The Builder Behind the Rooms: Inside Sarfraz Khan's Quiet Playbook for Compounding Trust

There is a particular kind of entrepreneur who is hard to categorize, and harder still to compete with, because they've never been building one business — they've been building one capability, expressed across several. Sarfraz Khan is that kind of entrepreneur.

On paper, his career reads like four separate ventures: a media network, a technology agency, a CRM software brand, and a seat on a closed-door global council. Spend any real time with the arc of his work, though, and a single thread emerges — Khan has spent six years building the same asset over and over, in different forms: trust that compounds because it was earned in the open before it was ever spent in private.

Act One: The Mathematics of Relationships

Khan's beginnings are almost deliberately unglamorous. A Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Delhi University in 2016. Three years as Chief Operating Officer at SM DevOps in Delhi, running daily operations, setting performance targets, and supporting fundraising for a company that wasn't his own. An Entrepreneurship Certification from IIT Delhi in 2018 — not a launch, just preparation.

It's a founder origin story with no dramatic pivot, no near-failure narrative, no viral moment. What it has instead is a pattern that shows up in everything Khan has built since: operational discipline first, storytelling second, scale last.

"The most valuable business happens through relationships built on substance, not visibility."

That's the philosophy Khan has described as the through-line of his career — and it's easy to dismiss as a founder platitude until you look at how literally he has executed on it.

Act Two: Startup Times — Six Years, 1,000+ Relationships, One Network

In June 2020, Khan founded Startup Times. What began as a single publication grew, over six years, into a multi-publication media network: INC91, covering startup and innovation news, including its widely followed "30 Under 30" recognition list; Business Press, focused on business and policy reporting; Gulf Times, covering the Gulf region's business landscape; and Founderbaaz, a podcast where Khan interviews entrepreneurs about the unglamorous, often-unspoken realities of building a company.

The number that matters most, though, isn't publication count. It's the more than 1,000 founders, operators, and investors Khan has personally engaged with across India — conversations that built the platform's institutional credibility to the point of hosting Union Ministers at policy dialogues and welcoming international diplomats for cross-border discussions.

Startup Times wasn't built to be a media company in the traditional sense. It was built to be a relationship infrastructure — and everything Khan has done since has drawn directly from it.

Act Three: Devobyte — Turning the Network Into a Delivery Engine

Storytelling, on its own, was never the endpoint. In August 2022, Khan founded Devobyte, a technology and growth agency with operations spanning Greater Noida/Delhi and Dubai. As Founder & CEO, he built the agency around a deliberately narrow promise: help companies apply AI, automation, and digital systems to two measurable outcomes — revenue growth and operational efficiency.

The client roster that resulted is unusually diverse for an agency of its size and age: a UK-based agritech biocontrol company, a licensed investment management firm operating across the UK and US, a children's coding and creativity education platform, a veteran-led cybersecurity consultancy, and businesses in glass manufacturing and wellness. Few growth agencies serve that range of industries and geographies simultaneously — and fewer still do it while also building software products of their own.

Act Four: DesignMyCRM — From Services to Product

That last point matters, because Devobyte's ambitions haven't stopped at client services. Under the same operating philosophy — outcomes over visibility — Khan has been building DesignMyCRM, a custom AI-powered CRM software platform positioned around a simple, aggressive goal: to become the leading name in custom CRM development, starting in India before expanding further.

Where most CRM platforms sell rigid, one-size-fits-all workflows, DesignMyCRM is built around customization and unlimited users — a direct answer to the complaint Khan has heard repeatedly from the founders and operators in his own network: that off-the-shelf CRM tools force businesses to bend their process to the software, instead of the other way around.

It's a natural extension of everything preceding it. Startup Times gave Khan a front-row seat to what growing businesses actually struggle with operationally. Devobyte gave him the technical and delivery infrastructure to build software, not just recommend it. DesignMyCRM is the product expression of both — a bet that the same relationship-first, outcomes-first approach that built a media network and a client-services agency can also build a scalable software brand.

Act Five: The World Leaders Consortium — Where the Real Conversations Happen

In July 2026, Khan stepped into his most institutionally significant role to date: Co-Chair of the World Leaders Consortium (WLC), a closed-door executive council of just 25 carefully selected individuals per session. No panels. No media. No posturing.

It is, by design, one of the few spaces where business, capital, and policy sit at the same table without cameras — and Khan's role there is a direct continuation of everything before it. He supports WLC's strategic growth across India, builds partnerships with government bodies and institutions, and leads the coordination of national and international leadership summits and policy dialogues.

The irony isn't lost on Khan: a career built on public storytelling has led him into the one room built entirely on the absence of an audience. But it isn't really an irony at all. It's the payoff. Six years of visible, credible relationship-building is what earned him a seat at the table where nothing needs to be performed.

The Single Thread

Look at the four ventures side by side and the pattern stops looking like diversification and starts looking like design:

Startup Times built the network. Devobyte built the delivery engine. DesignMyCRM turned delivery into a product. The World Leaders Consortium built the room where it all pays off.

What It Means for Everyone Else

The lesson embedded in Khan's trajectory isn't really about media, software, or policy — it's about sequencing. Most founders try to build access before they've earned trust, or scale a product before they've understood the problem from the inside. Khan's path suggests a slower, more deliberate order: understand the problem publicly, build the infrastructure to solve it commercially, productize what works, and only then step into the rooms where the highest-leverage decisions get made.

It's not a fast playbook. It's a compounding one — and six years in, it's clearly starting to pay off.

Sarfraz Khan is the Founder of Startup Times, Founder & CEO of Devobyte, the founder behind DesignMyCRM, and Co-Chair of the World Leaders Consortium. He is based in Delhi NCR, India, with operations extending to Dubai, UAE.