By Default, or By Design: A Note on Where Paramantra Began
By Default, or By Design: A Note on Where Paramantra Began
Our founder, Tathagat Jaruhar, recently published a piece on his personal Substack called “By Default, or By Design: Why I Started Paramantra,” an account of the question that sat behind this company’s founding. What follows is a reflection on that piece, drawn from a few of its threads that seemed worth sitting a little longer.
A Question From 2004
The piece opens with a sales training workshop Tathagat Jaruhar attended in August of that year, where the facilitator asked the room a simple question: who in this room chose sales as a career, and who ended up here by default. He follows that question with a thought experiment about a classroom of sixth graders, asked how many of them want to work in sales when they grow up. Very few hands go up, in most rooms, at that age, before most of those children have had any real contact with the profession at all.
The point he draws from this is not that the perception is wrong exactly, but that it forms before there is any experience to test it against. A profession gets judged, in effect, before it gets met. That is a strange position for any line of work to occupy, particularly one that touches nearly every transaction in the economy.
A Function Without a Stage
From there, the piece turns to something more specific: the absence of the revenue function from how companies tell their own stories. Tathagat Jaruhar points out that the founders and executives of the most celebrated product companies of the last two decades have spoken often, and well, about engineering, design, and vision. What is missing from that telling is any real acknowledgment of the people who carried those products from idea to transaction, the marketers, the salespeople, the service teams who kept customers returning. He notes that he has yet to hear the CEO of a public company stand up and speak about the greatness of their sales organization the way they would speak about their product team.
He brings the pandemic into this argument directly. While other frontline professions were rightly and publicly recognized for showing up through genuine uncertainty, revenue teams did the same work, continuing outbound calls and demonstrations and follow ups at a moment when nobody, including the people on the other end of those calls, knew what was coming next. That work kept commerce moving. It went largely unacknowledged. The asymmetry he describes between those two facts is the clearest argument in the piece, and it is one we think holds up regardless of how anyone feels about the rest of his reasoning.
Borrowing From a Different Science
The piece’s most distinctive move is a comparison to physics. Classical physics assumed that with enough measurement, outcomes could be predicted precisely. Quantum mechanics, through Heisenberg and Bohr’s generation, established something different: that in certain systems, uncertainty is not a gap in measurement but a structural property of the system itself, and that probabilistic models describing a range of outcomes turned out to be more accurate than any deterministic one. Tathagat Jaruhar extends this same reasoning to clinical research, where probabilistic methods replaced deterministic ones once it became clear that human biology and behavior simply do not yield to the older assumption.
His argument is that the revenue function has always operated this way. Every sales conversation and every campaign carry variables that cannot be fully controlled, because they depend on the decisions and circumstances of other people. The question he says he kept returning to, in building this company, was whether the tools built for this work reflected that, or whether they were still designed around the older, deterministic assumption that enough data would eventually make outcomes certain.
Why This Sits at the Center of the Company
This is the part that explains, more directly than anything else we could write about ourselves, why Paramantra exists. The conviction it lands on is that the revenue function deserves software built from first principles for a domain that stays genuinely uncertain, software meant to reduce that uncertainty where it can be reduced and to support better human judgment where it cannot be eliminated. That has been true of the company since 2008, long before there was language as developed as this to describe it.
Tathagat Jaruhar closes the piece by saying what he is really after is larger than any product: helping this profession find its own voice and inviting others to help do that. We agree with him that the revenue function has run economies quietly for long enough. The full piece covers more ground than we have here, including parts of his own history that don’t summarize well secondhand, and it’s linked below.
To know more, read Tathagat Jaruhar’s “By Default, or By Design: Why I Started Paramantra” on Substack
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