Start to now
Nothing here happened in a straight line. This is the order it actually happened in: the table at the flea market, the surf school with no office, the rooms I talked my way into, and the people who were honest with me before I had earned it.
I made real gemstone bracelets and took them to an offline flea market, mostly because I wanted to know whether a stranger would actually hand over money for something I had made. Eight weeks later the answer was Rs. 70,000 in revenue, Rs. 19,000 of it profit, and unit economics that worked from the first weekend.
No ads. No website. Just the table.
RIRA was an AI receptionist. It picked up inbound calls, asked its own follow-up questions and booked the appointment without anyone in the loop. Built end to end on Vapi, n8n, Lovable and Replit, none of which I knew when I started.
Most software, it turns out, is a conversation with better manners.
I started the BBA at Mesa School of Business, run with IIM Bangalore. Less lecture, more deadline. Real companies send a real problem, and the person who owns that problem is sitting in the room when you present it back to them. You find out fast whether your thinking survives contact.
I interned at a surf school in Mulki, a small town on the Arabian Sea coast. I built their scooty rental website and ran bookings on the backend. Friends worked in parallel on cafe automation, booking allotment, photo distribution. It was a tiny startup, except the office had hammocks and kayaks in it.
I also learned to stand on a board, which is mostly a long course in falling off one.
I ran operational planning for Divuzl's London expansion. Over 120 applicants, more than 30 interviews, 12 MBA students from top IIMs shortlisted, then a pan-India onboarding of program coordinators. Almost everyone across the table had ten years on me.
Authority comes from being prepared. It does not come with the title.
I signed up to volunteer thinking I would hand out badges. I ended up in rooms pitching to sponsors and attendees I would never have approached on my own, then watched the TPF team run dry runs and repair logistics with hours to spare. The best hour of it was a calm conversation with Anshumani Ruddra from Google about how AI is actually being pushed inside product teams.
Over 5,000 people walked through something I helped hold together. I would do it again.
Kiran Shah, who founded Go Zero, sent a case ahead of his visit: design a full influencer campaign for the summer season. Risheek Nawka and I built the shortlist, the budget breakdown and the metrics dashboards, and presented it to him in class. Afterwards I pitched him an FMCG idea I had been sitting on for months. He took it apart, completely and without softening it.
That second conversation was worth more than the first.
Brand Week at Mesa, with Prof. Tim Calkins from Kellogg flown in to run it. The brief was a real advertisement for a real company, The Pant Project, pitched to their CMO. I directed, produced and edited. We finished first out of 45 undergraduate and postgraduate teams and walked out holding a cheque the size of a door.
Yash built GOAT LIFE on one observation: people do not skip breakfast because they hate breakfast, they skip it because nothing healthy tasted good enough to bother. Shark Tank India turned him down four years running. The year he got on, all five sharks made an offer.
Jab sahi time aata hai, tab hi milta hai.
It never felt like a mentor session. It ended with the two of us on the floor doing the GOAT Life pose.
Everaw makes freeze-dried fruit snacks and spreads, and appeared on Shark Tank India Season 5. I work in the founder's office: marketplace strategy, listings, keyword research, the operational spine that decides whether a genuinely good product ever reaches the person who would love it.
everaw.in
AURIX is a daily habit gummy built around caffeine, L-theanine and L-tyrosine, for people who need to hold attention without paying for it later in the afternoon. Formulation, brand, packaging, website, supply chain. All of it, on me.
getaurix.inNow
Building AURIX, learning at Mesa and IIM Bangalore, and looking for the next room I have not earned my way into yet.