EP - 107 | 🤯💀 SCARYYY!!! Ex-Airforce Turned Entrepreneur | Aurm | MyGate | Raw Talks Telugu Podcast |
In this Telugu podcast episode, we sit down with Vijay Arisetty — Shaurya Chakra awardee, former IAF helicopter pilot, ex-Goldman Sachs Vice President, and the founder of MyGate and Arum, to hear a remarkable story of service, crisis leadership, corporate learning, and product-driven problem solving. Vijay’s journey runs from Air Force service and rescue missions to ISB, Goldman Sachs, and startups that now secure millions of homes.He explains why helicopters matter: their three-dimensional agility, strict pre-flight protocols for VVIPs, and the pilot’s role in immediate response and covert logistics. He revisited 26 December 2004 in Car Nicobar, when the shoreline vanished and a tsunami struck. Vijay led evacuation sorties, rescued nearly 300 people, witnessed mass casualties, and later briefed Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam; those missions earned him the Shaurya Chakra and left lasting psychological marks.A shoulder injury ended his flying career and nudged him to ISB and Goldman Sachs, where he learned organisational thinking, reproducible processes, and the power of consistent culture. Corporate rigor became the backbone of his entrepreneurial approach.MyGate began as hands-on research: months working with security guards, mapping friction in gated communities, and prototyping resilient workflows. When Chennai’s internet faltered in 2017, MyGate proved its resilience and product fit. Vijay recalls Chennai 2017, when homes faced outages and MyGate kept communities connected, and he explains how small product details built lasting user trust. Today the platform protects millions of households and modernises visitor access and community management.Arum arose from another need; insured, tamper-resistant vaults for homes where traditional lockers failed. Named after gold’s element symbol to signal trust, Arum blends hardware, insurance partnerships, and tamper-evident design to create insurable household vaults. Vijay describes field research: interviewing police, analysing theft patterns, and speaking with people who had lost valuables to build practical countermeasures. He explains why traditional bank lockers could not be insured due to opaque failure modes and mysterious disappearances, and how Arum negotiated insurance partnerships and applied tamper-evident engineering to make household vaults insurable.On privacy and ethics, Vijay is blunt: early GDPR compliance mattered for consumer trust. He explains how access logs and photo captures were implemented to protect residents while minimising intrusion, and why transparency matters more than opaque convenience. He also points out that early GDPR compliance became a competitive advantage when onboarding cautious customers.The episode mixes entrepreneurial gyaan with human reflection: how to spot problems users cannot name, why live research beats theorising, and how operational discipline scales products. Vijay reflects on the psychological cost of rescue work, leadership under pressure, and civic obligations from ambulance coordination to urban security design. He also discusses growth trade-offs, investor expectations, and ethical boundaries for founders. In a rapid-fire segment he names overrated industry jargon, three disciplines everyone could learn from armed forces training, and the personal inspirations that kept him moving forward.This conversation blends defence experience, humane product thinking, and offers clear, practical takeaways for builders, policymakers, and citizens alike., organisational design, startup From serving in the armed forces to strategy, or the ethics of technology in homes, Vijay Arisetty’s story is a masterclass in resilience, curiosity, and practical innovation. Tune in for actionable frameworks on crisis leadership, product instincts and civic tech lessons.
South Africa