Operator first.
Everything else after.
Founder & CEO of Rope Digital. Self-taught, six years in. MBA, UWE Bristol. CIM Level 7. From Colombo, running it all as a digital nomad from Malaysia.
The operator instinct came before the operator title.
I grew up in Colombo, in a country whose economy runs on physical things: tea, garments, tourism, the port. That shaped a bias that never left: the businesses that actually carry an economy aren’t the ones the tech press covers. They’re the ones with inventory, with people, with vehicles, with locations.
I started building early. The first thing I sold was something physical, in a market I didn’t fully understand, to customers I learned to listen to one at a time. The pattern stuck.
The three lessons that almost cost me the company.
- I mistook a busy pipeline for a working one. Plenty of conversations, not enough of the right ones. The fix wasn’t more activity. It was a sharper answer to who we serve, rewritten every quarter from the deals we actually closed.
- I treated equity like money. On paper the business was worth a lot. In the bank it wasn’t. Cash discipline is what buys you the time to be right.
- I kept channels alive out of loyalty. The ones that had worked before got budget long after they stopped working. Now every channel gets tested, scored and cut on the numbers, not on history.
Most founder problems are distribution problems wearing other clothes. I’ve made every version of the mistake. Now I recognise it in 20 minutes.
Software, data, marketing, and the teams to run them.
Rope Digital is the flagship: a global digital agency for software, data, marketing and staff augmentation, with clients in 40+ countries, run from Delaware (USA), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) and Colombo (Sri Lanka). The bet behind it? The generalist agency era is ending. The winners are focused, technology-fluent teams serving the real economy.
I run it as a digital nomad from Malaysia, one of the only Sri Lankans selected for the DE Rantau nomad visa programme. Around Rope sits a portfolio of ventures across property, software, e-commerce and travel. Operator range, not a service menu. see the portfolio.
If you’ve read this far, you probably know whether we’d work well together.
