Send us a text"Food is a pharmacy. If you have premium gas, you're able to get more from your workouts, more gains."Kamal Singh, cofounder and COO of Halitra, on why he treats food like fuel for startups—and why he won't buy anything if he can't pronounce what's on the label.In this episode of Founders Fridge, host Heidi Knoblauch sits down with Kamal to talk about building a bootstrapped data company, pivoting from hardware to software, and why cooking has become both his creative outlet and his expression of love.Kamal's week revolves around the farmer's market. He buys what's fresh, what's seasonal, and then forces himself to figure out what to do with it—because real food doesn't wait three weeks. Radishes and beets? Look up a recipe. Artichokes and leeks? YouTube it. His goal: master two to three dishes from every cuisine he falls in love with. Right now, it's Thai. Massaman curry. Green curry. Fish sauce and galangal and lemongrass—ingredients he never would have touched a year ago. Next up: pho, and the art of building a really good broth.His wife is finishing med school, and that's reshaped everything about how Kamal thinks about food. He reads labels now. He makes his own salad dressing—avocado, olive oil, lime, salt, pepper, a little maple syrup. He skips the processed stuff. And when he cooks, he watches her face as she eats it. "That's a high," he says. "That's an amazing feeling."Growing up, his mom did all the cooking—sixty percent Indian, forty percent Western. No turkey at Thanksgiving. Instead, holidays became a masala of cuisines: Indian, Singaporean, Indonesian, Malaysian. "Really good haul," he says. "Not your typical cranberry turkey."His fridge? Eggs. Vegetables. Protein. Ketchup and Dijon—and that's about it for processed. Water with electrolytes. No seltzer. No mystery ingredients.Listen for:How Halitra pivoted from hardware to software—and bootstrapped to six-figure ARRWhy Kamal orients his entire week around farmer's market daysThe cuisines he's working to master (and why rendang and Massaman rank among the world's best dishes)What it means to cook with love when your partner is deep in med schoolSubscribe to Founders Fridge for more stories about the meals that fuel founders and the rituals that keep them going.Check out our Substack!

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