After engineering, Chanda’s father gave him ₹2,000 and told him not to ask for money again. That was it. No cushion. No backup.

The irony? Engineering wasn’t even his call. “I wanted to study commerce,” recounts Chanda. “I was a bright student but my father wanted me to become an engineer, so I joined NIT Agartala.”

College passed. A degree followed. But the fit never quite landed. Chanda’s first job at Satyam in Delhi didn’t last. The company was raided. The job disappeared. That could’ve pushed him back into the same lane.

It didn’t. He moved to Bengaluru, following momentum more than a plan. And then made a call that didn’t quite fit the script. “I didn’t want to work as a software developer,” he says. “And I joined Blue Dart as a courier delivery boy.”

What followed was routine, almost mechanical. He carried boxes of shoes into offices—Wipro and others—under a ‘try and buy’ programme of an ecommerce startup, laying them out, waiting as people tried them on, packing them back, then heading to the next stop.

It’s not a pivot that most resumes highlight. But for the first time, the choice was his.

“I used to deliver shoes to offices and ask people to try them,” recounts Chanda. There’s no attempt to dress this up. It was work. But it stripped things down. Titles didn’t matter. Plans didn’t stretch far ahead. What mattered was staying in motion.

The next break came through American Express. He applied, got through, and stepped into a structured, global setup. Within months, a senior leader encouraged him to move to the US. He took the call. The exposure widened and the path looked stable.

Then it shifted again.

He returned to India for personal reasons. Back home, he worked across SISA Information Security and Network Intelligence, helping both expand internationally. Over time, a pattern emerged. He wasn’t just working in cybersecurity. He was learning how it scaled.

Eventually, he moved to build by starting his venture Wizard Cyber. He sold his house, his wife’s jewellery, and two cars to fund the business. An investor had committed and the plan depended on it. But the money never came as the investor backed out at the last moment.

Chanda, however, didn’t step back. He reached out to Ampcus Inc, and to its owner, Salil Shankaran. The conversation led to a merger. Ampcus Cyber took shape from that pivot.

Looking back, he doesn’t dramatise it. “Cybersecurity is a tough and crazy industry,” he says. “I wish somebody had warned me.” And then he shrugs, almost as a footnote. He knows just two things to do—the business of cyber security and making Maggi noodles. “I’m terrific with both,” he grins.

Scale, Ambition, and the India Bet

Today, Ampcus Cyber operates across more than 40 countries, with over 600 employees serving over 3,000 customers globally.

Think of it this way. When you shop on Amazon, your credit card information sits somewhere in the system. That data has to be protected. To make that happen, companies go through layers of checks—certifications, audits, and continuous monitoring. That’s where Ampcus Cyber comes in. It validates systems, tests vulnerabilities, and stays on top of threats before they become problems.

It’s the kind of work that sits in the background—the digital equivalent of the ISI mark on your helmet. You don’t notice it when everything runs smoothly. You notice it when it doesn’t.

And yet, the growth is visible. And India sits at the centre of that plan. “Our job is similar to a doctor’s profession,” says Chanda. “A doctor quietly hopes for more patients.”

And with that comes the other side. None of this runs friction-free. As the company scales, the tensions sharpen. Hiring without diluting the culture he built won’t be easy. Competing with larger global firms without losing speed is never straightforward. Expanding across markets where the rules keep shifting only makes it harder. And then there’s the pressure of the business itself. Cybersecurity doesn’t wait. The threats evolve, expectations rise and response time shrinks.

Through all of this, one thing hasn’t changed.

At some point, the missing ‘E’ may come back. As the company grows, as titles formalise, as the outside world demands a certain language of leadership, it would be the easiest thing to restore. And maybe it will.

But inside Ampcus Cyber, this is already how things work. The distance is gone. The hesitation has been worked through. The signal was set early enough to hold.

The decision was never about sounding different. It was about operating differently when it’s inconvenient, when it costs, and when it actually matters.

The ‘E’ was just the first thing to go.