A fourth-generation entrepreneur, Aviral Shah, moved through investment banking in Tokyo, cryptocurrency and parking startups in India. After a decade in SaaS, he eventually bet on something far more offline: clean, organic ingredients. Today, as founder of Almighty Organics, he ships globally and is preparing to scale a vegan Omega-3 line designed to replace fish oil.
I’m the fourth generation of entrepreneurs in my family, and for a long time, that fact confused me more than it inspired me.
I used to wonder why I couldn’t just take a job, do well at it, and be content. Ten years and about ten different work experiences later, I think I finally have the answer. It comes down to your mindset.
If you have that urge to build, create, and take something from an idea to reality, a job may not always satisfy it. You can try to ignore that feeling, but it keeps coming back. Eventually, you realise that maybe the only thing to do is listen to it and go build the thing you’ve been thinking about all along.
It All Started in Tokyo
My career started far away from India, in Tokyo, at Rakuten. I spent two years in the securities investment division, working on application and network architecture, before moving into the founder’s office. After returning to India, I worked in two startups back-to-back. One, launched by me, was in cryptocurrency. And the other, interestingly enough, was in the parking industry.
My journey then took me to Dubai, where I worked as a product manager for a SoftBank-backed communications company. Over four years, I helped launch approximately ten products.
Back in India, I started another technology company. About a year later, almost as a side hustle, I started something completely different: an organic food company focused on clean ingredients.
I’ve always been passionate about organic food and clean ingredients. I genuinely believe that what we put into our bodies plays a big role in how we feel, how we live, and ultimately, our quality of life. I wanted to build something around that belief.
Looking back, I think two things naturally pushed me towards entrepreneurship. The first was my career. At almost every company I worked with, I found myself involved in building something from the ground up. The second was the desire to create something I truly believed in. With the organic products business, the idea was simple: if we can eat a little better, we can live a little better.
What began as a side project eventually grew into Almighty Organics.
Learning to Sell Food Like Software
FMCG was a completely new industry for me. I had worked across ten-odd businesses by that point, but tech had always been digital. This was the first time I was building something offline.
And yet, once we got going, it became one of the most rewarding journeys I’ve been part of. Today, we have more than 700 SKUs and ship our products across the globe.
Looking back, I’ve realised that a lot of what I learned along the way found its way into this business. The business development experience I gained while building SaaS products became incredibly useful when we started working with enterprise customers in food. Even the finance experience I picked up at an investment bank, something I never imagined I’d use again, has played an important role in running the company.
Steve Jobs once said that you can only connect the dots looking backwards. I’ve found that to be incredibly true. You rarely know how something you’re learning today will help you years later. You just have to trust the process and have faith that, somewhere down the line, the dots will connect.
The Hardest Decision
The hardest part, honestly, was walking away from the comfort of a job and the kind of packages that come with it. They can be incredibly hard to say no to, and making that decision was exhausting at first.
But I think, eventually, it comes down to how badly you want to build something of your own. There are days when things feel really low, and you question everything. And then, somehow, you wake up the next morning with a little more energy, a little more conviction, and you keep going. For me, that desire has always been stronger than the fear of giving up what I had.
Of course, you also need something outside the business to keep you grounded. I play badminton almost every day for about two hours, and the cardio really helps me reset. Meditation and yoga help too. When you’re building something this intense, you need something that takes your mind away from it for a while, something else to hold onto.
The Crash That Taught Me to Keep Going
I remember my very first job interview in Tokyo, at an investment bank. The interviewer asked me one question: “Can you handle pressure?”
I said yes!
He asked me the same thing in five or six different ways. By the end of it, I was sweating, but my answer hadn’t changed. That was probably the first time I realised that staying calm under pressure was something I could genuinely do.
Years later, that same lesson came back to me while I was building one of my earlier startups.
We had just onboarded a large customer who was running close to a million minutes of video calls through our system. Then, without warning, the entire system crashed. The impact was serious enough that the customer had to switch back to another provider in the middle of operations, across multiple geographies. We lost the customer, along with the revenue that came with them.
It was a tough day. But the next morning, we were back at it. We fixed what had gone wrong, learned from it, and started looking for the next customer, one that was even bigger.
I think that experience taught me something simple: Things will go wrong, sometimes badly. What matters is whether you can pick yourself up, learn from it, and keep moving. For me, stopping was never really an option.
Building Almighty Organics
Exporting food turned out to be a learning curve of its own. There were certifications to understand, trust to build, and a lot of figuring out what customers in different markets actually wanted. None of it happened overnight, but slowly, we learned our way through it.
Today, we serve customers across international markets, with the business largely focused on B2B. We’ve built the company completely bootstrapped so far and continue to grow steadily across markets.
One area we’re particularly excited about is our vegan Omega-3 product, an alternative to traditional fish oil. We’re now scaling that business and exploring the possibility of raising external capital specifically for that subsidiary.
It’s been a long journey, but there’s something incredibly fulfilling about seeing a product that started in India make its way into homes and businesses around the world.
Advice for Other Founders
If I had to share a few things with someone starting out, I’d say: try not to begin a business with a lot of financial pressure already sitting on your shoulders. Building a company is difficult enough without worrying about a significant financial backlog in the background.
It also helps to start with something you understand. You’ll still have a lot to learn, but if you already know the space, the learning curve becomes a little less steep.
And over time, try to become a generalist. When you’re building a company, you’re going to find yourself dealing with questions across finance, sales, product, hiring, operations and everything in between. You won’t always know the answer, and that’s okay. You just have to be willing to figure it out.
If Not This, Then What…
I love travelling, especially when I’m travelling with people I care about. But beyond that, I’d probably still be building something. I’ve been in product management for almost a decade now, in one form or another, so I think building products is just something that comes naturally to me.
And if I wasn’t doing that, I’d probably be cooking. I genuinely enjoy it. I’m not sure I could ever turn it into a business, and maybe that’s exactly why I enjoy it so much. So, in one way or another, I’d probably always be making something. That’s just how I’m wired.
What makes Aviral’s story interesting is that very little of it seems to have been planned from the start. He built in cryptocurrency, parking, telecom and SaaS before landing, almost by accident, on clean, organic food.
And yet, every one of those detours turned out to matter. Almighty Organics is the story of a founder who trusted that the dots would eventually connect, and kept building until they did.
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