It was my dad's travel agency.

Indica Travels & Tours was a travel agency my father started in New Delhi in 1983 and sold in 1988 — an IATA-licensed shop on Barakhamba Road that booked flights and itineraries back when "Cable: INDICATOUR" and a telex number on the letterhead were how you reached people across continents.

The compass-rose-with-N made sense for a travel business. The green wordmark made it feel established. The IATA badge meant my dad could actually ticket you on a real flight. The whole thing has the quiet confidence of a business that knew exactly what it was.

I picked the name because it was his. The work is different — I'm not selling airline tickets — but the through-line is the same. He helped people figure out where to go and how to get there. That's roughly what I try to do too, just with founders instead of travelers.

There's a smaller symmetry I like too. He started Indica in 1983 and exited in 1988 — five years of running his own thing before moving on. I co-founded a bootstrapped company in 2009 and sold it in 2021 — twelve years of the same. Different decades, different businesses, but the same impulse: start small, run it yourself, hand it off when the time is right.

One small note, because it comes up: a lot of people now ask me if Indica is a cannabis fund. It isn't. The word predates that association by a long stretch — "Indica" is just the old Latinate adjective for "of India," which is how botanists ended up naming the plant Cannabis indica in the late 1700s. The name on our door points to a travel agency in Delhi, not to a dispensary.

If you want to read about the actual practice, head back home. Otherwise, thanks for being curious enough to follow the link.