#UNTOLD | Identity, Ego & Redemption: The Unmaking—& Making—of Ashok Hariharan

Ashok Hariharan couldn't take his eyes off the door.

In a few moments, it would open. Then close. Open again. Close again. Twenty times.

He didn't know who would walk in first. Someone from engineering? Sales? Product? Someone he had hired? Someone whose appraisal he had written? Someone who had watched him build IDfy from a cramped office in Sakinaka where Friday evenings meant homemade mojitos, steaming Maggi and conversations that stretched long after work was done?

He didn't know.

He knew only one thing. For the entire exercise, he wasn't allowed to answer a single one of them.

The room was barely large enough for a difficult conversation. A rectangular table occupied most of it. Chairs faced each other across it. A notebook rested beside a pen. A single wooden door stood a few feet away. The only way in. The only way out.

Hariharan chose the chair facing it. Across the table sat Vivek Trilokinath. Investor. Mentor. The first person who had believed in IDfy. Today, he would oversee a trial of sorts. Hariharan had volunteered to hear the case against himself.

Vivek looked at him.

“The rules are simple.” Hariharan nodded.

Twenty people will walk into the room. They've worked with Hariharan for years. They've helped build this company. “They've seen who you were,” underlined Vivek. “And they've seen who you've become,” he added.

Hariharan shifted in his chair.

“You don't get to speak.”

No speaking? No explaining? No defending? Just listening? How difficult could that be?

The brass handle turned. The first employee walked in.

Hariharan knew him well.

They had celebrated product launches together. Argued over impossible deadlines. Shared late-night dinners after releases. He had watched the company grow. More importantly, he had watched Hariharan change.

The employee stopped just inside the room.

His eyes found Hariharan. Almost immediately, they drifted towards Vivek. Then back again. He pulled the chair back.

The scraping sound lingered longer than it should have. He sat down. Placed both hands on his knees. Opened his mouth.

Nothing. The silence stretched. Hariharan almost smiled.

Come on... it can't be that difficult.

The young man looked at Vivek once more. One last chance for someone to stop this.

Vivek didn't move.

“I...”

The word collapsed halfway.

Another breath.

“I don't know how to say this.”

Hariharan reached for the pen. His fingers rolled it unconsciously.

The employee swallowed. Then finally looked him in the eye.

“I don't think you're...”

Silence.

“...the same person anymore.”

The sentence landed quietly. It hurt anyway.

A reply surged to the back of Hariharan's throat.

No. You're wrong.

You weren't there when payroll had to be met.

You weren't there when investors walked away.

You have no idea what it took to keep this company alive.

His jaw tightened. His mouth opened. Nothing came out.

Across the table, Vivek lowered his eyes towards the notebook. He didn't have to remind Hariharan of the rules. Hariharan picked up the pen. The nib touched the paper.

Outside, footsteps echoed in the corridor.

Another employee was waiting. Twenty colleagues. Forty hours of conversations. Each conversation would last nearly two hours. Each would leave behind another page in the notebook. By the end, the notebook would contain evidence against him.

One Apartment. Three Identical Résumés

Years earlier, Hariharan had been on the fortunate side of a much easier judgement. The lesson arrived disguised as an apartment hunt.

Fresh back from London, he was looking for a place in Bandra. A friend knew an elderly Catholic woman whose apartment near Pali Naka had remained vacant for months. Hariharan spoke to her for about an hour and a half. Eventually, she asked about his caste.

He identified himself as South Indian. The house was his.

Her reasoning, as he recalls it, was that South Indians didn't quarrel. A broad assumption about a community had supplied the reassurance she needed about a prospective tenant.

Hariharan walked away with the apartment. And a question. How much of trust is built on facts? How much on stories we tell ourselves? How much on assumptions masquerading as certainty?

He had benefited from the shortcut. He was also beginning to wonder how many decisions were made that way because people had no better information to work with.

Another incident deepened the question.

At Gaboli, his earlier venture with his friend Vineet, a job posting attracted roughly 1,600 applications. Three applicants submitted the same résumé. Word for word. Even the grammatical errors matched.

They called the candidates for interviews and began unravelling what had happened.

Different people. The same paper. How could something as fundamental as identity be so fragile? Employers were making decisions on documents. People were trusting claims. Someone needed to establish whether the information deserved that trust.

The interviews ended. The questions didn't.

They followed him into conversations, including one at Vineet's brother's wedding. The two friends were drinking beside an open car boot when the idea received an enthusiastic hearing. Hatim, a colleague at Gaboli, was subsequently assigned to explore it.

Gaboli had begun with an online-education ambition and moved towards services to sustain itself. Hariharan wanted to build products. When the new venture was incorporated, he decided to take it on full-time.

The thought had become an obsession. The obsession had become an idea. The idea became IDfy. How do you know the person sitting across the table is really who they claim to be?

Years later, that question would acquire a meaning he hadn't anticipated. The company arrived. Reality arrived faster.

Twelve People. No Exit

By 2013, IDfy was barely a year and a half old. The idea was exciting. The balance sheet wasn't. The money was running out. His co-founder had left after the two disagreed on where the company should go. Raising fresh capital became even harder.

A co-founder’s departure made investors nervous. The business had little momentum to reassure them.

Hariharan looked at the numbers one last time.

There wasn't much left to calculate. He called everyone together. Twelve people. The entire company fit comfortably into one room.

There was no motivational speech. No promise that everything would somehow work out. Hariharan had always believed people deserved the truth, especially when the truth was uncomfortable.

“If this company shuts down,” he said quietly, “I want all of you to have enough time to find another job.”

The room fell silent.

Outside, the city carried on as if nothing had happened. Inside, twelve careers had just been pushed into uncertainty.

Then someone spoke. It was Kaushik Srivatsan. The youngest person in the room. An intern. The sort of person who instinctively gravitated towards anyone having a bad day.

Years later, people at IDfy would jokingly call him the company's first Chief Culture Officer.

That afternoon, nobody was joking. Kaushik looked at Hariharan and shrugged.

“Dubenge toh saath mein dubenge (If the ship was sinking, they would sink together.)

One voice became another. Then another. All twelve stayed. Hariharan had expected résumés. He found belief.

Belief, however, doesn't pay salaries.

The twelve employees had stayed. The bank balance hadn't.

Blume, an existing investor, subsequently provided bridge funding as traction improved. Hariharan remembers raising money in instalments of about ₹60 lakh. The money kept the company going, but by 2015 it was still living almost hand to mouth.

What followed became a routine. Pitch. Reject. Repeat. Some meetings ended politely. Some ended before they had properly begun.

When Opportunity Called to Say Quit

Around the middle of 2015, a call briefly seemed to offer a way out. He glanced at the screen. It was the name of one of India's best-known venture capitalists.

For a brief moment, the exhaustion disappeared. Finally. Maybe someone had understood what IDfy was trying to build.

He stepped out of his cabin.

“A big VC just called.”

Heads turned. Laptops closed. Nobody said it aloud. Everyone thought the same thing. This could change everything.

Hariharan walked into an empty meeting room and closed the glass door behind him.

The muffled sounds of the office faded.

He answered.

“Hello?”

The investor didn't waste time.

“Why are you still running that shit?”

Hariharan froze.

“I'm sorry?”

“You'd make a great product guy.”

“Shut this down.”

“At some point, you have to give up.”

The line went dead.

For a few seconds, the only sound in the room came from the air-conditioner humming above him. Hariharan stared at the black screen. Maybe he's right. Maybe this is over. Maybe I'm the only idiot who still believes this problem exists.

Outside the glass wall, someone looked up from their laptop.

Another teammate smiled and pointed towards the phone.

How did it go?

Hariharan slipped the phone back into his pocket. Forced a smile. And walked out as though nothing had happened.

The questions followed him everywhere. Friends had started asking what investors had been asking for months.

“You're talented.”

“You could build anything.”

“Why this?”

Some even had suggestions.

“E-commerce.”

“Logistics.”

“Food delivery.”

“We'll fund that.”

But identity? Fraud? Trust?

One investor laughed. “India mein fraud hota hi nahi.”

Every evening, Hariharan drove home carrying the same doubts.

What if they're seeing something I can't?

What if this isn't conviction?

What if it's just stubbornness dressed up as resilience?

Morning never gave those doubts much time. He would iron his shirt. Walk into another investor meeting. Tell the same story again.

Somewhere beneath every rejection, one belief refused to leave him. People were already trusting strangers with money, with identities, and with access. The fraud already existed. The world simply hadn't noticed it yet.

The question was beginning to find a larger audience. As businesses dealt with more customers, workers and transactions, verification became harder to leave to assumption. IDfy began to gain ground.

Eventually, the company raised a $3-million round. For the first time since starting IDfy, Hariharan did something he hadn't done in years.

He paid himself a salary.

Mukti had kept their household running through that wait. Her dependable income had allowed him to keep pursuing an unpredictable one.

The crisis had ended. Or so he thought.

The Company Grew. The Ego Followed

The company grew. Customers came in. The product matured and the team expanded. By Hariharan's account, annual revenue reached around ₹11 crore by 2016. For the first time, the future seemed less uncertain than the past.

Success had finally arrived.

Quietly, something else arrived with it.

The office was changing. Not overnight. Slowly. Almost invisibly. The intimacy of the early office became harder to preserve as the company expanded. Once, Hariharan had made Maggi for everyone at four and mixed mojitos on Friday evenings. Colleagues told him about their arguments at home, their relationships, their good news. He knew their lives beyond the work they did.

“I knew everything about everyone and they knew everything about me,” he recalls.

Growth would eventually make some of those routines impractical. But something more troubling was happening than a company outgrowing its pantry. People were beginning to experience a different Ashok.

He was changing. One meeting at a time. The market was beginning to accept his judgement. His colleagues were finding that judgement harder to question.

Around him, the startup ecosystem had its own mythology. The celebrated founders were demanding, relentless, uncompromising. Their aggression was presented as part of the explanation for their success.

Entrepreneurship was lonely. Hariharan began looking sideways at founders raising larger rounds and building bigger companies. Perhaps the way they behaved helped explain why they were doing better. He started borrowing from their personalities as well as listening to their advice.

He began trying to change himself.

The change travelled into his meetings. Urgency became impatience. Impatience became anger. Debate became instruction. Listening became waiting for his turn to speak. He told himself this was leadership. This was what CEOs did. This was the price of building something meaningful.

“I think I became pretty mean,” he says.

The culture that had held twelve people together when there was almost no money was beginning to crack after the money had arrived.

Then came another blow.

His Dream. Her ₹1.5 Crore

By 2017, despite growing revenues, IDfy was running out of cash again. Technology was expensive. Enterprise sales cycles were painfully slow. The company had built for tomorrow.

Tomorrow hadn't started paying yet.

Hariharan went home. Not for the first time. He sat across from Mukti.

“I think we're shutting down.”

She had heard those words before.

Years earlier, when IDfy was barely alive, she had quietly accepted that the company might not survive. This time felt different.

More people depended on the company now. There were families, years of work, a longer history of believing it would survive.

A dream that had grown too large to fail quietly.

She listened. Asked a few questions. Then made a decision.

Mukti transferred ₹1.5 crore into the company. The investment bought the company time to reach a point where existing backers were willing to provide another bridge. Without Mukti, Hariharan says, IDfy would probably have shut down.

It wasn't the first sacrifice she had made.

She had loved London and was doing well there. Hariharan wanted to leave. They had discussed moving to the United States, where he would take a job, or India, where he would try building something. They chose India.

He had met Mukti at the Indian School of Business. By his own account, the freedom to take entrepreneurial risks owed much to their circumstances: she earned well, his parents were financially secure, and he had no dependants elsewhere relying on his salary.

“I don't come from a rags-to-riches story,” he says.

The security was real. So were the choices Mukti had deferred to maintain it. She stayed in investment banking longer than she would otherwise have wanted because its income mattered to the family. His opportunity to keep trying had consequences for the work she could choose.

Years later, Hariharan would laugh and call her his “sugar mamma.”

There was humour in the phrase. There was gratitude underneath it. The money bought IDfy more time. It didn't buy Hariharan peace.

The Founder Fails His Own Check

Something still felt broken. Not in the balance sheet. In himself.

For weeks, the question refused to leave him. The immediate funding problem had an answer. The feeling that something was wrong with the company remained. He had run out of explanations.

One evening, he picked up the phone and called the one person whose opinion he trusted more than his own. Vivek Trilokinath.

Vivek had been the first person to believe in IDfy. Over the years, he had become something else. A sounding board. A mentor. Perhaps the only person who could tell Hariharan something he didn't want to hear.

Hariharan didn't call to discuss fundraising. Or customers. Or product. He asked a much simpler question.

“I don't know what's happening.”

“I think something is wrong.”

Then Vivek answered.

“The problem is you.”

Hariharan didn't argue. Not this time. He had exhausted every other explanation.

“Okay, Guruji...”

His voice was barely above a whisper.

“Tell me what to do.”

Silence. Then Vivek spoke.

“I want twenty people from your company.”

Not any twenty. The people who had built IDfy with him. The people who had watched him grow. The people who had watched him change.

“Let them tell you the difference.”

The first employee left.

The brass handle turned again. Another familiar face entered. Another colleague who had known the earlier Ashok and had something to say about the present one.

Hariharan had heard the first account. Perhaps the next would be different. The employee spoke. Hariharan wrote. When that conversation ended, someone else took the chair. Some spoke directly. Others searched for gentler words. Their seniority, their closeness to him and their comfort with confrontation shaped how they approached the subject.

The subject itself kept returning to the same place. Different people. Different memories. Different ways of speaking. The same man. They didn't know what the others had said. Then why did it all sound so familiar?

By the third colleague, Hariharan says, he had lost all self-respect. What followed felt like the same wound being struck again and again.

He kept writing. At some point, he was doing more than recording the complaints. He was writing about what he felt as he heard them. The note-taking had become journaling. The business problem had become painfully personal.

When did urgency become anger? When did he become someone people struggled to be honest with? How had he let the company drift from the culture he wanted to build?

One of his closest colleagues had no difficulty finding the words. He had stayed with Hariharan through the years. He could speak plainly.

“Ashok has just become an a**hole.”

The word hurt because it named precisely the kind of person Hariharan had never wanted to be.

An a**hole? Is that really what they see when they look at me?

He had known that he shouted. He had not expected to hear so many people, one after another, describe what it was like to be on the receiving end of the person he had become. His own explanation had been familiar: the pressure, the urgency, the burden of keeping the company alive. His colleagues supplied the experience missing from that explanation: Theirs.

The notebook filled. Every account made it harder to dismiss the previous one. Some of these people had stayed when the business could offer little certainty. Now they were telling him what was happening to the company they had helped preserve.

He wanted that culture back. The twentieth conversation ended. The last colleague left. The door closed, and this time there was no next person to hear from. Forty hours of conversations. Twenty versions of the same difficult truth.

Hariharan had come to Vivek because he thought something was wrong. Now he had an answer, and another question.

What should he do? Vivek suggested vipasanna.

Ten Days. Nowhere to Hide

In February 2018, Hariharan went for a ten-day vipasanna. The company came with him.

It travelled into the silence as unfinished work, unresolved problems and thoughts that refused to stay where he wanted them. After meditation, particularly at night, his mind continued to race. There were twenty conversations he could no longer escape by moving to the next meeting. The people had spoken. He had listened. Now he had to live with what he had heard.

On the third day, other faces began to claim his attention. His children. His parents. Mukti. He thought about how much of himself he had given to the company and what had happened to the people around it. The tears came.

The distinction he would later make is a painful one. He had often returned home early enough to spend time with his children. For much of the year, he had been physically there. Yet his mind had continued working for IDfy.

He was home. He wasn't always present. Sometimes he could do little more than sit, numbed by everything occupying his head. His family could have him in the room and still struggle to reach him.

That, he says, was one of the costs of entrepreneurship: the occasions when his wife, children or parents needed his attention and received only his proximity.

During the retreat, he began confronting that cost alongside the damage at work. By about the sixth day, the turbulence settled. He felt greater clarity about the person he wanted to be and the changes he needed to make.

One idea stayed with him: anitya, impermanence. Things arrive and pass. Success, failure, praise, criticism. He could observe them without becoming so tightly attached to every rise and fall.

He still experiences anxiety. Vipassana, he says, gives him a way to manage it. Customers would still need attention. Investors would still have questions. The company would continue producing problems. It changed how he lived with those problems.

Sorry Has to Show Up at Work

Back at IDfy, Hariharan stood before his employees.

Many had sat across from him during those forty hours. They had already told him what they thought. Now it was his turn.

He apologised.

There is a revealing detail in the way he remembers that moment. Saying sorry had never been taboo in his family. His parents had taught him to acknowledge mistakes. He had apologised readily throughout his life.

“Sorry was easy.”

Explaining why he owed them one was harder.

He had to describe the mistakes he had made in treating people and what he intended to change. The painful part had already happened: hearing colleagues describe a man he did not want to be. Now he had to acknowledge that man in front of the organisation.

He did. He spoke about returning to the company's original beliefs. About changing his behaviour. About rebuilding the culture they had begun to lose.

The founder who had spent forty hours listening could finally speak. What mattered was whether the people hearing him would recognise his words in the decisions that followed.

At home, Mukti began noticing a difference. His anger had eased. Three months after his retreat, she enrolled for Vipassana herself, encouraged by the change she had seen. She had helped keep his dream financially possible for years. Now something in the way he lived with it had shifted.

The reset also changed what Hariharan was willing to accept from other people.

The idea that exceptional skills justified awful behaviour had helped lead him astray. He no longer wanted to build around that bargain. Skills mattered. Attitude mattered more.

The principle applied to money too. He had spent years listening to investors tell him what he should become. He now says there are conversations he will not begin because the values do not fit. He can compromise on many things. His value system is a boundary.

The change did not give IDfy immunity from another crisis.

The Apology Meets the Balance Sheet

By early 2020, Hariharan recalls, monthly revenue had reached around ₹3 crore. He thought the business was heading into a strong year. Then COVID arrived, and monthly revenue fell to about ₹30 lakh.

A company with employees, commitments and ambitions suddenly had a fraction of the income it had been expecting.

The old pressure was back. Hariharan took it to the leadership team. He did not want to lay people off. That concern extended to the security guard, even though the guard was not on IDfy's payroll.

How could they make it work?

The leaders proposed pay cuts. Senior people took substantial reductions. Employees earning below ₹6 lakh a year were protected from cuts, he recalls. The company worked through the difficult months together.

Years earlier, twelve people had chosen to share the uncertainty of a business that might close. Now the leadership was sharing the cost of keeping people employed.

This was the apology facing a balance sheet. Hariharan could not make the pandemic disappear. He could decide what the company would ask of its people while it lasted.

By the fourth month, he says, demand began accelerating. Digital customer onboarding had become essential, and IDfy had the products and relationships to respond. The company recovered and went on to raise a larger round in 2021.

He describes the advantage that helped IDfy survive in an unusual way.

“We played on time.”

An entrepreneur can cast a wider net through a larger market, several industries or multiple products, he explains. IDfy had kept working long enough for the opportunity to grow around the problem it was trying to solve.

That endurance had depended on people whose contribution could not be reduced to the time they spent at their desks.

Who Are You Becoming?

When Hariharan talks to new employees about the culture he wants, he often begins with a question: what was the best time of their lives? Many say college. He asks them to think about why.

They were discovering who they were. They could make mistakes and learn from them. They made friends who would remain in their lives long after they left.

He wants some of those freedoms to survive the journey into work.

At IDfy, he says, a mistake made while attempting something difficult should create an opportunity to learn. Laziness is different. Repeating a mistake without learning from it is different. But people need room to attempt things whose outcome is uncertain.

They also need room to be themselves. Religion, sexuality and background should not decide whether they belong. Opinions should be expressible. A workplace that asks for people's ideas has to make it possible for them to speak.

The founder who once had to remain silent while colleagues described him now wants disagreement to arrive before it requires an intervention.

Then there are the friendships.

Ask people at IDfy who their closest friends are, Hariharan says, and many will point to someone in the company. Colleagues travel together. They become best men at each other's weddings. Some marry. Work creates shared memories that outlast an assignment or a reporting relationship.

He traces part of that inheritance to Kaushik Srivatsan, the young intern who had been among the first to say they would sink together. Hariharan may have been the founder, but he credits Kaushik with helping plant the friendship at the heart of the early company.

The Maggi and mojitos belonged to a small office. By the time of our conversations, Hariharan was talking about a company of around 800 people. Cooking for everyone was no longer a practical way to hold it together. The values beneath the ritual had to travel further than the founder's reach.

So did the lesson he had learnt about himself.

It had an uncomfortable precedent. Earlier in his career, Hariharan had been a talented, brash employee. A CEO had once sat him down and told him that his ability came with a cultural cost. He had not understood the warning then. Years later, as the founder hearing from twenty colleagues, he understood it far better.

The danger was familiar. Ability could make bad behaviour easier to excuse, especially to the person displaying it. Success could supply more excuses. Pressure could supply the rest.

He had used enough of them.

When asked which identity an entrepreneur holds closest, and which one he would like to get rid of, Hariharan gives the same answer to both.

“Ego.”

It brings the story back to that room.

The door opening. A familiar person entering. The hesitation before an honest answer. Hariharan listening, writing, confronting what he had become.

Twenty people had walked through that door. They had helped build the company. Now, by telling him what it was like to work with him, they had given him a chance to become the person he wanted to be again.

The door closed after the last conversation. The difficult question stayed. Who are you becoming?