a little about me

19 years, 2 months, 8 days old, born and raised in Mumbai, India.

I started swimming at the age of 3, competitively from the age of 4, and didn't stop until I was 17 — 2 hours a day on weekdays, 4 hours on weekends, 6 days a week with Mondays off. That was basically my life. This is the period that I feel defined me the most. I learned resilience and discipline, and got the hunger to always improve, all thanks to my coach.

After 13 years, I decided to stop — not because I wanted to quit, but because I wanted to explore.

The sporty side never left, though. I love playing pickleball and squash, and sometimes running.

I had always loved to build — I started off with Duplos, then Legos, then robotics, and then I was introduced to the world of software by my brother. My brother was the one who exposed me to the startup ecosystem; seeing him at the top of his class at Caltech made me hungry for more. So I locked in during 10th grade and did decently. I quite literally used to fail before — on my first day at my new school, I got an 'E' on a dictation quiz, and the kid who joined with me got an A+. Before that, I used to come home with empty books (this was quite funny to my mom and dad).

I realized the power of building in 11th grade when I saw my friends struggling to find material to study for midterms and complaining about it. The same kid who got the A+ and I decided to build a website centralising all the prep material required for every subject. It was simple — just HTML and CSS. After putting it together and gathering all the resources, we deployed it as a static Git website and decided to advertise it in school. We didn't think much of it, but it changed the way students accessed study material. The day we realised we had made an impact was when we saw an anomalous Reddit post about it — with 0 advertising, we reached 2,000+ users just by word of mouth and its utility.

That summer, after graduating high school, we decided to build a little more in the education sector. Everyone in my high school took tutoring classes and used to share their resources. We wondered how much tutoring centers lost due to their resources being shared by their students, so we decided to build a simple learning management system for tutoring centers. We advertised it, saw responses, and on our 3rd client meeting the owners wanted to buy the whole thing. Bam — sold my first company!

I moved to SF for my undergrad at Berkeley and, wow, learned about a whole new side of the world. My first semester, I tried to build a better version of a funded startup with the dream of "dropping out" and posting the "backed by XYZ" on my LinkedIn — and failed. The biggest takeaway was learning why it failed. I started learning about the art of venture capital, fell in love with it, started opening up and meeting people, and since then haven't stopped thinking about the next cool thing to build.

Currently, I'm interested in the intersection of agentic systems and human personality — to see how well they perform on personality-specific decision making.