What is TIES? What is Tiesverse Foundation?
For a long time, I found it surprisingly difficult to explain what TIES was. Depending on who I was speaking to, the answer seemed to change. Some people saw us as a media organisation because of the audiences we had built and the platforms we operated. Others saw us as a research organisation or a think tank because of the work we were doing around geopolitics, policy and international affairs. More recently, people have started looking at us through the lens of technology because of the products and systems we are building. I don’t think any of those descriptions are wrong. I just don’t think any of them tell the whole story.
To be very honest, this confusion wasn’t something we deliberately created. It came from the way TIES evolved. We didn’t sit down at the beginning and decide that we would try to mix research organisation, a media company and a technology company under one roof. We started with one kind of work, and as we went deeper, we kept discovering that the next problem required a different capability. Research would lead to questions about distribution. Distribution would lead to questions about information and technology. Technology would sometimes take us back to the original research with a completely different understanding of the problem.
Over time, Me and my Co-Founder started to realise that the boundaries between these areas existed more inside organisations than they did in the real world. A good piece of research is useful only if the people who need it can access it. Media can distribute an idea at scale, but distribution without substance eventually becomes noise. Technology can solve extraordinary problems, but without understanding the problem properly, it can also become a solution looking for somewhere to fit. The more we worked, the harder it became to think of these as completely separate activities.
That was when our thinking around TIES started to change. We began to see research not simply as something that ends with a report, but as a starting point. A research question could become a public conversation, a media property, a dataset, a product or a technology problem worth solving. And sometimes, something we built technologically could generate new information that sent us back to research. The relationship between the three became more interesting than any one of them on its own.
This is where the idea of Research-Media-Tech, or RMT, came from. It wasn’t a model we invented first and then tried to fit the organisation into. The work came first and the name came later. RMT was simply the clearest way we found to describe the direction in which TIES was developing: an institution where research creates understanding, media gives that understanding reach, and technology allows some of that understanding to become practical capability.
That technology capability is also why I don’t think it makes sense to restrict what we build to applications within strategic affairs or national security. Those remain important areas of focus for us, but the capabilities we are developing can have applications far beyond them. If we come across a broader problem worth solving, I don’t see why we shouldn’t build for it. Therefore we have built a massive HRM, CRM infra, Automation pipelines for almost all of day to day activities, along with our own email inbox system, and currently building document manipulation and OCR infrastructure, Geoatlas for maps, graphs and data visualisation, Narrative Operating System, learning infrastructure & platform, currently calling it Base Camp, and increasingly ambitious AI capabilities. The common thread isn’t a particular industry. It is the willingness to build when we encounter a problem worth solving.
The same thinking extends beyond digital products. We are experimenting with curated offline experiences and environments because we don’t think every meaningful interaction has to happen through a screen. We continue to operate media properties and work with others on media and communication because distribution remains an important part of how ideas move. We continue to build research capabilities because understanding the world properly is still where much of this begins. We continue to support and collaborate on various govt. initiatives and projects.
So, I no longer find it particularly useful to ask or answer whether TIES is a think tank, a media company or a technology company. Those labels describe parts of what we do, but they don’t describe the institution we are trying to build. I think the more useful question is whether an institution can combine the ability to understand something deeply, communicate it widely, and build something around it when necessary.
That is the direction we are taking with TIES. We don’t have every part of the answer figured out, and I don’t think we should pretend that we do. The organisation will probably look very different several years from now than it does today. But the underlying idea is becoming clearer: we want to build an institution where ideas can move from research to media to technology and back again, without being constrained by the boundaries between them.
TIES is still evolving. But perhaps the most important thing we have learned is that we don’t need to choose one category simply because the world has already created one for us.
Tiesverse — India's youth-led research, media and technology organisation.