For years I was the software I am now building

By Meet Patel · 2026-08-31 · updated 2026-08-31

For a few years my actual job, whatever the title said, was this: notice what was moving in the business, work out why, and tell people what to do about it.

Not the strategy version of that. The Tuesday version. Somebody would ask why collections looked odd, or whether a cohort was behaving, and the honest answer was that nobody knew yet, and finding out was going to be my afternoon.

I did that as interim COO and then as Associate Vice President inside a fintech. Over that stretch we went from 17 people to 192, and from 105 SMEs served to more than 7,000.

I was good at it. That is the part that took me a while to see clearly, because being good at something is a very effective way of not noticing it should not exist.

What the job actually was

Strip the title off and the work had four steps, every time.

Find where the number lives. Usually more than one place, usually disagreeing. Decide which version is real, which means holding a definition in your head that is not written down anywhere. Work out what changed and whether it matters. Then walk into a room and say something, with enough evidence behind it that people move.

Three of those four steps are assembly. Only the last one is judgement. And the assembly is what ate the afternoon.

The tell was that I never got faster

Six months in I was quicker at knowing which system to open. Two years in I still needed most of a day for a real question.

That is what a process looks like when it is being run by a person. Genuine expertise compounds — you get faster because you have seen the pattern. Manual assembly does not compound, because the work is the same length every time regardless of how well you understand it.

Growing made it worse rather than better. Every new system, every new segment, every new person who needed an answer added to the assembly, and none of it added to the judgement. By the end the ratio was awful.

The thing nobody says out loud

When the person who does this is unavailable, the company does not do it more slowly. It stops doing it.

That is the sentence I keep coming back to. The noticing was not a function of the company. It was a habit of one person, and the org chart had no box for it. If I was heads-down for two weeks, nothing was watching, and nobody experienced that as an outage because nothing had ever declared it a service.

Which means it was never really working. It was working while I was looking.

Why I left to build it

Not because it was hard. Because it was a bad use of a person, and because it was obviously a process.

Something should connect the systems a company runs on, settle the places where they disagree, watch what matters without anyone volunteering, and put a decision in front of the people who run it with the evidence already attached. Then keep watching after the call to see whether it worked.

That is Dan, and it is why Company 8 exists. The judgement stays with a person — I am not interested in software that decides and acts alone, because that removes the only place accountability could live. But the assembly should not be somebody's afternoon.

The uncomfortable version

I was, for a while, load-bearing infrastructure with a job title. That felt like importance at the time. It is not the same thing, and the difference matters: infrastructure that depends on one person paying attention is a single point of failure, and I was the failure point.

The version of me that would have been genuinely useful is the one who noticed sooner that the job was a process, and built it, instead of getting better at doing it by hand.

So that is what I am doing now.

Written by Meet Patel — founder of Company 8, building Dan (usedan.com). Dubai, UAE.

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