Harshal Gajjar

Harshal Gajjar is an AI Forward-Deployed Engineer at C3 AI, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Harshal leads Agentic AI harness development for the Forward-Deployed Engineering organisation at C3 AI, and since January 2026 has been building a stealth-mode startup in the Agentic AI space. Harshal cofounded Shram.io in 2024, where he led the pivot from a Jira-competitor product to an AI assistant that reached #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt.

Harshal holds an M.S. in Computer Science (Machine Learning specialisation) from Georgia Tech and a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Dharwad, where he was part of the institute's foundational class. He spent three summers at Wolfram Research in Boston — first as a summer researcher in 2018, then as an instructor for high-school students in 2019 and 2020 — and was a Wolfram Student Ambassador throughout his undergrad.

Outside of work, Harshal is a long-distance cyclist and a vertical and horizontal caver, active with the San Francisco Bay Chapter (SFBC) grotto. In 2019 he was part of the Hubballi Bicycle Club Guinness World Record for the longest single line of bicycles.

Contact Harshal at mail@harshalgajjar.com.

The pivot is the product decision

Notes from leading the Shram pivot, written down so I don't forget.

At Shram in 2024 we were the 800th Jira competitor. The pivot — into AI assistants when the space was very new — was the entire company.

Three things I'd tell past-me:

First, the pivot isn't a feature change. It's a customer change. If your old user can still use the new product, you didn't pivot, you added a tab.

Second, the speed of the pivot matters more than its accuracy. We had two weeks of runway, not two months, and the pressure forced clarity we'd been avoiding for half a year.

Third, the team you pivot with is the team that decides whether the pivot survives the next pivot. Worth more than the idea itself.

#shram#founder