About Me

I was born on September 11, 2002, and now I’m 24. Yeah, I’m getting older (that’s concerning). Since childhood I was the quiet kid. I never spoke to anyone. I was so silent and just did my things.

As far as I can recall, and from what my parents said, I always loved to tinker with things around me. It might be crafting something with cardboard, or playing with electronics. In my childhood I used to watch a lot of episodes of Art Attack. I still remember watching them, trying to create things, and really enjoying it.

I am not the smartest kid in the class. I’m decent. I loved physics and I got 10 points in both class 11 and 12. But thanks to my college for making me not think — I never saw a physics or any subject textbook. It was just question and answer. That’s it. It made a person who can’t think, and it took me a long time to get back.

I didn’t know IITs and NITs existed. The only thing I knew was EAMCET. I wrote the exam, and still today I have never looked at the result.

Later I took English as a major in my bachelor’s. Till now I don’t know why I took this course. All the people around me thought I was dumb. Fortunately or unfortunately, I got into one good habit: reading. You gotta read a lot of novels and sonnets in those studies.

At first I thought I’d be a musician. I’m a fan of Justin Bieber — who doesn’t love his songs? I bought a guitar, learned a little, and even played at our hostel event.

But because of my introverted nature, I was so afraid on the stage and I used to overthink everything. So I learned I love music, but I’m not the person who dances and is on stage.

I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I came to the final year of an arts degree. No mentor, no plan, nothing. Everyone around me seemed to know their next step. Some were going to master’s and civil courses, but I didn’t want to do a master’s in arts again. That I had decided.

Covid hit and it made it even worse. I was playing 7+ hours of PUBG every day with my friends and getting scolded by my parents and all the relatives. I was really afraid that I would end up like this, with no purpose.

At the end of my final year, I bought my first laptop, and it changed everything. I couldn’t afford one at that time and it was really hard. Someone travelling from the US brought it for me.

From then my tinkering started. I’m not from a tech background. I didn’t know anything, so I could learn and do anything I liked in the most undisciplined way.

Nobody in my hostel block knew coding, so I acted like some hacker guy, copy-pasting commands in the terminal and installing libraries. I used to show these to my friends and they thought I was a genius. A hacker.

Graduation finished and I had no idea what to do. One thing was clear: I didn’t want to do the MA. So I thought I would go to the USA, study business, and get into entrepreneurship, which I loved.

I applied to universities. I got into UMBC and even got a scholarship, and my visa slot was booked.

And then suddenly, somewhere in my heart, something said this is wrong. I sat for one week with paper and pencil and started writing down all my thoughts, and decided not to go to the USA. My instinct said no. Still, I don’t know the reason. Maybe after a few years I might know. I just followed my instinct, and I didn’t even show up for the visa interview.

On a random day I got a YouTube video about recommendation systems. Back then I used to listen to a lot of Justin Bieber songs, so all my feed was that. That video stuck with me. How does YouTube know that I like Justin Bieber songs? How is it recommending me these songs? Now I had a laptop and time, so I could learn anything. I dug deep into it and found out it was machine learning.

I was so excited at that time to learn it. Although I am from an arts background, I didn’t care. I had no career objective. I just wanted to learn how it works.

I learned a bunch of stuff, reading articles, watching tutorials, and even took a course on machine learning. And you know what? I was the elite topper in the course among all the students.

Then I did two internships in machine learning, one from the UK and another from the USA. I believed AI was going to be the next big thing, and I thought I wanted to learn more. I wanted to connect the dots, so I started tinkering.

This is the year where everything changed. I brought back my childhood mindset, tinkering with ideas and doing experiments, but now with technology. And thanks to AI, which made the job easier.

I’ve been part of a lot of projects, because I’m too excited to experiment, do the real stuff, and find out what I really enjoy doing.

I started freelancing. I got my first client, who paid me $1,300 to build a chatbot. The meeting went like 6 minutes, that’s it. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that I closed a deal sitting in my village that’s worth $1,300 in under 6 minutes.

I and one of my friends, Kartik from Uttarakhand, started a marketing agency. It went well. We got a few clients from Australia, India, and the UK. Then it came to a point where I wasn’t learning anything. I just became customer support between the client and the team. So I thought it was time to learn more. I quit that and started exploring more about AI.

I, Tony from the USA, and Dave from Australia — three of us started a company in the automotive industry. It helps owners book calls and solve enquiries. I thought this was going to be a huge thing, but it took us a lot of time to get into the market, since we were polishing and making it perfect every single time. By the time we were launching, players already existed. And since the team members had to make a living, the interests got diversified. And it stopped.

After learning many things, this time I wanted to do a proper startup. My uncle and I started DeleMate, a startup which taught me more than an MBA. We launched it, got 10,000+ users, made it to news articles, got featured in startup communities, and went into acquisition talks with Porter. Along the way I’ve made a bunch of mistakes and learned many things which I hopefully don’t repeat next time.

I started doing podcasts, creating content online, writing blogs and newsletters. I experimented with a bunch of stuff to see what I enjoy.

For the first time ever in my life I was attracted to a woman, and she is from Kerala. I was on cloud nine. But unfortunately she didn’t give a shit — I mean absolute shit — about me. So I’m still stuck here, and it takes some time to come back to normal. It’s been one year. A typical introvert guy. Anyway, I’ll continue.