It was an automated response email that broke the camel’s back. Having worked diligently this past quarter to install an operations infrastructure for Pathrise — one of our small but quickly growing clients — I felt something in my psyche break when I received this seemingly innocuous email from Salesforce Support.

It all started when I filed a support ticket with Pardot, Salesforce’s email automation tool. Let’s take a look at the automated response, shall we?

My eyes hurt looking at this email, but I’m going to try anyway.

1. What is going on with the lack of formatting, random text strings, and multiple open URLs in the email body? I don’t have any image or HTML blocking software, so there’s no need for the email to look like this unless it was purposeful — or negligent.
2. Why am I told that Pardot Support is open 24 hours a day while in the same sentence they say they will respond within 48 hours? At best, it’s strange phrasing and at worst, it’s making a misleading suggestion about support availability.
3. In a separate email (gorgeously formatted), Salesforce let me know that they will “respond within 1–8 hours for Premier Success Customers. Standard Success Customers will hear back within 2 business days.” Turns out you can purchase a customer support package that will let Salesforce prioritize you. This is such a classic big tech move: turn customer support into an upsell opportunity. Funny how the support email itself is a mess but the email to get you to pay for more support looks incredible.
4. Perhaps most important: this unfortunate mess is an automated response email from an enterprise software that does automated email marketing. You really cannot make this stuff up.

Ok, it’s just an email. Relax.

Perhaps. But the email is a wonderfully appropriate microcosm of how much we let big tech companies get away with. Let me be clear: Salesforce adds a ton of value to organizations. I’ve used it in some capacity for many years. I’ve implemented it at companies. The platform creates unimaginable amounts of value to the world.

But as customers we can hold Salesforce and other big tech companies accountable for a lot more. A few weeks into our Salesforce implementation at Pathrise, I realized that core functionality was simply missing. We combed through forums trying to find out where it went. We filed support tickets. We asked our sales rep to escalate for us. And while we were trying and failing to speak with a technical support rep, we had sales reps constantly upselling us on more seats (which, of course, we bought).

It took over a week for someone at Salesforce/Pardot to finally reach out to us, and two months later the product issue has still not been resolved (we found workarounds).

An optimist would call this a testament to value creation. We allow tech startups to have a certain lack of professionalism, minimal support, or even broken product functionality if the product provides value as a whole. And to a certain extent, I’m comfortable with that. Having worked at early stage (and even late stage) startups, I intimately understand how chaotic it is to grow a company. Things move in fits and starts. Support tickets aren’t always answered. Emails go out to the wrong lists. Product features break. Startup employees thrive in that chaos; customers tolerate it as an acceptable tradeoff in order to benefit from the startup’s product offering.

But Salesforce isn’t a startup.

Salesforce is a company that constructs a massive building — one of the biggest in the country — in the middle of downtown San Francisco. They’re a company that makes aggressive $15 billion acquisitions on a Monday. They’re a public company traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

And, crushingly, they’re a company that prioritizes constant, pervasive upsell over better UI/UX, improved product functionality, or customer support.

I love Salesforce. I admire the value they have created. But unlike tech startups that are grappling with the frontier of technology and limited resources, Salesforce (and other big tech firms like it) has the resources to do much, much better by its customers. Do they have the will?

When do customers begin holding big tech companies accountable? was originally published in Two States Consulting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Then my friend Abhi Sivasailam — a brilliant analytics leader with whom I’d collaborated in politics — called me and convinced me I should move to San Francisco and work in tech. How could I ignore the advice of one of the smartest dudes I’ve ever met? I spent the next two years executing a career pivot and turning into an analytics manager / growth strategist. I got to know some amazing mentors, colleagues, and peers along the way. Most importantly, I learned. And learned. And the more I learned, the more I realized I had to learn.

So in the name of #constantselfimprovement, Abhi and I launched a consultancy called Two States. We had both seen the difficulties that startups go through in implementing a culture of experimentation and data-driven decision making. We had noticed the struggles that late-stage startups experience when they didn’t invest early in scalable infrastructure for analytics and operations. And we knew that we could help bring some of the best practices we had accrued to brilliant but bandwidth-strapped startups in our network.

We have been doing this now for a couple of months, but it’s just recently begun to feel real. A select few of our colleagues — some of the sharpest operators I’ve met in tech — will be coming with us on this consulting ride. I don’t know where this consultancy will go from here, but I do know that I am having an impact and I am learning new things every day. I am more than content with that. What else can any of us ask for?

Check out our new website below, and if you are curious about what we do, please feel free to hit me up for a friendly and free consult:

https://www.twostatesconsulting.com/

On Career Pivots & New Chapters was originally published in Two States Consulting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I. I Love My India

As a PIO (person of Indian origin) who was born in the United States, I’m obsessed with bharat. I cannot help it. I grew up in a multi-generation Punjabi household, went to Gurdwara and Sunday School twice a week, and eventually developed a fascination in the narrative of India as the land of spiritual enlightenment and truth-seeking.

Don’t ask me where I got this obsession from. My family was never really from India as we know it today. We hailed from Lahore (in present-day Pakistan) while India was still under British rule. When British and South Asian political leaders in 1947 decided to partition the region into two independent states — India and Pakistan — my family was one amongst millions of Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu families who lost everything and fled across the newly-formed borders. That’s how my grandparents found themselves in New Delhi — a far cry from the billowing mustard flower fields of Lahore and yet safe from danger and violence. Until 1984. That’s when state-sanctioned Hindu riots against Sikhs broke out across India, resulting in the murders of thousands of Sikhs. My father, a turbaned Sikh at the time, sometimes recounts hiding his parents in the closets of his Hindu friends as the mobs swarmed through his neighborhood and broke into his house. After a tragic yet necessary decision to cut his hair for the first time in his 26 years of life (and thus hide his Sikh identity), my father did what so many long-disenfranchised peoples do: he took his family and he bounced the hell out of there.

So….. why do I love India? For one, I have the benefit of choice. My immigrant family made sacrifices to arm me with higher education and thus career options. That in turn allowed me to choose how I want to engage with India. While my family’s homeland is still on the other side of that India-Pakistan border, the Sikh religion continues to call me back to the Indian state of Punjab.

Another reason I love India is that, as a person of color in the USA, I seek an identity that mirrors my own experiences. I’m not strong enough to assume the role of the lone brown kid or even of the lone diasporic Sikh. I seek communal bonds in perpetuity, even while I know that I’m not Indian enough to be “truly indian” and I don’t feel American enough to ignore my skin tone and my uniquely Indian experiences growing up.

And on a more fundamental level, India has a lot to offer, from a deeply fascinating mishmash of cultures, to the most spiritual places on earth, to literally tens of millions of brilliant, young, hungry kids willing to use any avenue to educate themselves and follow their dreams (or maybe to just join the hordes of doctors and lawyers [but let’s try being a doctor first]).

II. Buffet-Table-NRIs

NRIs (non-resident Indians) are everywhere, and some of them have something to say. You know who I’m talking about. You know — those middle-aged, upper middle class NRIs (non-resident Indians), complaining about India as they cluster around the buffet tables at restaurants like Delhi Palace or The Kohinoor. It is as if their favorite topic of conversation is to slander India, even while they stuff their faces with besan pakodas. They love to complain about high-level corruption, or maybe unpaved dirt roads, or especially how the awful smell of burning trash hits your nostrils as soon as you exit the plane at Indira Gandhi International Airport.

I hereby name this group buffet-table-NRIs.

Much of the slander isn’t fair, but perhaps some of it is. Here’s a quick story. My father, as a young man, tried to join the Indian Air Force as a pilot. However, his physical showed that his spinal cord had an irregularity that could manifest itself if he flew planes at high altitudes. The doctor who performed the physical had a solution: if my dad could slip him a 500-rupee note, the doctor wouldn’t report the irregularity to the military.

But, honestly, a lot of the NRI criticism still feels unwarranted. The complaints about pollution sound hollow as Prime Minister Modi’s swachh bharat (“Clean India”) initiatives take hold (most notably in tree planting initiatives and the war on open-air defecation). NRI critiques of high-level corruption also lose poignance as the population starts to vote for explicitly anti-corruption candidates. One of Modi’s biggest campaign platforms in the 2014 Indian general election was anti-corruption, in which he charged that decades of governance under the Congress Party had led to a corrupt and morally bankrupt state of national governance.

But I have a broader criticism of this land I love. Let me preface what I’m about to say: I’d guess that many Indians (especially going by interactions with my liberal, educated Indian peers in grad school) would say that I don’t have the right to form an opinion about this land from my vantage point as a privileged US citizen* who has never lived in India. I’ll say it anyway.

III. The Nickel-and-Dime Theory

There is a status quo of casual, day-to-day corruption and self-enrichment that seriously undermines India’s future prospects as a country that attempts to race out of poverty.

I’ll limit my evidence to some New Delhi anecdotes because I find Delhi an important microcosm of a broader Indian ethos, if such a thing exists. When I state casual self-enrichment, I mean the taxi drivers that jostle with each other to rip off everyone in sight. I also mean the unpleasant on-foot policemen who take bribes from said taxi drivers to allow them to rip off tourists and locals alike. But on top of that, I also mean the hotel chains, where, for instance, many of the airport hotels like the pricey JW Marriott (next to Delhi airport) charge tourists 1,000 INR for a 2-kilometer ride to the airport rather than deign to provide a basic shuttle service.

The nickel-and-dime philosophy permeates all strata of Indian society, but its existence at the lower levels of the class pyramid is perhaps unique to India. It’s also particularly troubling for two reasons:

1. The more unhelpful people are, the wider people must open their wallet to get what they want. This creates a culture of general hostility.
2. A byproduct of default hostility is that Good People are obscured from the vision. It incentivizes generally fewer genuine interactions.

A few years ago, I was traveling to India with a few American friends and showing them around. My Hindi is pretty decent so when two local plainclothes cops suddenly pulled me aside, I felt no qualms about conversing with them in Hindi. Mistaking me for a local, they asked me how I dared to show around tourists without a permit. One of them grabbed my collar and threatened to slap me if I lied to him. The other told me to empty my wallet so they wouldn’t arrest me for being an unlicensed tour guide. As soon as I flashed my US passport and switched to English, they backed off and apologized profusely. Great news for me, but what about the actual tour guides that get roughed up and harassed every day by goons? And middle-class families don’t get spared either — one time, I was with my family and our car was cornered by a man with a bear who made the bear do a quick jig and then demanded we pay him for the entertainment. We gave in, because he had a bear.

The corruption is so utterly casual. For my family who live in India, they have a servant who takes care of most of the bribery and blackmail. He will simply hop out of the car, take the cop or army official or bear performer to the side, and discreetly slip him some bills. Or sometimes the servant will himself do something corrupt: he somehow owns an army officer’s cap that he occasionally puts on the dashboard to get us past toll roads or onto special highways.

IV. In Sum

My mother’s advice for coping with all of this rings in my head whenever I travel through India: “Speak with a loud voice and flash some bills.” Translation: people will be more scared of messing with you if they think you are a powerful person. Buy why should Indians have to do that? Why should, yes, NRIs and PIOs have to do that? How will we progress as a country if the thirst for self-enrichment rips our bonds of trust at the seams? With this status quo so firmly entrenched, how will we adapt for the 21st century?

On a practical level, it terrifies me for India’s future. In my “real life”, I work in the tech sector in San Francisco. I have watched with delight as centers for tech innovation have gone global, from Sweden to London to Hong Kong. But if I’m being completely honest, I’m terrified about India’s ability to leapfrog technologically and catch up with global competition. What if potential investors looking to invest in the youth, energy, and brains of the country are immediately hit with a wave of casual, everyday corruption on arrival to Delhi International? Who would want to invest in an environment like that? And with regards to the particularly brilliant locals (i.e. Great People) that bubble to the top…. why would they stay in that environment?

I’ve changed the title of this post at least 8 times, because I don’t know what any of this means for India’s future. I certainly don’t have the answers to any of these questions. But as an ABCD (American-Born Confused Desi), I feel the whispers of existential ennui begin to creep around me with each successive visit to India. And I am reminded of the buffet-table-NRIs all over the world who delight in stuffing down pakodas and slandering India. Because I still believe they are wrong. I still believe there are enough Great People, enough youth, enough energy, and a rapidly flattening world with high-velocity information transfer that will allow India to experience success and growth. I have to believe that the pathways to salvation indeed exist.

I really hope the buffet-table-NRIs are wrong.

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* For the record I completely disagree with the sentiment that I’m not allowed to have an opinion on India, but it took a whole lot of self-doubt for me to get here. I may fail to ever find other Indians quite like me and I may have never actually lived in India, but why should that preclude me from having an opinion on India? What do my life experiences being ensconced in Indian culture, cuisine, temple, community events, taking bhangra lessons, learning to read and write Punjabi, learning to speak Hindi, etc. make me? The bottom line is that the uniquely Indian circumstances that jerked my family from Lahore to Delhi to the US over the course of 60+ years have had a significant impact on who I am today. I refuse to believe my perspective on Indian affairs matters less.