At 22, I was making over a million dollars a year in tech, and I’d never felt more lost. Every big break in my life, from getting flown to Portugal off a few tweets to meeting my future wife because of a camera, came from some random sidequest I almost didn’t take. Now I’m almost 25, getting married, moving to India for two years, and building tech that helps people learn and improve their lives. Starting with my own.
Not easily tempted
I was born in Hyderabad, India, and moved to the US when I was 2 years old. The only memory I have of India is my parents telling me about this guy on a train who tried to tempt me with a toy, and I just didn’t care. Which honestly represents a lot of me today. I was pretty independent. I didn’t get tempted easily.
My parents were encouraging, but extremely hands off. In 4th grade, my mom let me walk to my taekwondo school, 1.5 miles away, by myself, which everyone else thought was crazy and I thought was normal. The last time my parents really helped me with school was in 6th grade; after that, I figured out what to study, my schools, and my career all on my own, to the point where they forgot what I was even majoring in during college. That independence was a bit of both, encouraging and demotivating. I never felt like I had anyone on my side. It’s still hard for me to trust that people are. But deep down, I know I can figure things out on my own.
I was always into random things. I used to collect iron filings from the playground and play with them during class, and kids would drift over just to watch. I was never afraid to do whatever I wanted, even if people thought it was cringe. In 5th grade, I made origami ninja stars and sold them with a friend, though I always felt it was a stupid business, because it was so easy and fun for me that charging for it felt wrong. I loved jailbreaking my iPod without ever understanding what was happening, just trying the software and downloading the hacks. It’s always been breadth for me. That’s a strength, because I can relate to almost anyone. It’s also a weakness. I don’t feel like an expert in anything.
I used to LOVE to read, with a light under my covers at night and a book underneath my desk at school. But as I grew older, I started feeling guilty about fun books and switched to only nonfiction. I still feel that today. The fun is super fun, but it feels like I need to figure out a purpose first.
Proving my worth
By high school, I was extremely serious about grades and career. Even though my parents were so hands off, I still wanted to impress them and everyone around me, because I believed my value as a person came from how good I was. I didn’t know the popular songs or TV shows; I’d watch summaries to keep up, because I never felt I had time to sit and watch.
I was also thinking about money beyond school. I taught myself Java to build a BTC trading bot, which never fully worked because I spent my time optimizing the UI instead of making it work, and in high school I turned 4k into 20k through trading before watching it die. Honestly, I copied people’s trades all the time. I never thought for myself. That’s a pattern in my brain: I don’t trust my instincts, and I don’t give myself space to develop them.
I copied my friend Sanjiv’s extracurriculars, because I had no idea what it took to win college admissions. When I discovered CRISPR in AP Bio, I reached out to professors for research, then gave up when they all said I needed experience. I refused to beg. I chased investment banking, then hedge funds, for the prestige, reading Reddit threads to rate my chances and Wall Street Oasis to see which firms to lateral into. I was obsessed with the stats. Never the work.
The SAT was my first taste of lockdown mode. I didn’t start studying seriously until a week before, and my first practice test came back at 1250. That week, I didn’t leave my room. I ripped every test I could find from Google Drive links on Discord and Reddit, and obsessively fixed my mistakes until I could see the patterns. By the end of the week, I got a 1510. I ended with a 1560 superscore, 800s on my subject tests, and a 5 on AP Calc BC after skipping school to self-study the whole thing. I love lockdown mode. Give me a clear goal, and I can hyperfocus.
I was better than 99% of people at school, and I only got into Rutgers. I was home when I found out. Every other college had rejected me. I was devastated. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Showing my work
I went to Rutgers on a full ride with 53 AP credits, did 19-credit semesters, and finished a triple major in math, CS, and stats in 2 years, taking so many grad courses along the way that they made a rule stopping students from taking more than 2 a semester. Freshman year, I went to a quant trading talk, walked up to the speakers afterwards, and ended up with an interview. Talking to them felt natural. I had a lot of confidence, and I felt like I had a lot to offer. It didn’t go anywhere. But I kept making opportunities for myself.
During COVID, I felt isolated. I was friends with everyone, but so focused on my own path that no one became a mainstay. I also started doing lots of acid and weed, and felt more confident than ever that I was a conduit of God, meant to play a grand role in the world as a connection between spirituality and actual work. It still seems true. Only now do I see how difficult it is.
Then I got my job through Twitter. I’d taught myself programming to build a podcast summarizer, and I was posting about it for fun while applying to HackNY. There was no goal. It was purely to show my work. Someone at Solana liked my stuff and flew me to Portugal to meet the team in October 2021, then to Chicago that January, where he gave me a temporary frontend job; another person at Solana gave me an internship because of research I’d done in a self-study class on topological data analysis, a class I’d asked a professor to let me take.
That summer, another intern was sooo sure he wanted to become a better engineer. I didn’t know what I wanted. But the moment he said it, I realized I was going to get good at product. I was handed a massively hard project and figured out all the frontend on my own, and afterwards I landed another internship with a team I’d met randomly at the Solana office. Every company gave me a laptop. Always find a way. I graduated in May 2023, still 21.
The ultimatum
At Solana, everyone had to figure things out for themselves, and only 8 months in, I almost got fired. Solana wanted to enter the payments space, and the big project was crypto payments, led by an engineer who’d spent 7 years at Apple. He barely made any progress. He was put on a PIP. Then one day, he was gone. They’d already thrown me onto the same project.
The very next day, my manager got on a call with me. I had one month to finish this ABSURD project as a new grad, with proper documentation and everything, or I’d be fired. I knew people in that position normally get fired, but I hoped I’d have a shot at surviving. Pure delusion. I wanted to give it my best shot anyway. That month, I didn’t leave my house. I slept maybe 5 hours a night. I grinded every single day. Nobody expected me to finish it and stay at the company. I did.
Feeling like a fraud
After I survived, my pay went up to millions a year, because Solana’s price went 10x and crypto went from something people called a scam to something everyone talked about. It was ridiculous. I was 22. In April 2024, I moved to Florida to save 10% on income tax and learned to live by myself, making friends with strangers, buying a convertible, and learning to cook, while getting extremely close to a group of Telugu guys from all over the US.
That same April, I met the first girl I fell in love with, at a singing competition I was only helping organize. After months of casual texting, we had an intense 2 months visiting each other and meeting each other’s friends. But I wasn’t confident enough, and she sensed it. She walked away. The truth is, I was never fully committed, and never wanted her to be my girlfriend with conviction. I liked the validation. That’s it.
At work, I felt like a fraud. Everyone around me was doing more important work than I was, and on a new project where I was barely pushed, I started to question what was even unique about me. What did people rely on me for? Not much. In December 2024, I went to Antarctica without any PTO and worked about 2 hours the whole trip. Shortly after, I told my manager I had no idea what I was doing. It was honesty; I find it hard to fake it in business. Two months later, a meeting with HR appeared on my calendar. I knew what it was. It was February 2025, just weeks after she and I went no contact.
Status and people
The day after, my friends and I were already planning a trip to Brazil for Carnaval. I couldn’t get my mind off work, and the whole time, I was going through a breakup while another friend on the trip got engaged. A friend in the startup space asked me to help fix one of his projects, and between nights of drinking, I cleared blockers his team had been stuck on for weeks. That’s what I can do: walk into any tech setup and completely overhaul whatever’s blocking it. I saw glimpses of the value I could provide. I still didn’t trust myself to do it on my own.
After Brazil came Chicago, Punta Cana, a fjord in Norway with the Bhagavad Gita, a watch factory in Switzerland, and finally Milan, where I spent 18k on watches and clothes and walked out holding so many bags I felt like the center of attention. Even in that moment, I felt how meaningless it was.
That spring, I started making content, first with something as silly as guitar, as if I’d become famous for that, then with stories about my life. I felt super cringe making these “thoughtful videos,” and even when people in my life said they were cool, I barely believed them. The kid with the iron filings never cared what people thought. Somewhere along the way, I’d started to.
In fall 2025, I went back to India for the first time in over 10 years for a friend’s engagement, and felt extremely grateful to have such a culture to hold up to. On a 10-day street photography trip, I was so timid about approaching people, but I found a hobby that forces me to look at the world a bit closer. In Chennai, I ended up getting dinner with my future wife. Then I did my first 10-day Vipassana, expecting to come out with inner peace. Instead, it showed me how much more work I had to do. It made me wish I were a lot more humble about my progress and ability.
For my birthday, I hosted a party for the first time in my life: a 20-person cabin getaway in the woods. The moment everyone loved was a PowerPoint I’d made about how I knew each person, full of pictures I somehow had with every one of them, and after that, everyone seriously bonded. These friends meant a lot to me. Milan felt empty. This didn’t.
The camera that led to my wife
At the end of 2025, I was in Dubai for a crypto conference, staying at the place of a billionaire I’d befriended after randomly striking up a conversation at a dinner in Singapore. I bought a Leica there, and a random Leica photographer I bumped into on the streets suggested I go to Paris Fashion Week with him. I never talked to him again. But it gave me a reason to message Sruthi, the only person I knew in fashion, to ask her to help style me. It seemed like a cool sidequest.
In early 2026, I went to South America alone to finish my bucket list, so I could come out of the year with no more desires for things I wished I’d done. I learned Portuguese in 10 days and could talk for hours, hired a singing teacher in Argentina, and hired a surfing coach in Brazil. It was brutal. My phone was stolen on my second day, and had to resort to using a backup. At the surf school, I realized my life had become making videos of me surfing. Nothing interesting. I was close to burning out on content because I couldn’t find a throughline whatsoever. Then I sprained my ankle hiking Machu Picchu, which turned into a blessing in disguise, because it’s what made me visit Sruthi in India.
In Varkala, we talked about our goals, what we wanted to build, and how many kids we wanted, and by the end of the week, standing at a famous temple, we decided this was it. She had amazing values and high standards. And this wasn’t validation, because not a single other person was involved. It was conviction, and a risk I wanted to take. Her family was a bit confused about who I was, but they said yes. Two months later, in Nice, with my parents and her father there, I proposed.
Building to teach
After Varkala, I spent a month at Network School in Malaysia, where a bunch of startup tech people live together, and for the first time I saw people my age building businesses and actually making money online: two guys scaling a basic app with nothing but Facebook ads, a 19-year-old making 20–30k from cold email. They were 1000x more ambitious than anyone I grew up with. I felt behind. I still didn’t know my purpose. But it was exciting too, because there was so much value out there, and I have skills. I just didn’t have my throughline.
Then I flew to Japan and spent 10 days working for free with my content coach, who needed help building out his offer. Everyone thought I was wasting my time, but for once, I felt like I was actually in the content game. Instead of pay, we took a split, a huge risk I had to stomach. I learned that I’m loyal. I also learned that I find it hard to say what I want.
The first person I ever really taught was my brother. He’s 7 years younger, and I loved him when he was little, then bullied him when the pressure of middle school made me angry. Later, I started giving him challenges, like learning to program and working out, and if he did them, I’d buy him an iPhone or a MacBook, because I felt that if I didn’t teach him now, he might never learn. He ended up building a Rubik’s cube–solving robot. This summer, before he went off to college, we built a life-sized robot together. Then I gave him my Porsche.
Now I’m in Hyderabad, looking for a place to live before the wedding and the move in December. My lockdown goal is using tech and rawness to improve my own life, from working out to nutrition to empathy, and building that into consumer apps, with a consulting business and a SaaS for creators on the side. I still don’t feel like I have a perfect throughline. But I know I want to build to teach. My brain can’t stop thinking about it. I need to go all in.