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Vishal Shanbhag

Origin

I come from Mumbai, India. These days I am in Hürth, near Cologne, Germany.

I graduated as an electronics engineer from Mumbai University in 2002. I stumbled into software because, after the 9/11 attacks of 2001, jobs dried up and a financial crisis loomed. The software industry was the first to hire. I have been building production systems ever since.

I came to Germany in 2023 because my wife was transferred. I like to travel, and the startup, software, and climate tech scene here? Das gefällt mir. I am staying.

I speak five languages at varying levels of decline: English native, Hindi and Marathi native, Konkani conversational, German at B1 and counting.

How I build

I am, by nature, a builder. Most of my work starts the same way: a whiteboard or a napkin drawing, a founder saying, "I have an idea that needs software to give it life." Within a few months, that idea becomes a working prototype. And prototypes, when they solve something real, attract users, funding, and a team.

When the system already exists, and the team is hitting the ceiling of what the current architecture can carry, the same instinct applies. I sit in a room with a founder or a CTO and a few senior engineers, and we take it apart together until we can all see what is actually there. Then we put it back together, sequenced, in a way the business can scale and the team can execute.

I work with companies that have found their footing and need to build the systems that carry them through the next phase without breaking what is already working.

What I believe

We shall ask WHY before we ask HOW.
Think like Master Oogway, asking existential questions, not about the universe, but about the product. Why are we doing this? Why does it matter? Who is this for? The answers shape everything that follows.
We shall build for outcomes, not features.
A king summoned six blind men and asked them to describe an elephant. The one who touched the trunk said, "A snake." The one who touched the leg said, "A tree." The one who touched the tail said, "A rope." Every description was true from where they stood. Every description was wrong for the whole. Often, a feature request is a blind man describing the elephant. The customer touches their piece, a workflow that hurts, a button they keep clicking, a report they export every morning, and names that piece as the problem that needs to be solved. Our job is to see the animal. Work backwards from the outcome. The feature request is just the symptom. Find the cause, the motivation, the desired outcome.
We shall build by principles, not by whim.
Ideas are noise until filtered. Design principles are the sieve. They separate what belongs from what distracts. Every feature request, every suggestion, every pivot passes through the same filter.
We shall keep it simple and stupid.
Google launched in 1998 with around a million dollars from angel investors and a white page with a logo and a text box. No categories, no stock tickers, no news, no weather, no email. Their competitors, Lycos, AltaVista, Excite, were multi-billion-dollar portals that did everything. The blank page won. Simplicity is not a limitation. It is a slingshot. David did not try to be Goliath. He found Goliath's weakness and aimed for it.
We shall prototype before we commit.
Google Glass. A product nobody asked for, built by one of the world's biggest companies, backed by billions in R&D. It failed because the customer discovery happened after the investment, not before. Prototypes exist to kill bad ideas cheaply. A rough prototype that fails with five users costs you a week. A finished product that fails with five hundred customers costs you months of development time and much more in costs.
We shall build with grit, spit, and a whole lot of duct tape.
Like the Penguins of Madagascar building a plane from scrap. The tools are never perfect, the ground is never level, and the requirements change before you finish typing. Most of the building is resourcefulness, making something work with what you have.
We shall deploy what works.
"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you have launched too late." Reid Hoffman. The Apple I was a circuit board. Ugly, incomplete, but it worked. Done is better than perfect. Perfection achieved through iteration is still perfection. Perfection before launch is a product that never shipped.
We shall learn from failures.
Edison found 10,000 ways that did not work. Keep a log. Failures are data, not shame. The features that became the mainstays are often nowhere in the first draft.
We shall rise after every hit.
"It ain't about how hard you're hit. It's about how you can get hit and keep moving forward." Rocky Balboa. Building is not a single fight. It is a long sequence of setbacks, near-misses, and unexpected punches. The ones who finish are not the ones who never fell. They are the ones who got back up.
We shall run further than a marathon.
A marathon has a finish line at 42 km. Sufiya Sufi ran 4,167 km from Kanyakumari to Kashmir in 68 days, then kept going toward Karakoram. That is the difference between a product launch and a company. Sprints are for work breakdown. The vision needs the kind of distance where the finish line keeps moving because the purpose has not been met yet. The long game has no finish line.Read the full analogy

The career arc, briefly

My first big job out of university was at Infosys, in their Banking & Capital Markets group. That is where I got my first global exposure: on-site in Richmond, Virginia, for a major US bank, harmonising a relational data model across 500+ tables.

2006 took me to Lehman Brothers in Mumbai. I survived the 2008 bankruptcy. Met my future co-founder there.

At Nomura I stayed with the same team, working in the same building. A few years later, in 2011, I co-founded Inbotiqa with the colleague I met at Lehman.

Inbotiqa / YUDOmail is the work I am asked about most. I built the system that processes 100,000+ transactional emails a day for global banking, at 99.9% availability. The numbers I care about are the operational ones: turnaround-time compliance went from 40–60% to over 95%; same-day close-out from 22% to 85%; email volume dropped 43%, and complaints went to zero. Inbotiqa is a Techstars portfolio company and went through their Fintech accelerator in London in 2019.
BauAI (Sep 2025 – Feb 2026) is the most recent. A vibe-coding-generated codebase that needed to become a scalable, production-ready product. The work was less "add more AI" and more "decide which AI-generated decisions survive contact with users."

Earlier: HDFC Life Insurance (early serverless, 2015), Progress Software (2011).

Connect with me on LinkedIn; drop a note when you connect, or I might filter you as spam.

Speaking, writing, mentorship

I write for JavaPro and Baeldung, two names every Java professional recognises.

Select articles

  1. Bridging Java and Python for AI/ML in Production: The Case for GraalPy on GraalVMJavaPro
  2. Greener Code: Sustainable Java Deployments with Native Builds and Knative Serverless on KubernetesJavaPro
  3. How to Secure Ollama ServerMedium
  4. Flutter ain't going awayLevel Up Coding
  5. Why you shouldn't use Langchain's indexing API?Level Up Coding
  6. Baeldung Author PageBaeldung

Off the clock

I trek, I travel, I write — in order of increasing frequency. I travel mostly by public transport. I cook rarely, badly, and enthusiastically (all three are related). I live to eat. I am, like every self-respecting Indian, a fan of spicy food, particularly the Malwani style Bombay duck, which is a fish, not a bird, named after my hometown. Yes, it confuses everyone.

I like stories presented on a bigger screen. I watch Bollywood and Hollywood movies. I grew up listening to music from Kishore Kumar, Asha Bhosle, and R.D. Burman, and am now trying to make sense of German music. The Mahabharata, R.K. Narayan's condensed English version, is the one book that has stayed with me. As a kid, I was fascinated with technology. I always wanted to take things apart and put them back together. I called it reverse engineering. These days, I explore software builds with the same curiosity and write what I learn, sometimes with metaphors and analogies from Hollywood or Bollywood movies.

If you have an idea that needs software to give it life, talk to me.

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