From now, going backward
20 → 0
The short version. Bullet points.
- 20Now
Placed. Then empty. Now rebuilding.
- Spent most of third year on a tech startup. The idea was too vague and the team was broken. I stepped down.
- Stuck between placement prep (DSA) and startups. Did a bit of both, and neither well.
- College exams: read the week before, wrote them, kept around 85%.
- Summer: one month of doing both in perfect balance. Then it broke.
- Started Agentronics. Dropped placement prep.
- Fourth year: lost two weeks to a room-allotment mess. Applied to 20–25 companies on campus. Didn’t get through the first few.
- Cleared PhonePe. The role was “AI and automations engineer”, the same line I’d put on my LinkedIn six months earlier. Placed in the first month.
- The month after felt empty. Slowly building myself back up. Working on Agentronics.
- 19
First startup. 30 orders.
- Second year, second term: started a small startup with a friend.
- Spent 2.5 months on pricing and on getting packaging from a vendor 2,000 km away, found on IndiaMART.
- Ran a 3–4 week beta in Chennai. 30 orders fulfilled.
- First time selling anything: door-to-door, Meta ads, pamphlets, WhatsApp groups. We were also the delivery guys.
- Couldn’t scale without money for warehouses and delivery people. Stopped.
- 18
Not IIT. An NIT.
- Got my JEE Main and Advanced results. A rank in both, but not enough for an IIT.
- Got into an NIT instead.
- First year: six months went into settling in and making friends. I don’t know where the next six went.
- 17
The grind, year two.
- Second year of studying for the entrance exams, on my own.
- 16
Studying because I chose to.
- Started eleventh grade.
- For the first time, I studied without anyone pushing me.
- 15
No public exam.
- Tenth grade. Because of COVID, there was no public exam to write. Lucky.
- 14
COVID. School on a phone.
- COVID hit. Classes moved onto my phone.
- I didn’t care about them much.
- 13
Down the Sundar Pichai rabbit hole.
- Looked up the “CEO of two companies”. It was Sundar Pichai.
- He wasn’t really CEO of two companies. He ran a parent company with many companies under it. That’s how I learned what a conglomerate is.
- Found out he studied at IIT Kharagpur. Started reading about how to get in.
- 12
First smartphone.
- We got our first smartphone at home.
- A friend told me about someone who was “the only person on earth who is CEO of two companies”.
- 10–11
Science, maths, and nothing else.
- Same school, still studying.
- Science and maths were all I knew, and they fascinated me.
- Not good at sports. The only extracurriculars I’ve ever done: art and craft, and some basic skating.
- 9
New school.
- Changed schools. Stayed at that one until I finished school.
- 6–8
Get rank one. Don’t ask why.
- Told to study and get rank one in class. I didn’t get why.
- Tried. Couldn’t be first consistently. Usually top three to five.
- 0–5
Don’t remember much.
- Born.
- Don’t remember much after that.
That’s all of it.