Srivatsa
Srinivasan
I'm human. And therefore unfinished.
I build trust first. I listen until the real problem surfaces on its own. One true constraint is more valuable than ten new tools.
What runs beneath most of what I've done is systems thinking — not in the academic sense, but in the lived sense. The ability to see the pattern beneath the noise. A sales problem disguised as a positioning problem. A workflow issue mistaken for lack of effort. A technology mismatch framed as a leadership gap.
I've spent time in enterprise boardrooms, on manufacturing floors, in Auroville, and on golf courses across forty-plus states. The thread connecting all of it isn't expertise. It's presence. And a quiet insistence on seeing what is actually there — not what people expect you to see.
"Being and doing are not enemies. The friction comes when doing is used to escape being — or when being is used to avoid responsibility."
A working principleI gravitate toward solutions that feel honest, repeatable, and light on ego — where growth feels earned rather than forced. I prefer depth over breadth, and a small set of genuine engagements over a large surface of surface-level ones.
The site is called Cogito Ergo Sum for a reason. Thinking isn't a credential. It's how I know I exist.
Twenty-five years. Mostly Cisco — as an engineer, an enterprise account manager covering energy and utilities, a global IoT partnership builder, and eventually a director running teams across six countries. I carried a quota for fourteen of those years. Cold calls, forecast reviews, eighteen-month sales cycles, deals that fell apart the week before close. The education you don't get from a textbook.
Before Cisco, Fannie Mae — a $30M network engineering budget, two data centers built, cost structures rebuilt. After, a series of smaller engagements with companies and nonprofits trying to figure out what they actually needed before spending money on what someone told them they needed.
The credential I trust most isn't a title. It's the scar tissue from things that didn't work the first time.
The work on a résumé is only a part of it. The rest shapes how I see, what I trust, and why certain things matter to me in ways that are hard to explain in a meeting.
Board Member, Travelers Aid International. Helping people in vulnerable situations find safety and human connection — often in the quiet moments where presence matters more than expertise. Not a skill demonstration. A practice.
Time at Solitude Farm taught me that simplicity, interdependence, and the intelligence of nature are teachers as reliable as any classroom. What began as volunteering became something I carry.
Forty-plus states. Not to check boxes — because a round of golf reveals things about a person (and yourself) that very few other situations can. Presence under pressure. Honesty about score. How someone treats the person they're about to beat.
Grounded in Vedanta — Ramana Maharshi's stillness, Chinmaya's framework, the Iyengar tradition I grew up near. Not as doctrine. As a way of asking better questions. Success without stillness, I've found, feels hollow.
Currently building two things quietly. And thinking about a third.
The thinking, as always, is the thing.