Seven years ago, Goken India did not exist.
What existed was a relationship, one built over years of working together from 2004-2010, then stretched across nine years of silence, and eventually strong enough to become the foundation of a company. When Doug Smith, the founder of Goken America and I connected in 2019, there was no elaborate pitch. There was trust. There was a shared belief in how engineering work should be done. And there was a 3-seater office in Pune where we decided to begin.
I was Goken America’s first employee in 2004. Today, I am the COO and Co-Founder of Goken India. And the journey between those two periods is what I want to talk about.
What Seven Years Actually Looks Like
It looks like 50+ engineering projects delivered across automotive and adjacent indus-tries. It looks like clients who have trusted us continuously for three years or more. It looks like a team that started in a room barely big enough for three people and has grown into something none of us could have fully predicted in 2019.
We have published a 7-year anniversary edition that documents this journey that includes the programs, the milestones, the people. But a book edition only captures what happened. What it cannot fully capture is how it happened.
It happened through discomfort. Deliberately chosen, collectively owned discom-fort.
Growth Asks Uncomfortable Things of You
Here is what I have learned running Goken India through seven years of building: the moments that defined us were never the smooth ones. They were the moments where we had to change something that was working because something better was needed. They were the moments where a job description became irrelevant because the project needed more. They were the moments where we chose long-term sanity over short-term ego, our own included.
Let me give you three specific examples.
Four years ago, we had built a solid recruitment process around a tool called Trello. It worked. Then, as we scaled and began operating more closely with the Goken America team, we had to let go of what was working and rebuild from the ground up. Roles were reassigned. Processes were rewritten. People who had mastered one way of working had to learn another. They did it without flinching.
We have senior managers at Goken India who have regular used CAD softwares and done the modeling work themselves, not because it was in their job description, but be-cause the project needed it and they were not willing to let the project down. That kind of ownership is not something you can train in a classroom. It is something you choose, every time.
And once, we walked away from a project because continuing it was not in our long-term interest. The decision cost us in the short term. But it protected something more valuable , our integrity and our sanity as a team. We absorbed the loss, stayed grounded, and kept moving.
Ben Horowitz, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, wrote that in business, you need to own a terrible situation and solve it completely. That is not a principle we adopted from a book. It is something this team discovered on its own and keeps redis-covering every year.
What This Means If You Are Considering Joining Us
Goken India is not the largest engineering services company in India. We are not the oldest. What we are is a company that operates at the intersection of American and Jap-anese engineering standards — built on the principles brought from two of the most demanding engineering cultures in the world — and delivered by a team in India that has chosen, repeatedly, to hold itself to those standards.
We are growing. We are expanding into new service areas. And the capabilities we are building over the next three to five years will create career opportunities that do not exist today in product engineering, VAVE, automation, and emerging domains like soft-ware-defined vehicles.
But here is what I want to be direct about: Goken India will ask things of you that your job description does not cover. The pace of the organization will change, and it will ask you to change with it. If you are looking for a stable, predictable role where the boundaries are fixed and the work is routine, we are probably not the right fit.
If you are looking for a company where your growth and the company's growth are the same story, where stepping into discomfort is not a burden but a signal that you are moving , then we would like to talk to you.
The Next Chapter
Seven years in, I am more optimistic about Goken India than I have ever been. Not be-cause the hard things are behind us , they are not. But because I have seen what this team does when the hard things arrive.
The next chapter of Goken India will be written by people who choose to be here, who choose to grow, and who choose to own whatever situation is in front of them.
If that is you, visit us at https://www.goken-global.com/careers/ or reach out to me directly on LinkedIn.
— Swapnil Gawade
COO & Co-Founder, Goken India