Get in touch
For writing, ventures, speaking, collaborations, or a considered hello.
Questions, answered
Who is Piyush Raj Akhouri?
I am an engineer by training, a business builder by profession, and a writer by instinct. I have spent the better part of two decades across industrial businesses, enterprise sales, staffing, technology, AI, and the mildly chaotic business of starting companies.
Today, I am building HirePlusPlus and Bridgentech. But I would rather not be reduced to job titles. I write, I read, I enjoy music and poetry, I obsess over ideas, and I remain very interested in why people behave the way they do. This website is probably the closest thing to the complete version of me because it allows the businessman and the slightly impractical writer to exist in the same place.
What is HirePlusPlus, and what does Maya actually do?
HirePlusPlus came from years of frustration with recruitment. We make enormously important decisions about people using remarkably weak signals. A CV, a few keywords, a hurried screening call and sometimes a polished interview can end up deciding someone's career.
We are trying to make that process more intelligent and evidence-led. HirePlusPlus uses AI across sourcing, screening, evaluation and interviewing, while keeping human judgement where it belongs.
Maya is our AI interviewer. She can have structured conversations with candidates, understand answers in context, ask sensible follow-up questions and help hiring teams see more than what is written on a CV. The point is not to create a robot that decides whether someone deserves a job. I would find that fairly terrifying myself. The point is to give human beings better evidence before they make human decisions.
What is Bridgentech, and who is it for?
Bridgentech is a global talent and staffing business I co-founded in 2018. We work with companies that need good people and prefer a faster, more trustworthy, common-sense process for finding them.
A large part of what we have tried to build there is fairly old-fashioned in the best possible sense. Understand what the client actually needs. Do the work properly. Do not send twenty CVs when four good ones will do. Say what you can deliver and then deliver it.
Interestingly, Bridgentech also gave us a front-row seat to many of the problems we eventually started solving through HirePlusPlus. Once you spend enough years inside recruitment, the inefficiencies become very difficult to unsee.
Do you advise startups or founders? What kind of problems should someone bring you?
Yes, though I am slightly uncomfortable with the grandness of the word "advisor". Often it is simply a useful conversation between two people trying to make sense of a problem.
I tend to be helpful somewhere between an idea and its execution. Bring me a product that is difficult to explain, an enterprise proposition nobody seems to understand, a pricing problem, a sales story that is not landing, an AI use case that may or may not deserve to exist, a hiring problem, or an ambitious idea that currently looks like six different ideas arguing.
I am particularly comfortable with B2B sales, enterprise GTM, positioning, partnerships, recruitment, staffing, AI products and early commercial decisions. I have made enough mistakes in these areas to recognise several of them before they become expensive.
And if what you need is simply a candid second opinion, that is fine too. I cannot promise agreement, and I certainly cannot promise wisdom on demand. I can promise that I will listen properly, ask questions and tell you what I actually think rather than what would make for a pleasant meeting.
Are you available for speaking or podcasts?
Yes, if I have something useful to add to the conversation.
I enjoy talking about AI, entrepreneurship, enterprise sales, recruitment, hiring technology, B2B businesses, building companies from India for international markets, and the gap between how startups are described publicly and how they actually get built privately.
I am equally happy talking about failure, uncertainty, bad decisions and things that did not work. In fact, I suspect those conversations are usually more useful than another forty-five minutes about disruption, scale and visionary leadership.
I also enjoy conversations that wander slightly beyond business. Writing, ambition, India, technology, music, human judgement and how we manage not to lose ourselves while trying to build things are all subjects I am unlikely to run out of opinions on.
What do you write about, and why is the old archive unedited?
Writing came before the companies.
I have written about love, ambition, fear, faith, family, loneliness, business, India, music, poetry and whatever else happened to occupy too much space in my head at the time. Some pieces are serious. Some are sentimental. Some are in English, some in Hindi, and some occupy that slightly unruly territory between Hindi and Urdu.
A lot of the archive goes back to my twenties, and I have deliberately left the writing itself substantially untouched. The grammar occasionally has ideas of its own. The punctuation can be adventurous. The emotions are not known for knocking before entering. Some opinions have aged beautifully. Others, perhaps, deserve the kindness of historical context.
But that is the point.
I do not want to edit my younger self into somebody more articulate, measured or conveniently wise. Those pieces are not there because I think every sentence is good. They are there because they were true to the person writing them at that moment. The archive is less a portfolio than a record of continuity. I find that much more valuable.
What's the best way to reach you, and what gets a reply?
Email works best. You can write to me at mail@piyushraj.com.
You do not need a formal introduction. Please tell me who you are, what you are working on, what you are struggling with or what you would like to discuss, and give me enough context to understand why you wrote to me. Three honest paragraphs are infinitely better than a polished piece of corporate theatre.
I try to reply when somebody has clearly taken the trouble to write to me rather than to a database.
What is less likely to work is a generic "Hi Piyush, hope you're doing well, would love to connect and explore potential synergies" message followed by absolutely no indication of what those mysterious synergies might be.
I am sure synergies are wonderful things. I would prefer to know what we are talking about.
Are you hiring / can I work with your companies?
Possibly. HirePlusPlus and Bridgentech are growing businesses, which means we're sometimes actively hiring and sometimes realize we should have hired someone three months ago.
If you genuinely find what we are building interesting, I would not wait for the perfect job description to appear. Write to us. Please tell us what you are good at, what you enjoy doing, what you have actually built or solved, and where you think you could contribute.
I like people who think independently, keep their word, communicate clearly and are willing to get their hands dirty. Fancy titles interest me considerably less than curiosity, ownership and evidence that you can make something better than you found it.
And if you are early in your career and your CV is getting in the way, I also run a small free CV initiative through this website. I read the CVs myself because, somewhere along the way, somebody once took the trouble to help me too. That sort of thing is worth passing forward.