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this is the part that came before anything on the front page. where i'm from, the school i went to, and the things i built when nobody was watching and none of it counted for anything.

Early life

Where i'm from

bhagwanpur means "town of god" — bhagwan, god, and pur, town. it's in haridwar district, uttarakhand, and it is not a place anyone moves to in order to start a company.

thirteen kilometres down the road is roorkee, and in roorkee is iit roorkee — founded in 1847 to train surveyors for the ganges canal, and the oldest technical institution in asia. i grew up next to one of the best engineering schools in the country. that sounds like an advantage. mostly it isn't, because of what it teaches everyone around it to want.

the place was built to produce engineers for employment, and a hundred and seventy-eight years later that's still the ambient definition of doing well around here: clear the exam, get the degree, get placed, earn a lot. i want to be fair about it — that's a rational thing to want. a salary is the safest route out of a small town, and most families are optimising for safety for good reason.

but it means the minds around me were pointed at getting a high-paying job, not at founding something. building your own thing isn't in the water here. you have to import the idea off the internet and then defend it at dinner, repeatedly, to people who love you and think you're being stupid.

The school

i studied at dps roorkee. i'll say this carefully, because it isn't really about the school — it's about what the whole machine is pointed at.

there were no great minds in that building. there were people running very hard behind marks. and the thing nobody says out loud is that most of them didn't arrive anywhere in particular for it. the goal is a number on a sheet. the number doesn't ask you to make anything, doesn't ask you to be curious, doesn't ask you what you'd do with a free saturday. you can win at it completely and come out the other end with nothing you built and no idea what you actually like.

i wasn't better than anyone there. i just happened to find, early, that making something and watching a stranger use it felt better than a rank did. that's the whole difference, and it was luck as much as anything.

Things i built before any of this counted

• mined litecoin at 14, on gaming laptops, in a town where the power isn't exactly stable. it was not profitable — i learned what thermal throttling is by melting through a summer, and that electricity is a cost. but it was the first time i understood that a computer could make money while i was asleep, and that turned out to be the part that mattered.
• at ~15 i built a bot that created signups for grammarly's affiliate programme and made about $800 before it stopped working. it was fake traffic and i wouldn't do it now. what it taught me is real though: any system with a payout attached will get probed by somebody, and that somebody can be a fifteen-year-old with spare time and no supervision.
• built a high-frequency trading bot for solana — reading the chain, watching for price gaps, executing without me. my first proper lesson in latency, and in how quickly an edge disappears once you're not the only one who's noticed it.
• sold solar panels at 16. in person, to adults, in a market where the objection is almost never the product. it was the first time i had to sit in someone's living room and hear no, repeatedly, and go to the next house anyway. everything i know about sales starts here, not at any of the startups.
• worked with not your type at 14 — an indian animation channel with millions of subscribers. at fourteen, discovering that you can just email someone with an audience and sometimes they write back is a genuinely dangerous piece of information. i've been using it ever since.

none of this was a plan. it was five years of poking at things to see which ones paid, which is a slow and stupid-looking way to learn what the internet rewards — and the only one available to me from where i was sitting.