Part 1: The First Fall

The Ahmedabad heat had its own personality that day, not just hot, but heavy, wrapping itself around every breath. A few blocks away, laughter from a street cricket game echoed faintly. But where Jaimin Shah stood, silence ruled.

Before him lay a barren patch of land. No boundary walls. No scaffolding. Just parched soil and a few stubborn tufts of grass swaying in the dry breeze. It was supposed to be the beginning of his empire. Instead, it became his first brutal lesson.

In his final year of civil engineering, when most classmates were polishing résumés and rehearsing for placement interviews, Jaimin was signing papers for his first piece of land. He wasn’t chasing a job, he was chasing independence and wanted to set up his own business.

The plan was simple: build, sell, reinvest, repeat. A chain reaction of success.

But reality had other ideas. Partnerships soured, funds dried up and the land, his land, stood there, empty and unproductive, every passing day a reminder of what had gone wrong.

Friends teased him. Relatives worried about him. Some quietly kept their distance, as people often do when failure visits.

For many, that would have been the end of the story, a cautionary tale of youthful overreach. But Jaimin didn’t fold. He looked at the empty site and made himself a silent promise: This is just the first chapter. Not the last.

And so, instead of another real estate venture, he did something unexpected. He pivoted into an industry that barely existed in India at the time: Technology.

It was the late 90s. The dot-com wave was still forming. In India, computers were rare, the internet rarer still. His childhood friend, Pranav Pandya, spotted a gap. Not in Silicon Valley, but in dusty government offices across Gujarat, places where files still lived in stacks taller than the men who managed them. They had no internet and many didn’t even know what a computer truly did.

So Jaimin and Pranav did something few entrepreneurs today can only imagine: they sold the very concept of technology. “We’d walk in and start with the basics,” Jaimin recalls. “This is a computer. This is the internet. This is how it travels from a satellite to a dish to your office.”

They weren’t pitching a service. They were pitching the concept.

And in 1997, Dev Information Technology Ltd. was born.

The failed land deal had taught him humility. The early days of tech would teach him the kind of patience that builds not just companies, but legacies.

But the road ahead would test both and it wasn’t going to be easy.

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Part 2: Betting on People Before Profits

In business, speed is worshipped. But in the world of government contracts, speed is a stranger. The bureaucracy in India moves slowly. Projects take months just to green-light and years to complete. Many entrepreneurs would have walked away but Jaimin stayed. Why? Because those slow-moving years taught him something he could never have learned in a fast-money game: that business is built on trust and trust takes time.

From the start, Dev Information Technology’s growth wasn’t powered by aggressive sales, but by people. Jaimin surrounded himself with those whose skills filled the gaps in his own.

When they acquired another IT company, its founder, Vishal Vasu, didn’t just get a CTO title. He became a co-promoter, a co-owner of the dream. When his childhood friend Prerak returned from the US, he wasn’t tucked into a safe role, but given space at the leadership table.

Every partnership was a bet on character before capability. Every acquisition was about cultural fit before financial gain. That philosophy reached its boldest expression when Dev Information Technology went public.

It wasn’t about raising money, the company was already profitable. It was about discipline, transparency and building something that belonged not just to the founders, but to employees, customers and shareholders.

When the IPO opened, Jaimin thought he might have to call family and friends to fill the book. But he went against his instincts and didn’t make a single call. The IPO was oversubscribed 74x, the highest in Gujarat, the third-highest in India. Among those who invested without ever meeting him was CP Gurnani, CEO of Tech Mahindra, a man who knows how to spot a winner.

It was a validation of everything Jaimin believed: if you build with trust, people will bet on you even without shaking your hand.

But trust alone doesn’t shield you from the storms ahead. And the market was about to serve him more than one.

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Part 3: The Phoenix Principle

If you run a business long enough, the question isn’t if trouble will come. It’s when.

For Jaimin, the “when” came in waves: Y2K, the dot-com crash, the 2008 recession, currency fluctuations, sudden policy changes. Each one threatened to undo years of progress.

Sometimes, they lost entire revenue streams overnight. Sometimes, they had to shut down whole divisions. But they never lost their reputation. That, Jaimin says, is the real wealth of a business. “Money you can earn again. Reputation? Lose it once, you’ll never get it back.”

It’s why Dev Information Technology’s client relationships span decades. Why employee attrition stays low in an industry notorious for job-hopping. Why the company walks away from deals that don’t align with their ethics, no matter how lucrative.

And while many leaders delegate innovation, Jaimin still learns it himself. Today, he’s exploring artificial intelligence, not out of fear but out of curiosity. “When computers came, people feared they’d lose jobs whereas they created millions. AI won’t take jobs. But non-AI people will be replaced by AI people.” he says.

From government offices in Gujarat to new markets in Canada, Dev Information Technology’s story has been one of expansion without losing its soul.

And if he had to start from zero, even from minus ten, Jaimin says he would. “Because I know my capabilities. I know my limitations. And I know the rest is just execution.”

The boy who once stood on an empty plot of land now stands at the helm of a listed global IT company. Not because he avoided failure, but because he learned to rise from it every single time. That is the Phoenix Principle. And Jaimin Shah lives it.