Deepak Gupta.

I'm a founder with a long-running pattern: notice a category before it has a name, build the product before the market has a budget line for it, then watch the rest of the industry catch up.

In 2013, I founded LoginRadius and scaled it to serve over 1B+ users for some of the world's largest enterprises, helping define what's now known as Customer Identity & Access Management. In 2024, I started doing the same for Generative Engine Optimization, the discipline of making sure your company shows up in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI features, not just in the classic blue-link results.

I still write code. I still read papers. I publish regularly, because writing is how I figure out what I actually think.

What I actually care about

The craft of building. The gap between knowing about a technology and shipping with it is where I live. I'll spend a Saturday reverse-engineering how an LLM picks which brands to cite, then ship that as a product feature on Monday.

Security as a foundation, not a feature. My patents span DDoS defense, IoT authentication, searchable encryption, and AI-powered fake-news detection. As a former CISO, I've navigated SOC 2, ISO, GDPR, CCPA, and enterprise audits. That background shapes how I think about data, AI, and trust.

Writing as thinking. Some essays here reach thousands of readers. Some reach twelve. I write them for the same reason either way, to understand the topic better than I did when I started typing.

Mentoring founders. Most useful advice I have is also the least glamorous, the thing you're avoiding is usually the thing you need to do next.

The stuff that doesn't fit in a bio

I grew up in Rajasthan, India, in a big family. I moved to Chicago for grad school at the Illinois Institute of Technology, started my first company before I graduated, and eventually landed in the Bay Area. When I'm not working I'm reading about something I don't understand yet, experimenting with whatever framework shipped last week, or trying to explain to my family what GEO means. They are still not entirely sure. Fair.