.png)
This week we sat down with Gaurang Torvekar, the co-founder of Bonzo Finance Labs, who spent nearly seven years as CTO at Indorse before going zero-to-one on onchain lending infrastructure for Hedera. He's blunt about the parts founders romanticize: why a remote team across two time zones nearly made him the bottleneck, why keeping an advisory role part-time cost him attention rather than hours, and why the technical answer stopped being the highest-leverage thing he could offer. His bet on where this all goes is the part worth reading twice. More activity onchain will be started by software than by people, and the protocols built to be legible to an agent are the ones that win.
You've moved between being a data science engineer, a tech lead, a product leader, and now a co-founder. At what point did you realize your career wasn't going to be a straight technical path, and how did you feel about that at the time?
I started as an engineer on fintech and data problems, and for a long time I assumed the career would just be deeper and deeper technical specialisation. That assumption broke the moment I co-founded my first company. As a technical founder of a small team, you have to juggle writing the code with client meetings and pitching to investors at the same time. Within the first year, I was running user interviews, setting pricing for bank and university clients, hiring, and deciding what a stretched team should build next. It was uncomfortable at first because I had tied my identity to being the person with the deepest technical answer in the room, and suddenly the highest-leverage thing I could do was often a commercial or a people call instead. What changed my mind was noticing the technical judgment never went away. It just became the thing that made my product and business decisions better than a non-technical founder’s would have been.
You founded an e-publishing company early on that had a relatively short run. What did that experience give you that a more conventional first job wouldn't have?
That was back in India, and my first attempt at founding a company. While it didn’t prove successful, it taught me a lot about entrepreneurship and innovation, which helped me get into Singapore Management University’s Master's program. When I started this company back in India, “startups” were quite new in that ecosystem, and I had little to no support or mentorship. I was trying to help local book publishers digitise their processes and e-publish their books and magazines online, but the technical support and customer willingness just weren’t there. I was a little ahead of the curve.
After nearly seven years as CTO at Indorse, you launched Bonzo Finance Labs while maintaining a part-time CPO advisory role at the same company. What made that the right moment to take on a co-founder role, and what was harder about it than you expected?
After nearly seven years on Indorse, I knew exactly what I was good at and what I wanted the next stretch of my career to be: building onchain financial infrastructure rather than running a product and services studio. Bonzo was the right moment because the timing and the fit lined up in a way they rarely do. Hedera needed a robust lending protocol, and based on my engineering and DeFi expertise, I could build one people would trust with real money. Keeping a part-time advisory role while starting something new looks efficient on a calendar, but the hard part was never the hours; it was the attention. A zero-to-one venture needs every bit of your focus, and it wasn’t easy in the beginning to be juggling both. I underestimated the switching costs early on, and I had to get disciplined about context switching and time management.
Building and leading a global remote team is something many founders underestimate. What's a specific thing you got wrong early in that process, and how did you correct it?
The thing I got wrong early was assuming that if I hired good people and gave them clear tasks, communication would take care of itself. Running a team across London and Singapore taught me that a time zone gap quietly punishes anything that relies on quick back-and-forth. Decisions that should have taken an afternoon were stretching into two days because someone was always waiting for the other side to wake up, and I was sitting in the middle of most of those threads, the bottleneck. The fix was to push almost everything into written, asynchronous, decision-complete communication. That meant writing proposals with enough context that someone could act without a follow-up call, being explicit about who owned each decision rather than leaving it implied, and saving live meetings for genuinely ambiguous problems that actually need a conversation. Once we worked that way, the team moved faster with less involvement from me, and we scaled it to 25+ people.
Bonzo Finance Labs is operating in DeFi and onchain finance. How is your team approaching AI, whether in the product itself, in how you build, or in how you think about what's coming for the space you're in?
I think about AI in three places. In the product, Bonzo is a lending protocol with automated risk assessment, so the real questions are about surfacing risk and market signal in a form that a human or an agent can act on, which is why I built a market sentiment service that exposes real-time signal to trading bots through a proper machine-readable interface. In how we build, AI coding agents are now part of my daily work, and I went deep enough on the tooling to write and open-source Docmancer, a local-first RAG tool that feeds coding agents accurate, version-correct documentation so they make far fewer mistakes on real codebases. In how I think about what is coming, my honest view is that onchain finance and autonomous agents are converging. More onchain activity will be initiated by software rather than by a person clicking a button, and the protocols designed to be legible and safe for an agent to use will win. That is what I am building toward, rather than bolting AI on as a feature.
We hope you enjoyed this edition of Coffee with Calyptus. Stay curious, stay inspired, and keep building what matters. Explore more editions and insightful articles at https://www.calyptus.co/blog.
