Me
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— · 4 Min read

5 min Catchup on my life

How curiosity took me to places, and how I'm still keeping it alive as an adult by focusing on solving problems I care about.

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My mom used to say "More than the grades, curiosity in a kid reflects who they will be upon growing up". Well, in the eyes of my middle-class indian parents, teachers and relatives, I was upto no good. And they were pretty sure I would end up managing (rather horribly) a grocery store. Phew, ignorant adults, I tell you:

Restless, Hyper-Curious Kid

  • Multiple (not-so) get-rich-quick side-hustles since I was 8 years old.
  • Self-taught systems programming at the age of13.
  • Later explored different online earning avenues. (Sold 5 Bitcoins for $5 at the age of 15 years :D)
  • Lacking a real interest in higher education, started my computer science from an average college in India in 2014 to appease my parents and society.

Becoming a generalist techie

Outgrowing my College Environment

  • Logic, Computer Science & Mathematics came naturally to me. College studies were slow for my taste. I needed a more challenging environment.
  • Joined as the youngest research assistant for the most chased-after professor in the institute. Within 3 months, I was leading a team of 12 peers for data curation and data modeling of scientometrics data.
  • I contributed to 2 research papers, the areas were not of my interest and I was getting very little guidance.
  • Tried cajoling my classmates to participate in different hackathons and building for a semester.
  • At the start of my 3rd year, joined as a tech-intern in a 2-man startup. I was working after college and on weekends. Learned a lot.
  • I got awarded Brightest Engineer in India by Economic Times, 33 among 25,000+ students who applied from all over India. (The only time my name was printed on a National News Paper)

Employed Life

  • Had a job offer before final year started. I was to join as a well-paid Data Scientist, a year later in 2018. And an year is a long time...
  • Company was sold before I joined, the data scientist department was removed from India and I joined the Data & BI Platform team. 2 weeks in, the manager left and a fellow fresher and I owned the whole stack responsible for the whole reporting: sales, support, FPNA, even for Nasdaq filing.
  • After 3 months of fire-fighting, the system was stable and we started focusing on newer reporting projects, albeit lacking a strong technical mentor.
  • After having multiple offers from MNCs (like Goldman Sachs), I decided startups felt more at home and joined as the first data-engineer at Zeta, a banking-tech startup, a Unicorn by the time I left.
  • Within a year, I had a promotion, had figured out the art to design and implement scalable data-platforms and deployed 4 new products during my time there. The data team now had 14 people, though my learning curve was plateauing.

Tech Entrepreneur

A Tough Decision

  • In Apr'21, at the age of 24, I was choosing between two offers:
    • A 6-figure dollar salary in Disney+Hotstar in India with a promotion to senior engineer.
    • Undergoing talent accelerator Enterpreneur First for a chance at building my own company

Every person I talked to, told me to take the first route, so I knew I had to take second to find out what happens. (PS: I had just taken a land loan was yet to pay the first installment, so I had to make money somehow)

First Company, 2 accelerators & Shutting Down

  • In EF, I was selected as a tech-founder, though I couldn't find a strong enough business leader for my taste. I switched and started pitchin to other techies to partner with me. One agreed.
  • In honesty, I entered blockchain through him. We did pick up funding on EF's BA6 batch and went on to join the Tachyon Web3 Accelerator, backed by Protcol Labs and Consensys Mesh.
  • We pivoted across ideas, very early for the market, but not real long-term markets in itself, speaking retrospectively.
  • In Oct'22, I decided to shut down the company. We had burnt $60k and returned the funds.
  • In the last one year, I had also won 6 blockchain hackathons, the winnings were sufficient to pay the remaining loan amount.
  • After shutting down the company and returning the funds to investors, I had one month of personal runway left.

Hiatus

  • Selected by Ethereum Foundation as a scholar for Devcon in Oct'22. Which means all expense paid trip to Bogota, Colombia. On the last day, I decided to shut down the company, return the funds and I ended up staying in colombia for 3 months, while doing grant work for Uniswap Foundation for survival.
  • I decided to take a break go to Medellin, stay at hostels, figure out how to meet strangers in a new land, learn spanish, get private salsa/bachata lessons. This smart girl from Tel Aviv giving me company for the next one month as we explored Colombia.
  • After a month, I went back to working researching during weekdays. That bug to build something can be ignored, but not for long.
  • Took the last days of the year off, went Santa Marta, snagged my open-water dive certification, and did a 4-day hiking trip to the lost city with no phone network.
  • Decided I wanted to learn surfing next. Peru was under travel restrictions, so I went to Mexico. After 2 weeks in CDMX, I moved to puerto escondido, Oaxaca.
  • By now we were actively researching for the next idea. Were having good conversations. So after quickly getting a feel for the different parts of the digital nomad town, I got myself an airbnb.
  • The next couple of weeks: Wake up and Get 2 hours of work done, grab fruit bowl and juice, go for surf lesson, grab lunch, do few more hours of work, go for yoga in the evening, grab dinner, sleep. It was pretty peaceful actually.
  • By mid-Feb, I was ready for the next phase. I went back to Bay Area.

JiffyScan

  • In March'23, we started working fulltime on JiffyScan. I went to WalletCon, EthDenver to launch it. After it's launch, it grew 28% MoM in usage till September'23.
  • By Jan'24, still a 2-man founder only team, fully-bootstrapped, we had generated >$600k as revenue. Now we couldn't scale the business any further with our current team and product. So I hired the first 5 people, set their resposibilities, established the OKR process.
  • JiffyScan became the leading data explorer in the Wallet Abstraction niche. We got 3 acquisition offers, including one from a top decacorn. At this point, I still had other product ideas outside blockchain domain I wanted to explore, so I decided to step down and let my co-founder take the company to the next level.

Orange DAO and DevScan

  • After having previously deferred the demo day, in Feb'24, I did the Orange DAO fellowship/accelerator (OF3). Even though I was no longer pursuing crypto, the fellowship team did a good job instilling good founder fundamentals in me. I got comfortable talking with users for discovery, infact it's become my default nature now.
  • Since then I've been experimenting with different problem statements that could benefit from analyzing online activity of software engineers.
  • I also got super lucky with getting an angel investor. He was an early employee at Paypal and LinkedIn, and got me on a call with the Youtube Founder Jawer Karim. He basically asked me work on the idea I cared about and see product. Around the same time, I met Naval Ravikant at a founder pent-house party. Gave me the same advice. That was actively resonating with me as well.
  • So I decided to halt on fundraising, be frugal (went down to $3k/month burn in San Francisco), and focus on product-market fit for a problem I cared about.
  • After going down idea mase, I ended up building DevScan. In the month of launch, I onboarded 24 companies to it, all fresh connections. So I was becomming better at this.
  • In September'24 my O1A visa was approved. Imagine a reset button being hit. I started fousing on bolder ideas, went back to living a life like it's game, as it should be :)
  • I moved to actively find a technical co-founder before committing to an idea.