People usually ask me one of two questions when they find out what I do. Either “how does a lawyer end up building websites?” or “why would someone with a legal practice bother with startups at all?” Fair questions. I’ve asked myself the same thing more nights than I’d like to admit.
I’m Parvez Ali. By profession, I’m a [contract lawyer based in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, about-me. I draft agreements, review contracts clause by clause, and spend most of my working hours making sure other people’s paperwork doesn’t come back to hurt them later. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I also became the founder of two things that have nothing to do with a courtroom — VelaPDF a PDF toolkit, and Malik Times, a business and startup news platform.
This post is the honest version of how that happened. Not the polished pitch-deck version. The real one.
## The Job That Taught Me to Notice Gaps
Contract law isn’t glamorous work. Most days, it’s reading the same kind of clause for the hundredth time, except this time it’s hiding something the client didn’t notice. You learn, fairly quickly, to read things the way most people don’t — slowly, suspiciously, looking for the part that’s missing rather than the part that’s written.
What I didn’t expect was that this habit wouldn’t stay inside legal documents. Once you start noticing gaps in contracts, you start noticing them everywhere. In tools. In websites. In the ten extra steps a PDF converter makes you go through just to merge two files. In the way business news gets written to fill space instead of actually informing anyone.
I noticed the gaps. I just didn’t plan on doing anything about them.
## Where VelaPDF Actually Came From
The push for VelaPDF wasn’t inspired by some big entrepreneurial vision. It came from irritation. I needed to merge and compress PDF files constantly for casework — client documents, contract drafts, scanned agreements — and every free tool online either buried the option behind an account signup, added a watermark, or quietly uploaded my files somewhere I wasn’t comfortable with, given the kind of documents I deal with.
So I started looking into building something simpler. Not because I had any background in software, but because the alternative was worse: staying frustrated forever, or paying for tools that did five things I didn’t need to get the one thing I did.
VelaPDF started as something to solve my own problem. It grew into a toolkit other people use too — for the same reason I built it. Because PDF tasks shouldn’t be complicated.
## And Then Came Malik Times
Malik Times came from a different kind of frustration, but the same root cause. As someone who reads a lot of business and startup news — partly out of interest, partly because it occasionally intersects with client work — I kept noticing how much of it was recycled press releases dressed up as reporting. Founders raising a round would get five nearly identical articles, none of which said anything the funding announcement itself hadn’t already said.
I wanted something more useful. Clear updates on funding, startups, IPOs, and technology in India, written by someone actually paying attention rather than reformatting a PR email. I didn’t set out to become a publisher any more than I set out to become a software founder. It just kept following the same pattern — see the gap, get annoyed enough to fix it, build something instead of complaining about it.
## Running a Law Practice and Two Startups at the Same Time
I won’t pretend this has been easy or particularly balanced. Most of the actual building — writing code decisions with developers, planning features for VelaPDF, editing pieces for Malik Times — happens in the hours after client work is done, not during it. Contract law doesn’t pause because a startup idea is exciting. Deadlines for clients come first, and they should.
What running both has taught me is something I probably should have already known from legal work: consistency matters more than intensity. You don’t finish a contract review by rushing through it once. You finish it by going back to it, again and again, catching what you missed the first time. Building VelaPDF and Malik Times has worked the same way — slow, repeated effort, not one big breakthrough.
## Why I’m Sharing This
I’m writing this because most “founder story” content online skips the part where the founder had an entirely separate, demanding profession and no formal background in tech or media. It makes starting something new feel like it requires quitting everything else first. It doesn’t. It just requires being willing to notice a gap, and being stubborn enough to do something about it in whatever hours are left in the day.
If you’re a professional — a lawyer, an accountant, a teacher, anyone with a full-time career — sitting on an idea you keep telling yourself you don’t have time for, I’d say this: I didn’t have time either. I made it, slowly, one contract review and one late night at a time.
VelaPDF and Malik Times are still growing. This isn’t a finished story. It’s just the honest version of how it started — read more of it on [My Story](/my-story).