Tarun Upadhyay.

Founder and CEO of Routespring · Co-founder and advisor to Up Robotics

I build technology companies.

Previously co-founded Pine Labs, GlobalLogic and hCentive. Writing about company-building, technology and the decisions behind both.

Tarun Upadhyay

Mid-project. As always.

Building now

Routespring

Founder and CEO

Building software for corporate travel and airline crew operations, with a current focus on using AI to automate the exception-heavy work traditional systems leave behind.

Visit Routespring →

Up Robotics

Co-founder and advisor

A hands-on robotics and engineering program helping young students progress from learning the fundamentals to building and competing with real robots.

Visit Up Robotics →

Recent writing

  • Build versus buy is really a question about who owns the interface

    The standard framing — compare the cost of building to the cost of buying — misses the question that actually decides it: does the vendor's product expose the interface you need, or just the outcome?

    Jul 21, 2026 · Operating Notes

  • Pivot gates

    How founders can distinguish a slow strategy from a broken premise before sunk cost makes the decision for them.

    Jul 21, 2026 · Building Routespring

  • The first question in any outage: whose system is it?

    Most production failures in integrated systems aren't yours or theirs. They're the handoff between the two, and that's exactly where nobody looks first.

    Jul 21, 2026 · Operating Notes

  • Routing optimization isn't a shortest-path problem

    The hard part of flight routing was never finding the cheapest itinerary. It's that 'cheapest' and 'best' are different questions, and one of them is a hard rule while the other is a matter of taste.

    Jul 21, 2026 · Thinking in Public

  • Company-Building Under Real Constraints

    A seven-part series on building operational software companies — customer concentration, automation, exception handling, services, enterprise risk, and what exits do and don't teach. Written from the operator's chair, not the slide deck.

    Jul 21, 2026 · Operating Notes

  • Manual minutes per transaction is better than "AI adoption"

    "AI adoption" is one of the least useful metrics in software. Manual minutes per transaction is hard to fake, captures hidden labor, and separates adopting AI from actually improving operations.

    Jul 21, 2026 · Operating Notes

Read all the writing →

From the archive

Earlier writing about startups, engineering, hiring and product development.

Previously

Pine Labs

Co-founder and CTO. Helped start the company in Delhi, initially building card-based payment technology for Indian retailers.

GlobalLogic

Co-founder and Head of Engineering. Built the early engineering organization as the company grew into a global product-engineering business.

hCentive

Co-founder and CTO. Built healthcare eligibility, enrollment and exchange technology; the company was later acquired by Optum.

Off Duty

When I'm not running a company, I coach robotics, build unnecessary home infrastructure and design 3D-printed solutions to problems most people correctly choose to ignore.

See off-duty →