Short Circuit, Switched On.

Sri Lanka’s tech services industry is shifting, and few moves signal that change more clearly than the merger of Surge Global and Calcey under the new Short Circuit Group. The combined company now spans engineering, marketing, digital transformation and a growing slate of in-house products aimed at both local and global markets.

Echelon sat down with Bhanuka Harischandra, founder of Surge Global and Group Managing Director at Short Circuit, to discuss the merger, the company’s product offerings, his approach to risk and leadership, and why he believes Sri Lanka can build world-class technology companies without chasing unicorns.

Rewiring a Sri Lankan Technology Group

How has combining Surge Global with Calcey changed the problems you solve for clients?

The merger has not fundamentally changed what we solve, but it has changed how much we can take on. Surge has always been a consulting business that blends technical capability and marketing to help companies grow aggressively online. Calcey brings deep engineering expertise that complements this.

By bringing the two organisations together, we have significantly increased our capacity. The combined team is now over 500 people, which allows us to serve a wider range of industries and geographies. That shared expertise gives clients more confidence that we have seen similar problems before and know how to execute at scale.

In simple terms, what kind of problems are clients asking Surge to solve right now?

Most growth today happens online, so we focus on building the infrastructure that supports that digital growth. Clients usually come to us with a basic problem: they need more customers. We help them find where those customers spend time, craft messages that resonate, and acquire traffic efficiently.

Once that demand is generated, they need systems to convert and retain it. That means building and improving websites, apps, platforms, and the underlying data and process layer. We handle both the strategy and the execution, from the first touchpoint through to purchase and advocacy, effectively acting as an extension of the client’s own growth and product teams.

Do you focus on specific industries, or does the group work across sectors?

We are largely industry and geography-agnostic within a defined part of the internet. Having a sizeable team means we have built experience across a wide range of sectors, from education and finance to biotech, energy, government and retail. For example, we work with institutions like Stanford University, companies like PayPal and several well-known regional brands.

In practice, our constraint is not the sector but the part of the web we operate in. We do not take on work in politics or in markets such as Russia and China, where the internet operates as a separate ecosystem. Within our chosen domain, we understand how traffic, platforms and user behaviour work and that is where we can add the most value.

What does the geographic and industry mix of Short Circuit (Surge X Calcey) look like today?

Half of our revenue comes from the United States, where we work mainly with mid-market and larger companies on technology-led projects, with some marketing execution layered in. Sweden & the UK contribute around 25%, while roughly 10% comes from the Gulf, where we deliver government work through our partnership with GBM, a strategic partner of IBM in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), for ministries such as Interior, Energy and IT. In Australia, we support seed-stage startups with prototyping and go-to-market execution.

Across the combined portfolio, no single customer contributes more than about 15% of revenue. The business is globally diversified, with meaningful exposure in the US, the Gulf, the UK, Australia and parts of Europe.

Surge primarily focused on marketing advisory, in addition to technology services. Has the Calcey merger shifted Surge more toward being a pure technology-focused firm?

Even before the merger, we were already tilting toward technology. Around 2018, Surge was roughly 75% marketing. By 2020, it was closer to 50-50, and each year since then, the mix has moved further into engineering. Some of this is reclassification. Work like user experience and web builds used to sit under “marketing”, but in reality, they are as much technology as they are brand.

Calcey has accelerated that shift. Today, the combined business is roughly 75% core engineering and 25% marketing. That said, we are now actively introducing Calcey’s long-standing clients to our demand generation and marketing capabilities, so that mix is likely to rebalance as we unlock more of the full-service proposition.

How do you position your value proposition when approaching potential clients?

Different clients come to us for different outcomes. The easier entry point is usually revenue growth, because companies are far more comfortable investing when they can see a direct and immediate return. The technology side is a longer-term transformation. When we streamline processes, build modern infrastructure or help teams adopt AI, the gains compound over time rather than show up instantly. Many businesses default to a cost-minimisation mindset for tech, which is why we frame our work around value creation instead of cheap execution.

“Our edge is not one thing. It is a mix of deep technical capability, strong marketing execution, global experience and a value-for-money proposition.”

Most of our growth, however, has not come from pitching. It has come from inbound demand and referrals. When we deliver well, clients bring us into their next organisation or recommend us across their networks. One of our longest relationships in Boston’s education space has generated steady work for almost a decade because the results speak for themselves. Social media amplifies that effect because it lets us showcase what we build and spark interest from clients who see a different way of solving their problems.

How do you differentiate Surge from traditional consulting firms like the Big Four or McKinsey?

We often say, only half-jokingly, that the main difference is simple. When we craft a strategy, we also take responsibility for executing it. Traditional consultancies often hand over a deck and walk away. Our model ties us to the outcome.

Our edge is not one thing. It is a mix of deep technical capability, strong marketing execution, global experience and a value-for-money proposition. We are not the cheapest option, and we are not the firms that charge millions just to start a diagnosis. At around 500 people, we are still considered boutique globally, which lets us stay agile. Digital business rewards speed. If a solution takes two years to reach the market, it is already obsolete. We sit in the gap where expertise, pace and cost meet, which is why clients choose us.

With Surge and Calcey now operating as a combined entity, what does scaling look like from here, and what challenges do you expect compared with the past decade of growth?

Surge recorded a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 87% over the past ten years, but we are at a very different stage now. Post-merger, the combined valuation was around $40 million, and this year we expect revenue to be over $15 million.

The industry has changed dramatically since we started. Expectations around technology have risen, and scale looks very different for us today. I have no intention of building a 5,000-person organisation or chasing another decade of 80-plus percentage growth. The combined business now has two engines: services and products. Their economics are entirely different, and the real long-term value will come from the product portfolio, which is beginning to scale. Even if the services side grows modestly or stays flat, as long as our products perform, I am comfortable with the direction we are heading.

You have spoken about building products alongside your services business. What kind of products are these, and who are they designed for?

We now have three products in various stages of rollout. Two are in real estate and hospitality in Sri Lanka, and one is a technology platform in software engineering and quality assurance. The hospitality and real estate products, Nivadu and Nivasa, are being built for local hotels and property operators.

Our advantage is that we already maintain a technical bench. Most companies would need to assemble and fund a dedicated engineering team to build a new platform. For us, those skills already exist in-house, which makes experimentation far more efficient.

With Nivadu and Nivasa, the goal is to enable hotel digitalisation at effectively zero upfront cost. We give properties a single platform for their website, booking engine, OTA connectivity, payment gateways and digital marketing. We onboard them, run the technology and remove capital as a barrier. In practice, we are taking the same consulting, marketing and engineering capabilities we offer clients and scaling them through platforms rather than only through one-to-one service work.

How do you justify using your bench to build multiple products, and how have you convinced your shareholders that this strategy makes sense?

As a globally competitive firm, we maintain a bench of about 5-10% to be able to onboard clients without hiring & upskilling delays. The product innovation strategy is to be able to maximise our efficiency further, to turn the bench, which is typically seen as an overhead, into a strategic advantage.

I know the approach is unusual, and it may not work exactly as planned. Two years from now, we might discover we spent heavily with little to show for it. But our board knows me well and has seen our track record. Mangala Karunaratne invested in Surge when we were a five-person team and has watched the business grow for a decade. Dave Chesson and I built Publisher Rocket together, took it from zero revenue to about $4 million in net profit, and eventually exited. Mahesh Patel invested after we completed the full digital transformation of his retail group in Papua New Guinea.

The confidence they have is effectively a bet on our ability to build and ship products. Most service firms have engineers on the bench, but very few have founders who have repeatedly created and sold technology products. We have done it multiple times. Now we are doing it with more resources and stronger relationships. As we scale our hospitality platform, for example, we will look to partner with major Sri Lankan hotel groups, and we expect to be taken seriously because we bring genuine experience and credentials.

You have built a globally scalable services business with clients across multiple markets. Why invest significant resources in Sri Lanka, a relatively small and less scalable market, instead of focusing solely on larger opportunities overseas?

Sri Lanka is less scalable, but for us, it is a proving ground rather than the end game. The thesis is that the technology is replicable. We want to validate the product here first, then take the same platform to markets such as Fiji and across Southeast Asia, partnering with strong local operators and raising capital market by market once the model is de-risked.

Even in Sri Lanka, the opportunity is not trivial. There are roughly 4,500 hotels, about 85% of which do not manage their own payments and rely on third-party OTAs. If a platform can support, say, 4,000 properties at around 50% occupancy and capture $10 per room in value, that is already a meaningful business. It will not be the next Airbnb, but it can shift a $15 million revenue base to $20 or $25 million quite efficiently.

I am not chasing a unicorn at any cost. I am comfortable focusing on the $10-$100 million range, where there are many underserved niches and less competition. If we back three products and two of them together are worth $50 million, that is a very good outcome.

Given that many investors chase unicorn outcomes and outsized returns, how did you convince your shareholders that a more measured, mid-market strategy was the right path for the business?

Our shareholders have already seen strong returns, which helps shape expectations. We are not operating with the scale or capital base of a Silicon Valley fund, so we do not need moonshot outcomes to deliver meaningful value. My commitment to investors is steady, reasonable returns rather than speculative bets that could jeopardise the livelihoods of more than 500 people who depend on this business.

We want to build sustainable careers, maintain stability and steadily improve the quality of life within the company. That is far more compatible with disciplined, mid-market value creation than chasing unicorn valuations. Sri Lanka has firms like WSO2 pursuing that path, and they should. Our approach is different. 

When did it become clear that a mid-market, product-focused strategy was the right direction for the business, and was there a specific moment that crystallised this shift?

The realisation came over time. As we grew, it became obvious that scaling to several thousand people in Sri Lanka would run into a hard talent barrier. If we intend to keep the organisation at roughly 500 people, the question becomes how to make that team as revenue-efficient as possible. Productisation is the natural answer.

We have already built sophisticated technology for clients globally, yet rarely for ourselves. We have the talent, experience and relationships to turn that capability inward and create platforms with far greater leverage than pure services. That advantage is something most service firms do not have. So shifting some focus toward products and placing a few high-stakes but calculated wagers felt not only logical but necessary for long-term scale and efficiency.

What is the most value Surge or Calcey has created for a single client, and how do you think about value capture in those situations?

One of the clearest examples is an education client we supported for over five years. By rebuilding their entire digital acquisition engine, we cut their customer acquisition cost by roughly 75%, which helped them double revenue and create a nine-figure uplift in valuation. We did not hold equity, but we were well compensated, earning about $1 million a year for that work. They had taken the early risk, and that is part of the trade-off in a services model.

We see a similar impact elsewhere. For a major retail client, our digital transformation work over two years helped position them as the most technologically advanced player in their market, enabling a successful exit to an investor. In some cases, the value shows up in revenue, in others it shows up as a catalytic event, but the common thread is that our involvement helps shift the trajectory of the business.

Why did you decide to shift from a pure services strategy toward building your own products, and how have your experiences with Simplebooks and Rooster shaped that decision?

I realised over the past few years that product building could no longer sit on the sidelines. Even though Surge has been my core focus for more than a decade, I have always built things outside the business, and those products are now cash flow positive and growing. Simplebooks, which began as a corporate secretarial service and now supports more than 10,000 registered businesses, is evolving into a tax and compliance platform and investing heavily in AI. Rooster, our HR platform built during COVID because Surge lacked the tools to hire at scale, now processes payroll for about 30,000 employees and has clear momentum.

What struck me was the inefficiency of running these efforts separately. At Short Circuit, I already have a strong engineering bench, while Simplebooks and Rooster were hiring their own teams. If these capabilities were aligned, we could move much faster. Earlier, Surge ownership had a more conservative growth strategy, which made sense at the time and helped us mature as an organisation. But once a services business reaches scale, it naturally de-risks, and my fear was that staying on that path would leave us vulnerable.

Building products gives us a second engine. It lets us use our talent more efficiently, pursue higher-value growth and avoid relying solely on service revenue.

How has Surge’s valuation evolved from Tavistock’s initial investment through to the Calcey merger and the formation of Short Circuit, and what does the business look like today in terms of scale and profitability?

Tavistock invested in Surge in 2017, taking 51% for about $350,000 at a valuation of roughly $700,000. They brought much-needed discipline and governance, and helped institutionalise the business. The team also supported a few acquisitions Surge made and remained partners until we bought them out earlier this year, delivering them around a 1,500% return. We still work with several companies in their US and UK portfolio.

The Calcey merger combined their clients, revenue and engineering depth with our marketing and product capabilities under the Short Circuit group. On the services side, we now operate across Calcey, Surge and Midraise, a model that allows companies between funding rounds to access engineering capacity on deferred terms while we take the credit risk. Alongside this sits a growing product portfolio of three platforms. Together, these assets are valued at about $40 million.

As a group, we remain profitable and cashflow positive, with EBITDA in the 15-20% range even while we invest heavily in our own products. Without that investment, margins would be higher, but our priority is maintaining cash flow strength because we work on multi-year government contracts with staggered payments. Any excess cash is channelled into product development, which all shareholders see as the most meaningful long-term value driver.

How did the merger conversation with Mangala unfold, especially given your decision to take on debt to buy out earlier investors and his very different attitude to leverage?

I had just agreed to a buyout of our previous investors and lined up a $6 million package with HNB, made up of $4.5 million in debt and $1.5 million in equity from Mahesh Patel and a few other investors. The valuation felt fair to both sides, and the previous shareholders were exiting with around a fifteen-fold return, but carrying that level of debt on Surge alone was clearly risky given our earnings.

We had flirted with a merger in 2022 and 2023, but the old shareholding structure meant the economics never quite worked. Once we had control back, the picture changed. Mangala and I spoke for about twenty minutes. I outlined the new structure, the debt, and the idea of combining the two firms so that a stronger balance sheet, bigger revenue base and deeper bench could share that load. He did not say no, which, from him, is as good as a yes, and within a few weeks, we had an agreement.

Mangala has built Calcey for over twenty years with no debt at all and is instinctively anti-leverage. I am the opposite. I see debt as a useful tool if it is priced sensibly and backed by real cash flows. Our HNB facility sits at roughly 6-7%, and the group maintains an interest cover of around ten times. We stay firmly cashflow positive.

What gave Mangala comfort was not just the numbers but a decade of context. He has watched Surge grow for ten years, seen how we manage governance and how we treat teams. The merger was a stock transaction, so he has taken on more risk without a cash payout, but he believes in the combined management, the valuation and the strategy. It also allows him to take a step back and focus a bit more on his passion projects like Asaya Sands.

Do you generate any meaningful revenue from Sri Lanka today, and how do you see the local market fitting into your long-term strategy?

Right now, Short Circuit has only one Sri Lankan client, CA Sri Lanka, although it is a substantial engagement. What is encouraging is that local enterprises are finally leaning into digital transformation and experimenting with AI in their workflows. We already work with players like SLT-Mobitel and are actively pitching more Sri Lankan businesses because we see the local market as a strategic long-term opportunity.

Sri Lanka will need dozens of new consumer and enterprise platforms over the next decade. We want to be the team building them. Unlike a typical service provider, we are willing to take risks alongside local partners. They bring market presence and operational knowledge; we bring engineering and marketing expertise. We only win if we create multiples of value for them, and that alignment is what makes the Sri Lankan opportunity compelling.

How will you fund these new products, and can your existing bench carry the weight, or will you need external capital?

Our bench can take a product from idea to prototype to proof of concept, but it cannot take a platform all the way to maturity. Once something shows real potential, the expectation is that the industry partner joining us will shoulder part of the funding. If the product demonstrates revenue and strong unit economics, it can also raise institutional financing.

What we are doing differently is front-loading the early risk. We use our bench and our balance sheet to de-risk a product before a partner steps in. By the time they join, the concept is validated, and the technical foundation is sound. From there, scaling becomes a combined effort. This will be our early investment, plus the partner’s capital and market insight.

How significant will Sri Lanka become for Short Circuit in the next few years, and will the country remain primarily a talent and cost-arbitrage base?

The cost-arbitrage model is not a silver bullet. Talent in technology is globally competitive, and the engineers we hire for US work are the same engineers who would support Sri Lankan clients. Their cost does not change. That is why Sri Lankan companies historically view high-quality tech work as cost-prohibitive, which limits how aggressively we can grow locally on the services side.

As our products mature, Sri Lanka becomes a far more meaningful opportunity. I do not want us to be only a service provider. I want Sri Lanka to generate value through both products and services. If Sri Lankan firms are willing to go through the digital transformation journey with us, we are very open to it.

The economy is improving, revenue numbers are rising, and businesses here are maturing. In absolute terms, Sri Lankan service revenue will grow, but in relative terms, the US, Sweden, and the Gulf will also keep expanding. So the proportional mix may not shift dramatically. That said, several of our products are designed specifically for Sri Lanka, and those will make the country a much more significant part of our future.

Inside Management’s Playbook

You run a services business while developing multiple products at Short Circuit and staying involved in ventures like SimpleBooks and Rooster. Investors usually worry when a founder is stretched thin. How did you convince shareholders that this portfolio approach is in their best interests?

I have been fortunate to work with investors who understand both how I operate and how our group is structured. They know I am not wired to focus on a single project, and that our breadth is deliberate. Operating across several domains gives us a better vantage point for product innovation, and they share in that value creation. I am also not running every business day-to-day. Each venture has its own leadership and established teams. Across the portfolio, there are close to 1,000 people, with around 500 at Short Circuit alone, and some investors and founders are involved in more than one company.

These are not transactional, institutional deals. They are relationships built over a decade of working together and delivering outcomes. That history has created trust and credibility, which is why our investors are comfortable backing a portfolio of active bets rather than a single, tightly defined focus.

Running even one company is hard. You oversee several. How do you personally make that workable, from finding the right people to aligning incentives so each business executes independently?

Social media has helped me a lot. I got into it early, which let me tell my story, show how we work, and attract people who were already aligned with our pace and culture. Some of it is timing and luck, but it has consistently brought in strong operators I can trust to run businesses without me in the weeds every day.

My own role across these companies is very narrow. I am a terrible operator, so I only get involved where I add real value, which is in customer acquisition and strategy. In one bakery we backed, I knew nothing about baking, but I understood the acquisition model. I funded ad spend the founders saw as risky because the data showed every $1 in ads was bringing in around $30 in revenue. That is the kind of asymmetric bet I like to make, as long as the right people are running the business. In technology, we do not scatter investments; we build ourselves. Short-Circuit is the only place I “work” in a nine-to-five sense. Everywhere else, it is about having the right teams and then being very disciplined about where I step in.

How central has your social media presence been to building these businesses, and how do you use both public profile and incentives to attract and align talent, especially given that your merger partner, Mangala, is not active on social platforms?

My public profile is not the only reason these businesses work, but it plays a big role. Internally, we pay people as well as we can and run a performance-driven culture. At Short Circuit, for example, people manage a book of business and share in the net margins they generate, which creates very clear alignment and an ownership mindset.

Social media then amplifies that foundation. I started sharing our journey about ten years ago with no master plan, but it drew in people who were inspired by what we were building and wanted to be part of it. That visibility and transparency are still unusual in Sri Lanka and have become a real edge in attracting talent and clients.

I am convinced the next generation of CEOs will all be social, because attention is now a form of currency. Mangala is not naturally drawn to social media, but he recognises its strategic value. One reason he backed the merger was the ability to tap into that reach and growth engine, while I handle the public-facing side, and he focuses on other strengths.

You have a team of about 500 at Short Circuit and roughly another 500 across the other companies you are involved in. Altogether, how many businesses are you part of, and do you even keep count anymore?

I am involved in 22 businesses besides Short Circuit. I treat them as a portfolio rather than a set of companies I run day to day.

We have an investment office that oversees them and a strong CFO who handles compliance, governance, and targets across the group. My time and energy are concentrated on Short Circuit, which is by far the largest and most demanding business in the portfolio.

You have an outsized risk appetite. How do you gauge the level of risk you are taking, what kind of return do you expect in return, and has that calculus changed over time?

Every year, Dave Chesson and I sit down and talk explicitly about risk. We walk through the worst case: every venture fails, the portfolio goes to zero, and we start again from scratch. As long as I am comfortable with that floor, I am willing to take aggressive but informed bets with asymmetric upside and survivable downside.

My risk appetite has shifted slightly over time. I recently got married, and that has introduced responsibilities beyond myself, so I pay more attention to resilience and liquidity than I did in my twenties. The philosophy has not changed, however. I still want to play to win and to back ambitious ideas, but I am more deliberate about position sizing and diversification so that a single failure does not compromise the overall journey.

Have you had failures, and have they outnumbered your successes? How have these failures shaped you, and what have you learnt from them?

In terms of the number of ventures and plans, especially early on, I have had far more failures than successes. In USD terms, though, the picture is very different. A few strong winners will cover the cost of the plans that did not work. As the successful businesses grow, they give us more resources to test ideas properly, validate assumptions and scale more carefully, which lowers the failure rate over time.

One example is our three-year-old agribusiness exporting fruits and vegetables to the Middle East. In the first year, we burned approximately $1 million USD on farms and lost it all. I count that as a failure, but not a reason to stop. We learned, adjusted the model and kept going. As long as a few big successes pay for many small failures, I am comfortable taking the 101st bet even if the previous 100 did not all work.

Besides Short Circuit, what do you think is your best success story?

I believe Publisher Rocket. We started it with about $1,500 USD in cash and grew it into a business generating around $4 million USD a year at roughly 90% margins. Over time, it paid monthly dividends that made life far more comfortable for me. I was a minority shareholder, with Dave holding the majority.

Early last year, I sold my stake back to Dave. I had been actively involved only in the first year, and for the next nine years, he carried the operational load. The business was clearly more valuable in his hands, so the decision made sense for both of us. For me, a 30-year-old living in Sri Lanka, it was a substantial and meaningful exit.

What drives you? To achieve what you have and do it at such a scale?

What drives me is a constant sense that, in the global scheme of things, we are still very small. By any international benchmark, what we have built so far is microscopic.

I have been fortunate to meet and learn from extraordinary people over my career. Ten years ago, I would never have believed I would even be in the same room. Watching what they are building and how they use their time is a real jolt. It makes me feel I am not yet doing enough with the opportunities and resources I have, and that feeling keeps pushing me forward.

When did it first become clear to you that building a public social media presence was creating real business value, beyond simply sharing the Surge story?

I really started to see the value around 2017–18. I met Dave through a Facebook group and a mutual friend who connected us. I later met Mahesh Patel at Richard Branson’s island, who invested in us, after we landed a client that had also come through social media. Those were clear proof points that this was more than just posting for visibility.

Since then, social media has been a core part of how we build the business. It keeps us top of mind with clients, helps us win work, and has been critical for attracting talent. For Surge, a meaningful share of client acquisition, brand awareness and hiring now traces back to that online presence.

“Post-merger, the combined valuation was around $40 million, and this year we expect revenue to be over $15 million.”

If you were starting over today, what would you do differently, and what do you wish you had done earlier in your journey?

If I were starting over, I would choose industries more deliberately, focusing on the next decade of growth rather than simply pursuing whatever opportunity appeared. In the early years, we said yes to everything because turning work down felt impossible. Today we decline far more than we accept, and if I had my time again, I would begin with that discipline. I would also prioritise building the right relationships and collaborating with strong partners from day one, rather than starting alone. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was to choose carefully the people you build with, because the journey matters as much as the destination. In whatever sector you work in, you need to enjoy the work and the people around you.

When did you begin choosing partners more deliberately, and how have early mistakes shaped the way you operate today?

I only started being selective about partners three or four years ago. Looking back, I should have done it much earlier, but when I began at eighteen, I simply did not have the experience to discern the right people. You make decisions with limited context and learn mostly by getting things wrong. I have made countless mistakes, some of them significant, but I do not regret them. Each one forced me to adjust, refine my judgment and understand what I value in collaborators. Without those missteps, I would not have the clarity I have today.

What is the one character trait you value most in yourself, and which trait do you like the least?

I think the trait I value most in myself is grit. I am willing to push through for much longer than most people expect, which is often what it takes to build anything meaningful. Social media creates an illusion of overnight success, but the reality is very different. In our first year on YouTube, for example, we produced 364 videos, each around 40 minutes long. Rendering took about six hours and uploading another six. All of that work earned $11. That kind of grind is invisible, yet it is what actually moves things forward. Early in your career, you are usually underpaid for enormous effort, and later you are often overpaid for much less.

The trait I struggle with is the other side of that same coin, which is stubbornness. Sometimes the right call is to walk away, yet I keep holding on, convinced I can push through, only to realise years later that I should have let go much earlier. There is also a level of arrogance and a touch of narcissism that most founders have, and I am no exception. You have to believe your idea will work before anyone else will buy into it. I see those flaws as part of the founder toolkit, useful but dangerous if not kept in check.

How do you now measure success in your life and work, after 12 years as an entrepreneur?

I measure success by how I spend my time and whether I genuinely enjoy it. I am fortunate to be in a position where, if I walked away from everything, I would still be comfortable. That makes it easier to treat time as the real currency.

Value creation still matters a great deal, but not in the abstract. It matters because it affects people I care about. Almost every business we are involved in has a story and a human connection behind it. The bakery, for example, was started by someone from our performance marketing team whose mother runs it. We pushed them to try because he runs ads better than most people, and she was afraid of losing money. That venture was as much about proving what was possible for them as it was about the business itself.

The same pattern runs through much of what we do. If we succeed, the benefit flows to people who have been on the journey with us. Early employees at Surge are now shareholders in Short Circuit, and for some of them, that ownership has materially changed their lives. For me, that combination of enjoying how I spend my time and creating tangible upside for the people around me is the clearest measure of success.

What share of Short Circuit is owned by employees, and what broader change would you like to see in how Sri Lankan companies think about risk?

Around 10% of Short Circuit is owned by employees, spread across roughly 20 individuals from both the Surge and Calcey teams. That ownership has already been life-changing for some of them, and it is something I want to expand over time.

More broadly, I would like to see large Sri Lankan companies become less afraid of risk. Too many initiatives need layers of approval and are designed so they never fail, which usually means they never really try. Some projects will lose money. We will lose some, and our partners will lose some. That is part of building anything meaningful. If we want the growth we talk about, we need a culture that accepts calculated risk and treats intelligent failure as a cost of progress, not something to be avoided at all costs.