A letter from the founder
Why I’m building this.
I should start with the part that’s hard to say.
I don’t have a good relationship with my sister. I don’t have a good relationship with my cousins. I’ve dated some amazing human beings, and the thing that failed was never the feeling. It was the communication. My inability to say what was actually going on, and to stay in the hard conversation long enough to be understood, is the flaw I keep meeting in every room of my life.
I know why. I’ve been addicted to the work. The grind, the building, the fulfilment you get from making things move. That fulfilment is real and I won’t pretend otherwise. But ambition is a quiet negotiator. It never asks you to give up a relationship outright. It asks for one more late night, one more postponed call, one more conversation you’ll have when things calm down. Things never calm down. And somewhere in the pursuit I forgot what it is to actually live, and breathe, and communicate with the people I love.
Here is what those years taught me, at a price I’m still paying:
We don’t have a problem talking to each other. We have a problem communicating with each other.
More words pass between us than any generation in history. Saying the true thing underneath them is the part nobody taught us.
Look at almost any conflict, in a kitchen or between countries, and you find the same root. Not a shortage of talking. A failure to communicate, and underneath that, a failure to be vulnerable. To say “this hurt me” instead of attacking. To ask for what you need instead of testing whether someone will guess. Most of us would rather lose the relationship than risk that sentence. I know, because I did.
The strange part is that the way through was in my own house the whole time. My father has spent decades teaching people how to have the conversation they’re avoiding, and it took me most of my twenties to realise the person who most needed to learn it was me. Untangle is built on that work. It exists because I needed it to exist.
So this is what I’m building, and who it’s for. It’s for couples first, because that’s where the stakes are highest and the silence costs the most. Then parents. Then the people we call friends but never tell the truth to. And it’s for me. I want to have untangling conversations with my dad. With my partner. One day, when I’ve earned it, with my sister.
I used to think “the quality of your life is the quality of your relationships” was a poster sentence. I now know it’s just true. You can win every year of your career and still lose the decade, because the people you were doing it all for stopped waiting for you to come home.
Nothing I build will matter more than the conversations it helps people finally have. That’s the whole company.
Kailash Sarma
Founder, Let’s Untangle · Sydney